I found this quotation of Steven Jay Gould on the internet. I am pretty much intrigued by this quotation. Please share your thoughts about this quotation.
How severe is the case in your country that many potential scientists and researchers could not achieve success and got derailed in their lives (due to lack of proper education, training, facilities, government sponsorship, poverty, vulnerability, etc.)?
(I mention my student Samir Ashraf, who gave some first thoughts about it).
Aparna Sathya Murthy
Thank you, dear Dr Aparna, for your thoughtful discussion point.
Maybe a change of perspective, but imagine there were 100 more Einstein, would the relativity theorie be ahundred times better? And, as a second thought, is working in cottonfields and sweatshops okay for people with less talent?
Dear Dr Hans van Iersel,
Thank you very much for the counter-intuitive response. this was really superb!
With respect to the first point, maybe the relativity theory could have been brought forth years ahead if there were an additional 100 more Einsteins (and given proper support by the government and the society in recognition of their exceptional merit), in that way, the development of science would have been faster in the world history compared to what we have seen till now!
With respect to the second point, I would rather prefer to see nobody working in the cotton fields and the sweatshops, unless they enjoy these works and these are not harmful to their lives in terms of health and longevity. Ideally, I would want to see everybody has a decent job or business (does not matter whether he or she is meritorious or not). It is the society and the state which run these cotton fields and sweatshops. Since this is the practical aspect of our society, I can not move away from this reality either. Only thing I can ask for is, some government support for the most meritorious of the people so that they get some relief.
Einstein is in my opinion a rather poor, if striking, starting point for this discussion.
Indeed, if we follow Thomas Kuhn distinction of ‘normal’ phases of scientific development vs. ‘scientific revolutions’ involving a deep paradigm change, Einstein is very much the archetype of a paradigm-changer. But there are very few true scientific revolutions, typically one a century or less, and their possibility is less a question of ‘talent’ of the scientists that initiate them (even it it does certainly call for quite a bit of genius) than of the convergence of many parameters yielding a kind of embrittlement of the old paradigm.
So in this sense, no, there couldn’t have been many potential Einsteins in the cotton fields : there simply wasn’t room for them in science between, say, Newton and Einstein.
On the other hand, if the question is ‘were there potentially highly talented young people in the cotton fields who never had the possibility to develop their talent for science’, it does indeed seem obvious. And Gould is absolutely right to suggest that, if we want more scientific progress, we should certainly start studying ways to let more potential scientific talents fructify rather than how Einstein’s synapses may have worked.
Also, to quote Robert Heinlein :
‘Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck." ‘
@ Eric Picholle
Thank you, for your very insightful discussion.
Poverty has killed, is still killing and will continue to kill talents. One big challenge is how to deal with this issue.
Eric Picholle , Heinlein was a astrofysical engeneer and father of the science fiction literature, but certainly not a social scientist. I think his quote stems from one of his passions, fiction.
The phases of Thomas Kuhn gave a lot of insight in the develeopment of science, but I have always learned that Kuhn's model resembled Maslow's: a great model but impossible to falsify.
Hans van Iersel , you're right about the Heinlein quote. It's an exerpt from the rather tongue-in-cheek Notebooks of Lazarus Long, itself out of the novel Time Enough for Love (1973).
But while definitely not a social scientist indeed, or any sort of scientist for that matter, Heinlein was very good at encapsulating a complex issue in a few sentences accessible to people of all backgrounds. And I like his understatement, "this is known as bad luck", which seemed relevant in the context...
By the way, several Heinlein stories, such as 'Misfit' (1939) or the juvenile novel Starman Jones (1953), directly deal with the issue of potential geniuses lost, or almost lost, due to social abuse or social segregation.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Engineering
- Modeling