[ZeroGravitas]

Cool name for the concept, and I think making it about dogs helps take the political angle out of it.

I think of this in terms of the 'great man' theory of history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory

And feel that it's obvious that science works the same way, and we should focus on the "science from below" a lot more than we do.

Charles Fort talked about "Steam Engine Time" and it gets referenced in Discworld:

https://fancyclopedia.org/Steam_Engine_Time_(concept)

There's similarly the book that talks about all the 'genius' people that Einstien was surrounded by who we don't generally hear about, but I can't recall the name right now.

There's the concept of 'scenius':

https://www.wired.com/2008/06/scenius-or-comm/

And in music/art there's the concept of "The Secret to Creativity Is Knowing How to Hide Your Sources" which (appositely) is often mis-credited to Einstien.

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Basically, I don't think you can look seriously into anything and come away with thinking that one individual did it all themselves unless you are very prone to that conclusion. And it seems human's generally are prone to that bias.

[qikInNdOutReply]

Im oppossed to the great man theory. In my mind the better analog is a damn across a river. Knowledge piles up, that goes unexplained, the pressure on the explenation rises, strange "subvertive" theories gain traction bypassing the dogma, but still deformed by the shape of the dogma. Finally one break through is made and the whole of knowledge tears through the old dogma, taking material with it for the next "hold-up".

Inkremental research flourishes again, exploring every nook and crevice of the newly discovered basin.

How to get the personal that does the final break through? Hire exotic characters who are uninfluenced by societys dogmatic powers. Heretics, Insane Prophets and Grifters, force them to be days filled with the material, so it fills the subconcious. Finally add some dogmatic priests to the mix, stand clear of the explosion.

[notacoward]

> Hire exotic characters who are uninfluenced by societys dogmatic powers.

Do you by any chance consider yourself one such? I hear this kind of rationalization a lot, almost always from people who feel that they themselves are candidates for the "misunderstood genius" role. It's a bit of cargo cult or selection bias (attributing outcomes to superficial and barely-related behavior), a bit egocentric, a bit misanthropic. What it's not is a formula for progress or innovation. Life is not an Ayn Rand novel, nor should we wish it to be.

A bit of "thinking outside the box" is certainly necessary for progress to occur, but that can be done in a collegial way - e.g. Feynman, most others involved in the Manhattan Project or early computing. Constantly deriding what others believe based on currently available evidence as "dogma" - five times in three short paragraphs, for example - is a huge red flag that something other than genius is at play.

[qikInNdOutReply]

If asked to qualify my own character, i would put myself firmly in the over adapted niche. I think society is no longer capable to integrate "characters" into institutions. A endless process of social justice, persecuting the insufferable and market forces promoting finacial gaming of systems see to that.

If you want to find out what i mean, take some biographs of break through characters and find out, when today there ability to inflict change would actually end.

Would they be kicked out of school, university, the first job. Somebody as charismatic as feynman, would be a scandalous figure in todays scientific community.

What is your explenation for the great stagnation? We have 8 billion people, 3 billion of whom could engage, even if just in there spare time (as many researchers did and started out in the past) in science. Break-Throughs and Future shock should be hammering down on the hour every hour.

Instead we have todays society, with a world in crisis falling back to historic means (coal powered energy) to keep a untenable situation stable a little longer. Its really hard, to see todays institutions & companys not as utter failures in regards to enabling progress, yes even roadblocks to it.

[ripe]

Love your analogy! Very visual. Makes sense, too. "Stand clear of the explosion," lol!

[FabHK]

For science specifically, the distinction is also known as the Newton vs. Ortega hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortega_hypothesis

[derbOac]

I think the Newton - Ortega distinction is slightly different. Maybe it coincides with the Balto-Togo metaphor to some extent, but I think part of why the Balto-Togo metaphor resonates with people here is because it recognizes the role of the citers as well as the cited.

Your mention of the Newton-Ortega distinction is the first I've heard of it by those names, so I'm not entirely familiar with its scope, but in reading the Wikipedia entry it seems to assume the contributions of the scientists in question are somehow known, and it's a matter of "does science progress with lots of little contributions or a few big contributions?"

You can turn this on its head though, and suggest that "contribution" really means "discussion in the literature" which is a property of the citers and not the cited. So, if say, a Newton comes along and has a brilliant discovery, but no one understands it or it goes into the wrong outlet and isn't read, then there will be no impact. Conversely, though, if something comes along and there's a rush of recognition of a concept, and someone publishes it first, is that because this "big innovation" was associated with that first publisher, or because the readers all had the same collective idea, and they're just citing the first to goal?

The issue is that scientific development is not actually a property of the discoverer -- the discovery is necessary but not sufficient -- and the "size" of a discovery and who makes that discovery aren't really the same thing either.

I think that e.g., (1) finding that science progresses in big leaps rather than small steps, and that (2) there is a "first post" phenomenon doesn't mean that the big leaps are necessarily due to the first poster.

My personal experience is that all of this bibliometric research is a little distorted because so much rapid change in process has happened even in the last 20 years, and much of what actually happens in science and scientific credit is much more complex than bibliometric models allow. It's difficult to study big versus small contributions accurately when political maneuvering and social dynamics is such a big part of what happens.

It's interesting to think about, in any event.

[mandevil]

This is true not just for science, but for engineering. The Wright Brothers did some fabulous engineering work and documented their work thoroughly, and none of the other claimants to first flying are nearly as well documented, but let's say that some day conclusive proof turned up that someone else built a heavier than air flying machine that did get into the air and was somewhat controllable before the Wright's did it on December 17th, 1903 at Kittyhawk.

But whomever that was, was necessarily a dead-end- they inspired no one to build and no improvements came from their work. It was the Wright's work in 1905-7 with their demonstration pilots doing their airshow flying in their Model A's- that was what inspired thousands of other people to get into flying, into building airplanes, and into aerodynamic research and led to the rapid improvement (65 years and one day between Kittyhawk and Apollo 8 leaving Earth to orbit the moon). So even though we trace flying to the 1903 Wright Flyer, it is really the Flyer III and the Model A in 1904-6 that we trace all modern airplanes to. Therefore, it was what the Wright's did in 1906 that makes their flight in 1903 matter. But in a lot of cases those two steps were different people- someone makes the very first, another person or team makes the first practical one you can sell. And so who is more important?

[nautilius]

Hardly, unless the Wrights also inspired development of the Time Machine that allowed Prandtl to found the first aerodynamics research lab in 1904, or Lilienthal’s studies on the aerodynamics of stork wings, that he used to build and fly his own heavier-than-air gliders with, which the Wrights heavily relied on.

Many countries (UK, Brazil, France, etc) had similar local flying heroes that inspired advances in those countries. Your view is simply US-biased.

[mandevil]

While we are definitely back to the core question of "Great Man or inevitable progress of history" that characterizes the entirety of this discipline, I think that there are some key differences between what the Wright's were doing and everyone else. They were very open about how Lilenthal inspired them, but he was moving down a very different direction (trying to apply power through moving the wings, rather than propellers). Octave Chanute, the French-American engineer, was a critical node through which many of these early aerodynamic engineers communicated, serving the role that modern conferences and papers hold in sharing knowledge among all the people interested in a topic- including with the Wrights. But the Wrights still hold an important position in the birth of the airplane.

In particular, the Wrights found that their 1900 and 1901 gliders did not behave the way their math said they should, they spent 1902 recalculating from scratch all of the constant values that they had based their work on. They discovered that one number, Smeaton's Coefficient, a measure of the density of air, was wrong by about 40% (their value is correct to <1%, as best we can tell today). With the correct values, they built their 1902 glider, which behaved exactly as their math said it would, and laid the way for their 1903 Flyer. Again, even the 1903 Wright Flyer was pretty lame, but it took this entire lengthy process to get there, and the Wright's were the largely the ones pushing the envelope through this process. Other people would have, in the course of time, corrected Smeaton's coefficient, and then gone on to build the first airplane and the first one effective enough to be sold. But it is also true that the Wright's did all three of those achievements themselves, in the course of less than a decade.

Then, once their work was published and popularized, lots of people like Santos Dumont were inspired by them- he openly admitted that he built his first heavier-than-air flying machine based on pictures of a Wright plane. The French in particular quickly surpassed the work of the Wright's: Wright Co. was best in the world up to 1908 or so, and then got passed fast, mostly by the French, such that the US aircraft industry was far behind by the middle of World War One. Which is why English uses terms like fuselage and canard and monocoque for key parts of aeronautical engineering. The Wright Brothers were one link in a great chain connecting the first recorded stories of people flying- say, the legend of King Etana of Kish- to the modern commercial airliner. They weren't the only link, and they never claimed to be, but they were incredibly important ones. Were they irreplaceable in that chain? Well probably not. But in our actual history, their link was one of the biggest and most important.

[nerdponx]

I just last night watched a mini-documentary on the origins of calculus in the work of Newton and Leibnitz, focusing specifically on how they came to be interested in the idea and their very earliest thoughts on it, often quoting directly from their notebooks.

The doc is on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/ObPg3ki9GOI

It was very clear that Newton in particular was building incrementally on work that other mathematicians had done before him. Leibniz was also making incremental improvements, but was apparently somewhat more visionary in his work. The Youtube comments are also interesting, including anecdotes of ancient Egyptian land surveyors using the same "sum of lines" technique (what Leibniz generalized into our modern antiderivative) in order estimate the areas of unevenly-shaped land plots along waterways for taxation.

Leibniz in particular was fascinating because it shows the incrementality of science continuing after him as well. Apparently Leibniz had built several computing machines, 150 years before Babbage, and was deliberately trying to work towards general and abstract paradigms for solving mathematical problems, 300 years before Hilbert, Church, Gödel, and Turing!