alt Hacker NewsSome other hypothesis:
- Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants. This seems true if you look at citations alone. See https://nintil.com/newton-hypothesis
- Matthew effect - extends successful people are successful observation to scientific publishing. Big names get more funding and easier journal publishing, which gets them more exposure, so they end up with their labs and get their name on a lot of papers. https://researchonresearch.org/largest-study-of-its-kind-sho...
If I was allowed to speculate I would make a couple of observations. First one is that resources play a huge role in research, so overall progress direction is influenced more by the economics rather than any group. For example every component of a modern smartphone got hyper optimized via massive capital injections. Second one is that this is a real world and thus likely some kind of power law applies. I don't know the exact numbers, but my expectation is that top 1% of researches produce way more output than bottom 25%.
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As with all things - both are probably true.
It might be that we attribute post hoc greatness to a small number of folks, but require a lot of very interested / ambitious folks to find the most useful threads to pull, run the labs, catalog data, etc.
It's only after the fact that we go back and say "hey this was really useful". If only we knew ahead of time that Calculus and "tracking stars" would lead to so many useful discoveries!
> Newton - predicts that most advances are made by standing on the shoulders of giants
Giants can be wrong, though; so there's a "giants were standing on our shoulders" problem to be solved. The amyloid-beta hypothesis held up Alzheimer's work for decades based on a handful of seemingly-fraudulent-but-never-significantly-challenged results by the giants of the field.
Kuhn's "paradigm shift" model speaks to this. Eventually the dam breaks, but when it does it's generally not by the sudden appearance of new giants but by the gradual erosion of support in the face of years and years of bland experimental work.
See also astronomy right now, where a never-really-satisfying ΛCDM model is finally failing in the face of new data. And it turns out not only from Webb and new instruments! The older stuff never fit too but no one cared.
Continental drift had a similar trajectory, with literally hundreds of years of pretty convincing geology failing to challenge established assumptions until it all finally clicked in the 60's.
>Matthew effect - extends successful people are successful observation to scientific publishing. Big names get more funding and easier journal publishing, which gets them more exposure, so they end up with their labs and get their name on a lot of papers.
There's a ton of this among all historical figures in general. Any great person you can name throughout history, almost without exception, were born to wealthy connected families that set them on their course. There are certainly exceptions of self made people here and there, and they do tend to be much more interesting. But just about anyone you can easily name in the history math/science/philosophy were rich kids who were afforded the time and resources to develop themselves.
> 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.