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Comment by Qem | Hacker News Reader

> Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Leibniz did the same, in the same timeframe. I think this lends credence to the Ortega hypothesis. We see the people that connect the dots as great scientists. But the dots must be there in first place. The dots are the work of the miriad nameless scientists/scholars/scribes/artisans. Once the dots are in place, somebody always shows up to take the last hit and connect them. Sometimes multiple individuals at once.

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> The dots are the work of the miriad nameless scientists/scholars/scribes/artisans

That is not plausible IMO. Nobody has capacity to read the works of a miriad of nameless scientists, not even Isaac Newton. Even less likely that Newton and Leibnitz were both familiar with the same works of minor scientists.

What is much more likely, is that well-known works of other great mathematicians prepared the foundation for both to reach similar results

> Nobody has capacity to read the works of a miriad of nameless scientists

It gets condensed over time. Take for example Continental Drift/Plate Tectonics theory. One day Alfred Wegener saw the coasts of West Africa and East South America were almost a perfect fit, and connected the dots. But he had no need to read the work of the many surveyors that braved unknown areas and mapped the coasts of both continents in the previous 4-5 centuries, nautical mile by nautical mile, with the help of positional astronomy. The knowledge was slowly integrated, cross checked and recorded by cartographers. Alfred Wegener insight happened at the end of a long cognitive funnel.

That's what review papers are for, and they're published regularly.

One of the ongoing practices of science is people putting out summaries of the state of different parts of fields of work (and reviews of reviews etc.)

Well, Leibniz did a different thing, with a similar part.

What does not go against the hypothesis. Both of their works were heavily subsided by less known researchers that came before them. But it's not clear at all if somebody else would do what they did on each of their particular field. (Just like it's not clear the work they built upon was in any way "mediocre".)

It's very hard to judge science. Both in predictive and retrospective form.

Which raises the question of whether there are any results so surprising that it's unlikely that any other scientists would have stumbled onto them in a reasonable time frame.

I've heard Einstein's General Relativity described that way.

Special Relativity was not such a big breakthrough. Something like it was on the verge of being described by somebody in that timeframe — all the pieces were in place, and science was headed in that direction.

But General Relativity really took everyone by surprise.

At least, that's my understanding from half-remembered interviews from some decades ago (:

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