[energyscholar]

You're raising the right question, and the paper addresses it directly. The transfer wasn't as clean as "physicists applied their tools to other fields."

Some specific cases: Wissel (1984) derived critical slowing down for ecology independently and was ignored for 20 years. The actual import to ecology came via economist Buz Brock, not a physicist. Nolasco & Dahlen (1968) derived period-doubling for cardiac tissue before Feigenbaum's universality result. Jaeger (2001) derived the edge-of-chaos condition for recurrent neural networks without citing Bak, Kauffman, or Langton.

The complex systems movement you reference existed. The paper documents that it didn't actually solve the transfer problem. The cross-citation analysis shows the gaps persisted through the 2000s and 2010s.

You're right that some domains imported rather than reinvented. The paper maps where each transfer was independent, where it was imported, and where it was partial. That's the point — the pattern is messier and more interesting than either "all independent" or "all imported."

[stared]

Well, just because someone published does not mean that it was not (even implicitly) based. For example, there was a paper rediscovering trapezoid method of integration https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/9602/rediscover... A scientist may had been not aware of the method - yet, mathematics used for that is thought in high school.

Note that phase transitions are 100 years old or so. If someone genuinely does not know statistical mechanics, they still may know a lot of tools derived from it (a famous one - Shannon entropy).

I am not saying it is impossible to independently discover something (it happens all the time), but if discoveries are not (more or less) as the same time, likely there was some knowledge diffusion before.

[shermantanktop]

> You're raising the right question

> You're right that…

> That's the point —

[Kim_Bruning]

I looked through this users' submissions and comments.

I think this whole operation just completely violates HN rules.

[Kim_Bruning]

Ha! I actually phoned their number. At the very least they're a real human being (as far as I can tell). But they're doing this while on holiday, and they didn't realize you shouldn't use an LLM to answer people. Not the smartest move ever!

Lessons learned I suppose.

[doe88]

Trolling us is the real experiment? I suddenly feels angry losing my time reading this submission.

[ajkjk]

AI comment?

[jmcgough]

AI comment, AI article, AI research. This feels like someone asked their AI assistant to do all of this as some kind of experiment.

[Kim_Bruning]

Escaped Openclaw? Not using Opus for the HN conversation though. I'm spotting 'constitution' violations.

edit: (tried calling them. If there's a mac mini in the corner of their office doing this, that'd be an actually interesting story!)

[Kim_Bruning]

They called back. They're a real human.

[ajkjk]

Doesn't count for much, unfortunately