tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post1996214190469876895..comments2024-03-28T21:32:26.550+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: Chargaff looking back - Extinction of tradition, lost human pace and scaleBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-70660289660861110902010-07-20T02:10:36.165+01:002010-07-20T02:10:36.165+01:00"...and more recently Andrew Wiles..."
..."...and more recently Andrew Wiles..."<br /> - and don't forget Grisha Perelman, arguably an even greater mathematician than Wiles, who retired and fled to his mom's house in Russia to avoid being surrounded by the second-rate impostors who stole his ideas. Perelman's story is an important example of how modern science pushes away its greatest men and replaces them with inferior academic politicians.Sydnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-68174283553916280542010-07-19T11:54:36.097+01:002010-07-19T11:54:36.097+01:00@dearime.
The 'human pace and scale' doe...@dearime. <br /><br />The 'human pace and scale' does not equate with being slow. <br /><br />As you know, one of my main criticisms of the modern scientific career (3-4 year BSc, 1-2 year Masters, five year plus PhDs, many years of different postdocs...) is that science 'education/ training' is now so extended such that people often do not become independent scientists until their middle/ late thirties/ early forties <br /><br />Yet long term real speculative science projects (i.e. not merely industrial projects, like the human genome project or large scale brain imaging studies) are all-but impossible; not least because the scientist is supposed to get large grants all the time.<br /><br />This applies whether a scientist actually needs large grants or, as is more likely, as with great scientists of the past including Chargaff and Einstein - and more recently Andrew Wiles - does not need large grants (indeed, administering large grants usually interferes with doing real science). <br /><br />The modern pace is both too slow where it should be fast, and too fast where it should be slow.Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-43054398026796372732010-07-19T11:33:13.419+01:002010-07-19T11:33:13.419+01:00"*That * is the pace of real science." ..."*That * is the pace of real science." Hold on, that wasn't the pace of real science when it made some of its great leaps, was it? When Newton did Mechanics, when Clerk Maxwell did Field Theory, when Einstein did his two Relativities and when the <br />Quantum men rushed ahead building on Planck, Einstein and the experimentalists (Rutherford and the others). Maybe you're right, but I'm not sure of it. The extraordinary thing was that just one generation after the quantum chaps had pretty much finished, a good paperback could give a decent account of it all to a bright schoolboy - who could reflect that all this stuff had been unknown to great physicists as recent as Maxwell, Kelvin et al. 'straordinary indeed! (Though Maxwell, apparently, had deduced that there was something profoundly wrong with classical physics, from the recalcitrant behaviour of gas specific heats.)deariemenoreply@blogger.com