Even though I had heard Newton's quote about standing on shoulder of giants I was never able to understand it fully till much later.
All these brilliant discovery had a thread going back to the beginning of our civilization.
I have never truly understood a theory until I learned its broken precursors.
One gets a taste of this in physics. Newton to special relativity. (I never got my head around GR.) Or earlier: the different models of atoms, from plum pudding to electron clouds.
It’s a good tool poorly used outside a few examples.
And we have a century more of understanding and refinements we can explore should we so desire, all at the press of a button.
They would only dream of the access to science and people we have now. Though twitter would be a poor medium to replace that era's epistolic cross-polination.
Yes, you can look it up. But that's not the same as having an intuitive feel for all of science at the deepest level.
But if you want something shorter, ponder this: What percentage of journal article material makes it to textbooks, and how has that changed over time?
I think that says as much about the quality of journal articles and academic incentives as much as anything.
A child on the internet today has to contend with deliberate science misinformation that tries very hard to look valid and authoritative (flat earthers, antivaxxers). This stuff is also likely to intersect with entertainment venues like YouTube and plant their ideas first where you then have to unteach the nonsense just to begin. Even as a science literate adult, navigating this with my children is hard because it brings difficult topics to the table well ahead of their age appropriate academic abilities traditionally prepare them for (religious motivations, philosophy, logic, history, etc).
>Darwin's generation was around the last who could have a full understanding of all branches of science
And
>Not really no. A single person can no longer know, grok even the whole of biology, or even the whole of molecular biology.
have always struck me as odd statements to make.
Not to get pedantic, but that's more of a commentary of our classification of knowledge than the kind of tasks they had to deal with. They were presented with the same living beings that we have today (well, those that aren't extinct anyway). No more, no less.
They had plenty of chances to get overwhelmed with what was in front of them, regardless of what their contemporary science had figured out already.
Put another way, not knowing how things work didn't make their jobs any easier. The way things work doesn't change no matter how many branches of science you throw at it.
It really really did. You could make major scientific discoveries by walking in a forest for a couple of hours.
There's an article about this [1] that I enjoyed reading a few years back, titled Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Story Behind Newton’s Famous Metaphor for How Knowledge Progresses
[1] https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/16/newton-standing-on-...
Rich dudes, their patrons, sitting around pondering the meaning of life.
There was a lot to be discovered and so few people trying to figure it out.
Now we have millions of PhD's studying every little nook and cranny, the vast majority of research ever published will be read by only a small number of people and then forgotten, maybe forever.
The marginal returns to effort now are extremely small.