> Sigh...the one hundred years before 1990 was really a period of giants, with Claude Shannon, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Emmy Noether, David Hilbert -- as well as Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie and the other quantum guys...
Most of giants of that period are giants in hindsight. We can see the results of their work and how those results still hold up today. I imagine those in 2117 will have their giants between 1990 and 2090 just like we do today.
Yes, but because human knowledge is so much greater than it was 100 years ago, a given lifetime of work is able to push knowledge forward less. Yes, we still have CRISPRs and other titanic discoveries, but even those are collaborations. There is no more room for an Isaac Newton who basically invents three different scientific fields.
A field depends on the body of work that comes afterwards. At the time of its invention, it's just a paper. I could imagine several people in computing alone that might end up inventing three different fields.
Remember that at one point, "computer science" was considered a subfield of "electrical engineering", and both of them have their roots in Claude Shannon's masters thesis. That's because after he published his result and it became widely known, thousands of others piled into those fields to study the consequences of digital circuits. Similarly, I'd bet that in a hundred years "computer science" isn't one field, it's at least half a dozen, and people will be studying the subfields of version control, distributed systems, CRDTs, neural nets, computer graphics, data storage, compression, information retrieval, and others. Actually, that isn't a hundred years, that's today.
When Isaac Newton was old, he used to give his visitors a lock of his hair in a small gold case, because he knew, and they knew, that they would be museum pieces one day. He was right, I saw one of them in a museum. I don't think any living scientist could confidently do that today.
Which of Shannon, Godel, Turing, von Neumann, Noether, Hilbert, Einstein, Dirac, or de Broglie are you implying were not regarded as giants in their own times?
I wasn't clear. I read 'scientific giant' as a 'scientific giant to general society' (those who start touching pop culture/media) as opposed to giant only in their field. For example, Shannon and Turing became giants to general society later on. Very few during their time knew the world of today that Shannon and Turing were creating. Shannon and Turing are only recently being recognized (hollywood films and biographies) in general society because we all now undoubtedly live in their world. And that is arguably why we're now learning about Betty Shannon.
Maybe you missed reading the article under discussion?
> His name has faded in our era, but in mid-20th century America, Claude Elwood Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories was a bona fide scientific star. In 1954, for example, Fortune featured Shannon in a list of the nation’s 20 most important scientists, alongside future Nobel Laureates Richard Feynman and James Watson, among others. Shannon also made the pages of Time and Life magazines, appeared on national television, and even earned a spread in Vogue, complete with a photo shoot by the renowned Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Being recognized within your field and the field itself being widely recognized are two different things. It takes a while for the public at large to recognize the importance of their contributions.
hopefully that would be the case...or perhaps my world view is a bit too pessimistic, but I feel that these days there are just too many different goals -- and many of them are mutually exclusive -- are amalgamated in academia...
I have seen quite a few cases where people with PhD degree in physics or mathematics went to Wall Street and became traders there and totally gave up their original pursuit of physics or mathematics...
also it is not a small number of people who would choose to pursue an academic career not because their research interests them but because it brings them fame and admiration, as well as stability in life -- as once they obtain their tenure, they would go start companies and pursue profits, instead of discovery...
I am not saying that there are not many people still hold their academic ideals pure and high...It is just that in this era when academic positions are highly respected, admired and well-paid, it might give people the incentive to pursue such a career not for its original purpose but for something else....And one of the very reasons why these days academic positions are highly respected, admired and well-paid was because those scientific and engineering giants in those old days had made really prominent and conspicuous contributions that made this world a significantly better place than it was a century ago -- and if we trace further to the reason why they chose science and engineering as their career in the first place and then made great contributions afterwards, it seems that in many cases it was not because science and engineering could bring them material profits, but rather they were genuinely interested and intrigued; and it was extremely fun to them...
But of course, it is a very difficult to say whether there is such a general decline in our pursuit for knowledge in general (such measurement is hard!)...not to mention the complexity in the essence behind some of the declining factors and drives...
Nevertheless, I wish that at the time when I am old and feeble, as I look back at those days in our time, I could say to myself, just as Odysseus might have said to himself, that I have lived in an age of many great ideals and many great heroes...Yet still, I feel that we should be warned that after the heroic Mycenaean period[1] ended, what immediately followed was several hundreds of years of darkness in the ancient Greek civilization[2]...
And because of those already in it, those oddballs who might value the ideal academy rarely get hired. The metrics are different: fund raising ability, collaboration, paper publishing, etc. It's just a regular self-promoting job now.
On the other hand, the world is such that you don't need credentials to do truly independent work. You do need time and a way of supporting yourself, but at least you have means to be heard.
> And because of those already in it, those
> oddballs who might value the ideal academy
> rarely get hired. The metrics are different:
> fund raising ability, collaboration, paper
> publishing, etc. It's just a regular
> self-promoting job now.
This is sadly true in many cases...and those oddballs, due to their eccentric nature and their inclination to avoid office politics, would hardly have the strength to fight this systematic encouragement for various digressions...
> On the other hand, the world is such that
> you don't need credentials to do truly
> independent work. You do need time and a
> way of supporting yourself, but at least you
> have means to be heard.
Yes, I agree. But in C.Shannon's words, there is an issue of signal-to-noise ratio...sometimes, we have to rely on fortune to let some truly informative voice be picked up...
Most of giants of that period are giants in hindsight. We can see the results of their work and how those results still hold up today. I imagine those in 2117 will have their giants between 1990 and 2090 just like we do today.