Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

hprotagonist·

while literally sitting on the toilet, the following names come to mind:

physics: issac newton, gottfried Leibniz, george lemaitre, james maxwell, lord kelvin,j. j. thompson ...

biology: gregor mendel, pasteur, francis collins...

there are rather a few very big names who are Just Fine doing both.

View on HN

Sure, but their understanding of the world was different. Everywhere around them religion was important. That's not the case anymore. Furthermore, they also knew a lot less about the world in general, because such information simply wasn't available back then.

i don’t think we’ve made any staggering advances in knowledge since 1960, when lemaitre died, for instance.

it’s just a false dichotomy, sorry.

> i don’t think we’ve made any staggering advances in knowledge since 1960, when lemaitre died, for instance.

We've got Twitter and Reddit, and if those don't encapsulate staggering advances in human knowledge, I don't know what would.

Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not...

As a counterpoint religious affiliation and attendance of religious services has fallen across the developed world space with education. I’m not sure that cherry picking a list of names can stand up to the overwhelming demographic shift we see today.

I am not sure, but looks like lemaitre is couple of steps ahead of your argument: https://archive.org/stream/theoriesoftheuni033062mbp#page/n3...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com