"The best physicist in ancient Greece could not calculate the path of a falling apple. There is no guarantee that adequacy is possible given your hardest effort; therefore spare no thought for whether others are doing worse. If you compare yourself to others you will not see the biases that all humans share. To be human is to make ten thousand errors. No one in this world achieves perfection."

This seems almost to gesture toward a thought I've been tossing around my head lately. If you're basically a conventional person, with a conventional, average view of the world, conventional understanding of morality, and so forth, people who never knew you will look back at you from the future and ask, "How could you think such things? What was wrong with you?" We say it about people in the times when slavery was conventional, when segregation was conventional, when entrenched sexism was conventional, when Nazism was conventional. People will say it about conventions of our time as well, and, I must say, rightfully so.

The only way around this is to give serious and continual examination to the conventions of our time -- to quote John Taylor Gatto, "the great non-thought of received ideas." People of the future, with higher shoulders on which to stand, will probably still find places to criticize you. No one is perfect, and no one can escape entirely the influence of their time and place. But what shows one's commitment to the good is moving toward it -- which, in turn, helps others move toward it.

And the same applies to physics. Every physics major today knows about relativity. That does not make them better physicists than, say, Newton. That credit can only go to those who move conventions -- be they in moral philosophy, or physics, or medicine, or anything else -- not those who follow them, however advanced the conventions they inherit happen to be.