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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

I think it's fair to say that Newton was a genius but also that a lot of the stuff during that time was ripe for the picking. There were several contributors to the developments of calculus. And Newton's calculus was pretty quickly "re-factored" from geometric to analytic terms.

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That's kind of like claiming that SpaceX isn't that special because it was all just "ripe for picking" (or any new tech or theory really was all ripe for picking at the time that it was picked).

It seems to me that people forget that the "picking" part is what it's all about: actually doing the work.

SpaceX isn't that special. It's 70+ years of NASA work and the inevitable improvements found in 2023 tech compared to the last time NASA was actually given budgets for this.

That's why there's so many other companies effectively competing with them... Oh... Wait...

Making reusable boosters work was pretty special. No incumbent was going to attempt it because they were unwilling to reduce their per launch profit margin on an unproven risk. SpaceX changed the entire economics of launch services and obsoleted every other player with their plan that detractors were sure would never work.

Ideas aren't special...execution is special. And SpaceX has not just execution but commercialization.

Yeah can you point to something SpaceX is doing of a similar magnitude of importance to Calculus or Classical Mechanics?

I didn't say Newton's work wasn't special. The implication is that general relativity is special-er.

> because it was all just "ripe for picking" (or any new tech or theory really was all ripe for picking at the time that it was picked).

Yea, that kind of is the point. General relativity came out of nowhere and was executed on at the same time. SpaceX is irrelevant to discussing achievements in physics.

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