Carne wrote:JustDoug wrote:Parson doesn't have to be any Einstein to shake things up: all he has to do is wonder about it and ask those seemingly stupid questions.
Which, ironically, is actually the approach Einstein is said to have taken when trying to work out relativity (for greater or lesser values of stupid, of course).
*wince*
He did not ask stupid questions dangit! A) they were not stupid and B)
he didn't ask them! The problem that was to be answered by special relativity was known since the Mikelson-Morley experiment. How come light seems to have the same speed in all directions to all observers, if light is a wave in some kind of immobile luminiferous ether? Here's what Einstein did and provided a "silly" (as in, not to the fashion of the time) answer: there is no ether. Next came the General Relativity thing, which was not a stupid question at all, but an extension. Special Rel. works for inertial observers. What about accelerated ones?
JustDoug wrote:Where I differ from you take on it is that they don't seem to question the +simple+ things. Jack, who seems to be wonderfully sharp, never really wondered about how falling works when hex boundaries are involved. It wasn't because he was a dolt but because he already knows how things work, so why bother? As has been noted elsewhere, there seems to be nothing anywhere near to the Scientific method on Erf and natural philosophy there resembles the classic Greek approach to investigating the Way of The World: think about it a lot, argue with others about it, and whatever sounds best wins. I doubt they would have come up with quantum mechanics that way.
Now, Parson introducing the Scientific Method to the Magic Kingdom would be something genuinely new.
Thinking about falling though? I dunno, even if the Ancients did not know about Mm/R^2, I'm sure they understood well enough all that there was there to use, tactically, from gravity, at their tech level.
Since Newton got mentioned again, a little more ranting on that topic. "Everybody saw the apple fall, but only Newton asked why" goes the anecdote. Well, the other side of the story goes like
So the previous generation (Kepler) had described laws for how the planets moved. Why were these laws in place? Actually several people pondered the idea, and got far enough with an answer that Newton was embroiled in a priority dispute with Robert Hooke over who ows what to whom for the law of gravity. Christopher Wren also made some contributions there.
Also, famously, Newton did not answer WHY the apple fell. "I propose no hypothesis" for how a force at a distance works.
Anyway, in principle, if Newton fell sick, someone else would have found that Mm/R^2 thing. But in this case, Newton was well ahead of the contemporaries.
A much more acrimonious photo-finish was that against Leibniz, about who invented calculus first/independently.
Later on, and without the dispute, Gauss, Lobachevski and Bolyai all started developping hyperbolic geometry. That was when the phrase "an idea whose time has come" was coined.
Charles Darwin was urged by friends to hurry up and publish Origin of Species, because it looked like Alfred Russel Wallace was thinking in a similar vein.
The three recipients for the Physics Nobel Prize for Q.E.D. also worked without knowing much of each other's works until the mid-game.
What happens in all such cases is that there are certain problems, and as several people will make stabs at them, some will come up with essentially the same answers.
But we need to keep our history simple, so we tend to stick with the first. That's one of the conclusions.
The other conclusion is that, often, the questions that are raised in science are not exactly provided by those who answer them. A lot/most progress comes from people trying to answer what stumped the previous generation, while in turn, providing a clear statement of their own stumbling blocks to the next generation.
JustDoug wrote:Bringing military innovation into this rather proves my point, too. Look back to The Great War. They kept doing the same thing- fix bayonets and over the top, boys!- that had worked so well previously until they finally figured out that it no longer worked. If the Old Ways of pound-them-with-the-guns-then-mass-charge had worked, do you think they would have gone through all the time, effort and expense developing things like armored fighting vehicles, attack aircraft and combined arms tactics, essentially changing everything? No, they would have worked to make artillery better and the charges more effective, and probably would have, too. The Same Old, only better and outtandingly performed.
The Great War is indeed a great example of what happens when the technology on the battlefield radically changes. And change it did, and left tactical doctrine a bit behind maybe. This was the war that saw the introduction of the tank, the airplane and the submarine.
The problem ... well, one problem ... then was that the machine gun had been invented, but not yet something to compensate for that on the offensive side. This resulted in the war of crazy stupid repetitive charges we now know about.
Tactical doctrine changed, because technology changed. I'm not too familiar with the history of carriers, but it looks like those were expensive ships to build, and several sides, USA included, had invested enough to have a few lying around. And when the war came, they proved themselves superior to battleships. If something works, it will get adopted, hang-ups, biases and inertia be damned.
OTOH, for whatever reason, technology in Erfworld seems quite stable. Again, It would be interesting to see Parson show how SCIENCE works to the Magic Kingdom, say. But until then, I believe there have been Pikers and Stabbers and Archers and Flying Mounts (and Dirt Bombs) since before Charlie was a baby Dish.
SteveMB wrote:Also, Erfworlders come into existence already knowing the basics of what they need to know, and their cities come into existence stocked with libraries containing anything they might need to look up. If anything, it's surprising that some of them (like Sizemore) have any concept whatsoever of trying to figure out for yourself how the world works and why.
enthar wrote:I actually want to touch on this again. One of the ongoing threads being discussed is the notion that Erfworld has very poor communication of ideas between 'cultures' (sides). Which is why I made my point about experience. OUR military makes a point of finding out everything they can about how other people fight. Erfworld largely doesn't have that luxury. {...}
My point being, that some people have no doubt done as you suggest, somewhere on Erf BUT even if true (somewhere on the plane, somewhen in time), there are few to no central repositories of institutional knowledge such as our militaries have. When a side dies, its the beginning of a local dark age- all their knowledge and experience is wiped out. New sides have to reinvent the wheel constantly, and very likely in parallel with everyone around them.
That is, indeed, the strange thing.
It's very important to not need to reinvent the wheel all the time, and use the experience of others, your own forebears or your enemies, as much as possible.
Erfworlders seem handicapped at this. They have no useful archives, and nothing to suggest a
need for learning.
But, they learn nonetheless. And not in that much less a quantity than Earthlings either. Synthesists like Sizemore are rare here also.
Finally one more thing, stolen from a book by Jared Diamond I read ages ago. The Aborigines of Australia may have not had any system of writing and keeping records, but they could live in their continent quite well. If some uppity European explorer would have come by and asked the "simple question": "how come you're not growing more of your food and such?", well because there's a simple answer. The ground is hard as rock and there are no oxes to pull the plows anyways.
Oh, and some uppity European explorers did in fact come by. Some of them died there. Food for thought. Outside perspective is not everything.
The whole point of this is lost if you keep it a secret.
