*sigh*... relevant xkcd
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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I know the feeling. Alan Turing is such a linux noob compared to me.
What was it Isaac Newton said about standing on the shoulders of giants?
He was quoting (allegedly) Bernard of Chartres, thereby standing on his shoulders, interestingly.
He was slashing one of his colleagues, Robert Hooke, who was shorter than Isaac.
I try to bear Old Isaac in mind when I meet arrogant and unpleasant but intelligent teens.
It's very easy as an adult to be very annoyed by them, short with them, and/or to feel an obligation in some way to "socialize them better"
But you don't know which of them have an insight in their brain that unlocks the proverbial Warp Drive.
That’s the trick. None of them have all of the pieces. We’re a social species. All of our efforts are collective. We use our combined brainpower to make these breakthroughs.
The first person crossing the line gets all the credit, because our society is obsessed with credit and patents. And then it freezes the advancements for the length of exclusivity, until we can all finally start working on it together again. It’s stupid and inefficient. We need to stop teaching these individualism myths.
What we need is a socialist revolution
Bingo.
"By the time I was your age I'd saved enough money to move into an apartment with no room mates, and I had enough money left over to buy a car."
Lol it doesn't matter what did he know he knew less physics lol
That you can fall from them like an apple.
Who cares what some loser who didnt know about black-body radiation says. /s
There is a wonderful book by Johannes Kepler about snowflakes. It's a great read, because he's one of the all-time greats and his thinking is fascinating and insightful and wrong at just about every turn, but he's doing his best. Though knowing what we know now he never even stood a chance. I mean, the guy didn't know that water and ice are the same thing.
Highly recommended.
He didn't know about molecules so... There was no language for him to differentiate between matter and states of matter.
I mean, the guy didn't know that water and ice are the same thing.
The summaries I find reference him theorizing that water may be spherical, leading to the hexagon pattern. He also related the feathery ends to steam hitting a cold window.
It seems to me that he knew that steam, water, and ice were the same thing.
Well, you'd be wrong. He thought they were different substances, one turning into another.
I really recommend finding the book and reading it. It's short and fairly easy to read. IIRC it was written as a Christmas present for someone, not as a super serious scientific treatise.
I mean, the guy didn't know that water and ice are the same thing.
What was his logic here? I still believe that but I'm curious to hear a scientific reason why.
There's a Sean Carrol video somewhere talking about how the average graduate student in physics understands Relativity far better than Einstein did, and it's because lots of people with lots of different specialties and insights have thought really long and hard about it and come up with deeper, more elegant ways to describe it.
I had a similar realization when studying undergrad linguistics.
One of the classes had us read Chomsky's "Remarks on Nominalization" paper. The overwhelming sense I got from it was that the author did not understand X-Bar theory, despite knowing that Chomsky was the one who came up with it (and not realizing at the time that this paper was essentially Chomsky's first paper on the subject).
I will also say that it is a credit to his writing that the paper still holds up pretty well; even if it spends an entire section coming up with bad answers to what was literally a syntax 201 homework assignment.
None of them beat Dark Souls 3, so i'm significantly better than both of them combined.
"Jimmy Page wrote Stairway to Heaven when he was 23, but I learned to play it at 18."
It's complicated. I know that Newton's model of light as a particle was wrong. If I had a time traveling Newton in front of me, could I explain all the experiments in between him and Einstein about light that get us knocking on the door of Quantum Physics? More importantly, could I show it well enough to satisfy the level of evidence he would need (even ignoring his giant ego)?
Probably not. Maybe if I had months to prepare.
Newton believed in god, so there obviously were things he accepted with practically no evidence whatsoever 🙊
That's crazy, I am also better at handling radioactive material than Marie Curie. It's because she's dead and I'm not.
Oh yeah? From first principles, derive one of those equations 
Yeah, meme stuff aside, I think this is a rather disingenuous take. It's easy to think that we know more just because we got aware of dependent concepts.
Still a funny meme, though. And kinda thought provoking, too!
The first principles:
There's bound to be a hard drive out there with more knowledge of physics than all of us!
these dudes didn’t even have the internet. what could they possibly know? i would never ask an old guy who hasnt ever googled anything a question.
I wish I had been born into the era of science where I'm smart enough to discover things. I can't code. I can't do calculus. I would have thrived in the 19th century where I could invent washing my hands and be considered a world-class doctor.
Actually, the doctor who invented washing hands was ridiculed and ostracized.
Yeah but it looks cool as hell when I do it.
Everyone thinks Newton is smart until they read his cure for the plague
All the dudes are impressed by my pr but the ladies sure seem to be unimpressed
One would expect the whole of humanity to be above that level by now, yet ...