On 12 June 2014 09:10, <ghib...@gmail.com> wrote: > > p.s. another point to note about the historical 'outsider' geniuses, is > that conditions were so different back then, in fact based on the criteria > of an outsider today, they weren't even outsiders at all. In that...they > did not exhibit gaps in knowledge that would currently be almost impossible > not to have outside a specialized scientific field. those historical > outsiders were every bit as knowledgable as the 'insiders' and in fact > there was no such real distinction as such. It was much more a dogmatic > line of distinction back then, in that, outsider or insider did not matter > so much as whatever the contemporary 'proto-consensus' happened to be. Not > respecting that consensus, would make you an outsider, whether or not you > were an outsider to begin with. Likewise, respecting it and being > knowledgable or less than knowledgeable, could get you respect regardless > of whether you were an insider or an outsider (being the right social > class a lot more important though....by no means crucial or anything like > it was in every other domain). >
Thank you for the kind comments. You are right that nowadays there is so much to know that a possible insight will have to cover a much larger amount of ground than previously. And so much research has been done in the last century (theoretical and experimental) that it is very unlikely a wonderful new insight hasn't been thought of before (although always possible....) So the Ross model says something like "perhaps the universe is made of point particles, and the strong force is the same as the weaker forces when the particles are closer together". OK, that could easily have been plausible a century ago, but now it has to account for the properties of 200+ composite particles, and reproduce the results of billions of collider experiments in which all sorts of exotic stuff occurs; it has to cover degenerate matter, neutron stars and similar objects (black holes are still rather more contentious, but the physics of white dwarf and neutron stars are well understood now, I believe). It has to cover gravitational lensing and the GPS system, not to mention any number of other occurences of routinely observed time dilation, plus the intuitively weird results of the two slit experiment with single particles, the Casimir effect, renormalisation, the Beckenstein bound, Hawking radiation, the microwave background, sky surveys .... and so on, and on and on! You need to be an expert to have a chance of having a new insight, or as Picasso might have said, you have to know the rules thoroughly before you break them, at least with any chance of success. The only way an insight is likely to work nowadays, imho, is if it is applied at the same level of string theory. That is, it should try to build space-time and matter-energy from something simpler (which generally requires immense amount of maths just to get to Planck cell one, as it were). It's quite possible space-time isn't made of strings and branes, or spin foams, or causal dynamical triangulations, or arithmetical relations, but something else, something that some genius will put his or her finger on tomorrow. But working within a Newtonian or Einsteinian paradigm seems unlikely to be the way forward now. We know too much, at that level, that we didn't a century ago for "everything we know to be wrong". (Probably :-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
