Why There Will Never be Another Da Vinci

Why fantasize about Da Vinci? Why not choose a subject much closer to our own time like, say, Francis Crick? I recall a story he told that as a child he wanted to become a scientists but was concerned that all the important discoveries had already been made.

Really...if you don't know Crick's story, go read up! In his lifetime, man went from not even being sure what category of chemical was responsible for inheritance to sequencing the full human genome, and Crick was there for a number of very important steps. Oh, and did I mention that he was originally trained as a physicist? and that in his final years he was deeply involved in neuroscience research concerned with the nature of consciousness?

For anyone who is really concerned with knowledge and its limits, I would also recommend the book "Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits". Don't waste your time with this sort of pop science drivel...

To be crude, this is bullshit. I am not a genius by any means whatsoever. I am 23. I have a degree in studio art, and I'm listed as a coauthor (along with small teams) on papers in machine learning AND biochemistry. It is 10,000 times EASIER to contribute to multiple fields today! There is still so much that we do not know, and it is so much easier to learn the basics. This kind of thinking, that we know almost everything, that we must specialize --- oooh, it enrages me. I can walk into any lab in the country, and two years later, have contributed significantly to published results; and that isn't a bold claim about me --- that's a claim about how easy it is to learn new things, and how much there is we do not yet know.

Although your assertion is mathematically sound, do account for the fact that Da Vinci devoted his entire life to learning. And interdisciplinary learning at that!

While I won't argue that the sheer volume of knowledge swirling today is exponentially greater than 500 years ago, its also very true that the type of education Da Vinci received, mentor-disciple, is almost non-existant today. The kind of personality he had, free-flowing (procrastinating and whimsical) and curious, is not suited to the current society's reward structure; in fact, its discourage by all but the very best of the schools.

Sure, Da Vinci didn't have to learn calculus, but just how do you explain the amount of detail his work shows? He conceptualized SCUBA generations ago. In his design for underwater breathing apparatus, Da Vinci, was very particular about the details. Details that people today use computer simulations to figure out, when not the experience itself.

And finally, Leonardo may have had less to learn because everything was as intuitive as the physical world, but the situation today is not so different. We are now closer to first principles than ever. Tomorrow's Da Vinci won't solve puzzles, he will build them.

With the increasing specialization of almost every field of scientific and even artistic endeavor, it's becoming more and more impossible for any one person to master multiple fields. Especially very different ones, like, say, quantum mechanics and songwriting. (Though I'm sure someone will quickly provide evidence of a string theorist who's also quite handy with the cello).

If we take the "10,000 hour" rule as even a rough basis for mastery -- to speak nothing of the years and years of academic credentialing necessary to be taken seriously in many fields -- then the math quickly tells the story.

As others have pointed out in this thread, Einstein seems like the closest we've seen to Da Vinci in many centuries. His accomplishments spanned almost every facet of physics -- a field that, even in the first half of the 20th century, was very broad and full of nearly insurmountable gulfs between sub-disciplines. But even Einstein would seem narrowly accomplished by Da Vinci's standards. That's not because Einstein wasn't Da Vinci's intellectual equal (he probably was), but because the nature of the game has changed so fundamentally and thoroughly since the Renaissance.

All that said, despite the hyperspecialization of everything these days, some big and important breakthroughs seem to come from cross-pollinization of disciplines. The world is still quite ripe for gap-bridgers and box-busters; in fact, some would argue that we need these people now more than ever.

Actually, historians argue about the level of impact da Vinci had on science, with many saying "not very much." This is because his notebooks were not published for centuries after his death. Most of his "scientific observations" were only to quench his personal curiosity.

In a sense, then, we can all still become da Vincis. Da Vinci was big on learning from experience, rather than by reading the works of others. Nothing is stopping a person alive today from observing nature and learning from it, in the same manner of Leonardo.

Will you be learning things that are already in a book somewhere? Most likely, yes, but I think that isn't really the point; the quest for knowledge may be more important than the acquistion of it.

Also, consider that many breakthroughs/innovations are from new entrants to a field# ie those who aren't experts in the new field. (Of course this may not apply to science as much as another field, but it's worth pondering regardless)

#See "The Medici Effect"

Submitted a week ago [1] and ignored. Submitted again, timing just right, lots of comments and discussion.

I feel that HN is broken in some fundamental way. The community decides this is worth reading and commenting on, and it gets missed first time round. How many other interesting links get completely ignored and lost.

I worry, I worry ...

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2745315

This brings a discomforting question to mind. Abstraction, simplification, etc- will they hold up? Or will we reach a point where to make progress your average scientist must spend a lifetime learning what is currently known? (And thus, simply not have enough time in a life to make progress?)

On the other hand, what do we do when we rely on abstraction and computers so much that we depend upon knowledge that is no longer known by man, and only by computer?

If we manage to expand into space, and especially if we figure out ftl communication, perhaps this can be solved by having "enough" minds, and linking them up into... a hive mind...

Asimov wrote a short story ("The Dead Past" I think it was) that extrapolated this idea into the near-future, where scientific advancement would be so expensive and require such narrow specialization that it could only be done by governments.

The title is a bit silly, of course science has advanced since the 1500s and you need to focus on one sub-field to make a contribution. But I think the point towards the end is a good one -- that advancements in science will increasingly require effort put to organising teams, and improving institutions to support research.

He mentions patents, which we all know are broken, and financial firms poaching scientists ... and funding, which everyone I know in grad school complains about one way or another (i.e. "we could do better work if it weren't for all the grant applications"). But I doubt that worthwhile change will happen to any of these in a hurry.

What if we uncover a "whole new world" of unknowns? How do you know we won't?

For a long time I've liked Horgan's book "The End Of Science", although you'll never meet a working scientist who thinks the book has any value.

It's definitely true that people are writing more papers than they've ever had and there's nothing to stop that trend.

On the other hand, Albert Einstein was able to discover some amazing things with simple pencil-and-paper calculations. The last "big theory" in fundamental physics to be confirmed in the lab was the electroweak interaction and that was 1983. Many of the great physicists of our day, such as Ed Witten and Steven Hawking have never had a prediction confirmed in an experiment.

To be fair, there has been some excitement in experimental fundamental physics in the last few years. Neutrino oscillations are confirmed, there are glimmerings of dark matter, and something interesting might happen at the LHC. However, even if Superstring theory is true, it's possible that's there is very little new physics left to be discovered within reasonable reach.

Now, look at other fields and you find similar stories. There is a huge amount to discover in the field of biology, but there's never going to be another Darwin or Crick.

All fields of knowledge face limits that are caused by undecidability -- computer scientists know they can't solve the halting problem by static analysis, and the field of classical chaos has been dead for decades. There's a linear plane, and a handful of systems that can be solved exactly, each with a pertubative island around it, and then a vast undecidable ocean.

He touches on the career problems of people in physics, which is probably the field that's been the most pathological for the longest. When I got my PhD in 1998, the APS estimated that fewer than 3% of us would get permanent work in the field. I found it quite hard to find a professor in my department who didn't have at least one professor for a parent, so the odds for a bright kid who comes from a working class background and loves science are a lot worse than that.

For all we know we could be producing 10 Einsteins a decade but only keeping 2 in a lifetime.

Having endured the public education system as a child, I'm optimistic that there is a lot of room for improvement where child development is concerned. That could be a good path to younger, more competent scientists and maybe lots of other cool stuff.

I remember reading articles in the late 90s about how games were becoming so complicated and expensive to develop that indie game developers would die out and everything would need to be a multi-million dollar funded blockbuster. Oops.

I call BS. If anything, there won't be another Da Vinci because the brightest minds of our day are busy trying to make us click more ads.

would you know it if you saw it happening real time? i don't understand Wolfram's ideas of computation but no-one doubts he's insanely smart - what if his idea is the only one 22nd century science considers as revolutionary in the early 21st century? maybe it's always the same in hindsight.