Re: The Fermi Paradox and Economics

Thomas Lee Elifritz wrote:
> 
> November 1, 2003
> 
> Matt Giwer wrote:

[snip]

> Introducing - scientific methods!
> 
> http://www.av8n.com/physics/00index.html
> 
> > If you are simply expressing a hope for long term job 
> > security for scientists that is something else.
> 
> Introducing - Induction!
> 
> http://www.cut-the-knot.org/exchange/induction2.shtml
> 
> Introducing - Sir Isaac Newton!
> 
> "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself 
> I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, 
> and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble 
> or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of 
> truth lay all undiscovered before me."
> 
> Isaac Newton, From Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855)
> 
> "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of 
> giants."
> 
> Isaac Newton, Letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675
> 
> http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Newton.html
> 
> Thomas Lee Elifritz
> http://elifritz.members.atlantic.net

... and even earlier than Sir Isaac Newton, there were other 
suggestions about the learning/discovery process.  

Quoting Rebecca Moore Howard ... 

1100's Bernard of Chartres, who was master of the episcopal 
school at Chartres from 1114-1119, who died in 1126, and whose 
works are lost to us except in John of Salisbury's accounts, is 
the 

        "first authenticated appearance in writing of the idea 
        of pigmies on the shoulders of giants" (Merton 37). 

John reports it (in Latin) in his Metalogicon; the 
twentieth-century scholar George Sarton translates it: 

        "In comparison with the ancients, we stand like dwarfs 
        on the shoulders of giants" (40). 

Only implicit in Sarton's translation is an assertion central 
to the original: 

        ". . . Bernard made explicit the singularly important 
        idea that the successors need be no brighter than their 
        predecessors--nor even as bright--and yet, the 
        accumulation of knowledge being what it is, they can 
        know far more and thus come to see farther" (41). 

Gimpel presents it this way: 

        "We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, 
        so that although we perceive many more things than 
        they, it is not because our vision is more piercing 
        or our stature higher, but because we are carried and 
        elevated higher thanks to their gigantic size." 

Rebecca Moore Howard; "Some Events and Ideas in the History of 
Authorship in the West"; 
http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Handouts/ChronAuth.html

-- 
Martin G. Diehl

Reality -- That which remains after you stop thinking 
about it.  

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