Quote:
Originally Posted by Chochawker
Except science?
...
Agreed. The modern scientist operates in a very different environment, both as a result of knowledge inherited from past generations and also from a very different operating environment. For example due to constraints associated with the need to obtain and maintain funding.
...
|
Here, I think, might be the source of the problem.
With 400 years of previous scientific advances (assuming 'modern' science starts around the time of Newton/Galileo), understanding science today is very, very difficult. And if you are trying to understand physics, you need to understand not only 400 years of physics, but a whole pile of pretty difficult maths.
I know from first-hand experience that the result of the past generations is that 4 years of full time university-level study gets you a basic understanding of the whole structure, and a tiny bit of specialisation to more deeply understand a small part of it. And, understandably, most of the effort goes into how to calculate stuff rather than worrying about what it all means. (Though all good lecturers do try to stop and think about meaning from time to time).
As an example, you can't really start thinking about what the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle means, until you've first thoroughly understood the mathematical formalism of QM, plus the theoretical basis of Fourier analysis. Trying to talk about it without that understanding is utterly pointless, and typically results in people saying stuff that is just flat out wrong.
Unfortunately it is much easier to not bother with all this, but to pick something that sounds intuitively implausible, and rubbish it for being intuitively implausible, and when challenged, breezily assert that going to all the trouble of understanding the details is 'not creative'. Or something.