I think the differentiating factor is bulk intelligence, the guy in the bath is a one or two per generation mind and PhD students are ten a penny. I was one, I know. I saw a mechanical engineering doctorate banging a screw into the wall with a hammer.
I did that once when I was a kid. I was testing the hypothesis that it would still spin, and therefore save time. My hypothesis was wrong, and it just punched the giant hole in the fence.
Like you said, the people that we read about today were generational talents, but they also had the advantage of living in a world where fairly simple observations could be considered new discoveries. We’ve discovered so much since then, and know so much about the world, that it takes something quite elaborate to be groundbreaking now.
there is however the bias of now knowing what is right and what is wrong about those old observations, and therefore trivializing them in our heads. to our ancestors they weren’t actually all too trivial, and they struggled a lot to try and figure out the world with what they had.
I think the differentiating factor is bulk intelligence, the guy in the bath is a one or two per generation mind and PhD students are ten a penny. I was one, I know. I saw a mechanical engineering doctorate banging a screw into the wall with a hammer.
I did that once when I was a kid. I was testing the hypothesis that it would still spin, and therefore save time. My hypothesis was wrong, and it just punched the giant hole in the fence.
Like you said, the people that we read about today were generational talents, but they also had the advantage of living in a world where fairly simple observations could be considered new discoveries. We’ve discovered so much since then, and know so much about the world, that it takes something quite elaborate to be groundbreaking now.
there is however the bias of now knowing what is right and what is wrong about those old observations, and therefore trivializing them in our heads. to our ancestors they weren’t actually all too trivial, and they struggled a lot to try and figure out the world with what they had.