And how not to lose sight of it.
A question many a physicist has to face many a time is : what's new in what you did ? Had not Father Dino in the Jurassic Age already done something similar ?
In a bulk of the cases, Father Dino turned out to have done something not very dissimilar but in an entirely different setting with entirely different motivations with maybe not a clear understanding and had just moved on leaving the final knots untied. But, in some cases, Father Dino did the exact same thing --- he just got buried under the sands of time.
This is not true of physics alone. One of the famous quotes of Sherlock Holmes goes thus : "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." That is obviously an exaggeration, but there might be some truth to it.
In any case, my personal view from whatever little explorations in science I made is that any scientific effort falls flat without an acknowledgement of its heritage --- what preceded and how the effort takes its field one step forward (or even at right angles, or even a few steps backward with a deep cut at the roots). In an age where an overload of information is nudging out history and context, we might be in serious danger of going around in circles unless one constantly blows away the dust from the books on the shelf.
This blog will be my humble attempt at doing the same: providing context to little and big scientific events I see around me. Although mostly for personal amusement, hopefully it will be fun reading, too.
A question many a physicist has to face many a time is : what's new in what you did ? Had not Father Dino in the Jurassic Age already done something similar ?
In a bulk of the cases, Father Dino turned out to have done something not very dissimilar but in an entirely different setting with entirely different motivations with maybe not a clear understanding and had just moved on leaving the final knots untied. But, in some cases, Father Dino did the exact same thing --- he just got buried under the sands of time.
This is not true of physics alone. One of the famous quotes of Sherlock Holmes goes thus : "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." That is obviously an exaggeration, but there might be some truth to it.
In any case, my personal view from whatever little explorations in science I made is that any scientific effort falls flat without an acknowledgement of its heritage --- what preceded and how the effort takes its field one step forward (or even at right angles, or even a few steps backward with a deep cut at the roots). In an age where an overload of information is nudging out history and context, we might be in serious danger of going around in circles unless one constantly blows away the dust from the books on the shelf.
This blog will be my humble attempt at doing the same: providing context to little and big scientific events I see around me. Although mostly for personal amusement, hopefully it will be fun reading, too.
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