I just started reading John Gribbin’s “The Scientists”. It features science through “the lives of its greatest inventors” over the past 500 years. Two initial thoughts strick me:
– In the Europe of the 16th century, books were the hyperlinks that connected ideas and scientists across countries. There were very few other alternatives. At times, language was a barrier. But just like the Internet of today, books wove a web around the ideas and scientists. The printing press’s importance in the advancement of scientific thought cannot be understated. The Web is doing just the same now. Bloggers are the scientists of this age, advancing thought and ideas through their writings. This is helping compress time and speed innovation even more.
– Wouldn’t it be nice if in our schools they let us make discoveries the same way our scientists did? We should be able to make the observations and then reach our own conclusions. We can then compare this with the thinking process followed by the scientists who originated the ideas. This will make us think, and that will be of far greater value in our life than the learning by rote which trivialises scientific discovery and our past.
