Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vargr616 655 days ago
exactly, plus the author's warped understanding, like einstein reinventing the wheel for every equation to make it "more" perfect, whatever that means; or in multiple instances, drawing up conclusions and asking them, or presenting these as facts in the article.

or one article being split on 5 pages so I can see some ads in-between (not really the author's fault there though).

3 comments

Choice of appropriate notation can absolutely make one version of a formula "more perfect" than another. Maxwell's equations underwent a painstaking "evolutionary" process as vector notation improved.

Ditto for proofs; it's not hard to believe that Albert Einstein could prove a theorem from scratch and end up with a better argument than one found in a previous textbooks.

The fatal flaw in the article, rather, is exemplified by the quote

> With the advent of Einstein, mathematics ceased to be an exact science in the fashion of Euclid.

Which I am in complete disagreement with. Einstein exploited elegant, novel (at the time), anything but inexact mathematical tools for his theory. That the theory posits uncertainty and, well, relativity of real-world phenomena has no bearing on the exactitude of mathematics. If anyone ever put a dent in that, it should be Gödel :)

I'm curious what you would think is "good modern journalism". Could you give examples?

The discussion's article writes more like The Atlantic or NYMag interview style than AP News or Reuters. Both styles are suitable in my opinion.

I actually didn't realize the article went on after the ad.