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Comment by mellosouls | Hacker News Reader

...to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel

Albert Einstein, on why he still went in to work at Princeton.

my favorite Gödel, Einstein story is when he was prepped by Einstein for an US immigration hearing, and then told the judge he found some loopholes in the constitution. Was it his character shaping his work, or his work and surrounding shaping (making) him, and if so what shapes a man like Gödel (or Freud, Einstein, Popper, Russel, ...) many others of that time. It seems there was a huge density of brilliant people concentrated in Europe at the time. Hardly anyone who died within the past 30 years will be remembered as those from that generation I'm sure.

Now everyone is writing AI papers which all look identical. Sure academia has changed.

A Contradiction in the U.S. Constitution https://jeffreykegler.github.io/personal/morgenstern.html

Gödel’s Loophole https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2010183

I agree. You look at that extraordinary flowering of genius in the early 20th century in both science and the arts, and it's difficult to see the equivalents in the last few decades.

The fact that we are overlooking our Einsteins and Gödels says more about us than about them. For a moment in history scientists were looked up to and mythologized. Today they're doing the same work, but they've been put in a different place in society.

Examples?

I don't think that there are fewer gifted/hard working people today than there were 80 years ago. It is simply that the problems that science deals with today are much more complex, because the low hanging fruits were all picked by the Einsteins.

People pre Einstein's time probably said that about the Newtons.

Has there ever been any lower hanging fruit than the fact 95% of our universe is unexplained, and the tiny bit that is is described by two mutually incompatible theories?

Low hanging fruit can be fairly precisely defined. Human brains have finite memory and finite processing power. Relative to that, every year, a new scientist has to learn more about what others have done before him, before he can create something new. So, it becomes harder and harder every year to make a super contribution.

What Einstein had to study before superseding Newton could probably be put into a 10-20K page book. What a scientist has to study before superseding quantum is probably closer to a 50-100K page book.

Yes, I understand the argument - but it doesn't alter the fact that those excuses can always be used, and probably always have been.

Quantum mechanics was more revolutionary than general relativity, but came almost immediately after and was simpler (after the conceptual leap) to study, which rather undermines the low-hanging fruit excuse.

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