7 ms·

Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...] Maxwell "invented" the displacement current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current http://en.wi

by mchouza 13y ago

Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...] Maxwell "invented" the displacement current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current

jjoonathan 13y ago
The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter. It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!
- ucee054 13y ago
  No, the application comes first, the theory follows. I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first. Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis". They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything. In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right? The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
  - kyzyl 13y ago
    > The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto. No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with. This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen. Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them. So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
    - ucee054 13y ago
      save you from dying of hunger The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it. So stop spreading disinformation I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
      - kyzyl 13y ago
        > The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. Are you trying to sound like an idiot? Don't be so narrow minded. > Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. This is a very typical argumentation failure. I make a statement where specifics of the examples are entirely irrelevant to the point, and you cherry pick one of them and throw some info about it that you presume I'm not aware of. You then go whole hog straw-man, trying to tear me down over the apparent ignorance, which you manufactured. Yet, it remains that you missed the entire fucking point. Let me get my crayons out: Academia does research into many, many problems, and some of it is 'pure', meaning there is no accompanying application. Some other research does have immediate applications. Nevertheless, research is a highly complex process, but has tremendous value... beyond it's immediate commercial ramifications. This is why people are complaining about the NRC's recent claims, which are bullshit. >I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. I'll grant you that some, even many, academics are highly driven by things like publications, fundable research and tenure. However, if you'd had any experience in academia (and kept your eyes open!) you would have seen that this is merely a circumstantial hoop, and often times the top level academics who are doing this are also the ones get the funding to allow all sorts of other research to continue for its own sake. Sometimes applications come early, sometimes not. You're being naive to think that all academics are simply giving us 'the run around'. > If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you. And he would be correct to do so. Getting something into the shop for people to buy is not the job of academia. Go buy a year supply of ramen noodles and drop out of that's what you want to do. You may not like it, but science actually, really does have a theoretical component to it, and a lot of your fancy shit (which you bought in stores) is the direct result of people using academic research. If you can't understand that, then you're the one who is badly informed.

by mchouza 13y ago

Maxwell didn't come up with anything himself [...] Maxwell "invented" the displacement current: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_current

jjoonathan 13y ago

The discovery of the displacement current was extremely important: it proved that light was an electromagnetic wave, paving the way for how we would come to understand the interactions between light and matter. It's no mistake that it took a theorist to find the displacement current since it mostly appears between the plates of capacitors and that valume is one that engineering demands call for minimization of!

ucee054 13y ago
No, the application comes first, the theory follows. I don't know that Maxwell would have been anywhere near that discovery if it hadn't been for Faraday's work first. Go take a look at first year engineering PhD students, and see how they flail around looking for a "hypothesis". They have no idea what to look for because their work isn't grounded in anything. In the end they often end up bodging together two or three previous research papers and going with that rather than solving a real problem. Because who cares about applications, right? The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto.
- kyzyl 13y ago
  > The PhD students' work usually ends up gathering dust on some shelf while the next breakthrough is usually made by three drop-outs with a year's supply of ramen in a trailer in Palo Alto. No, no, no, no, NO! That is just wrong. Yes, a lot of PhD work is highly specialized and remains largely unapplied (at least directly). But that is the nature it; science is an affair of serendipity. You simply do not know what problem you're going to figure out, what problem you're going to make progress on, or where you're going to get stuck. In fact, science largely has very little to do with YOU in particular. It's about building a body of work that many people to come can work with. This notion that most of science is brilliant people going "ahah!", and subsequently publishing a seminal work in their field that drives industry for decades to come is bullshit. That is not how it works. In very rare circumstances people have really significant eureka moments, but even then it takes the body of researchers, engineers, undergrads, and all their combined work to make things really happen. Most breakthroughs do not come from drop-outs in silicon valley hacking on Rails apps, or building PCs out of wood and spite, or figuring out how to make lasers encode information at very high density. Those are the exceptions. As a culture we just love to hear about the exceptions that made it big, complete with the highly biased, over-simplified and glory hogging narratives that accompany them. So stop spreading disinformation and putting down PhD students, and other academics, who are devoting years of their life to figuring out how to cure your ailments, build your LCD screens and save you from dying of hunger.
  - ucee054 13y ago
    save you from dying of hunger The reason I'm not dying from hunger is because of mostly Fritz Haber and partly Norman Borlaug. The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. And Fritz Haber wasn't working in "theory", he was working in "application" for the Second Reich. Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. There's a whole field called History of Science and Technology about how this stuff happens, as opposed to the self-serving narratives academics give you about how it happens. Try learning some of it. So stop spreading disinformation I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. Try working on a project for an academic. If you give him a hypothesis to investigate that you can submit to a big journal, he'll give you the go ahead. If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you.
    - kyzyl 13y ago
      > The work of everybody else is irrelevant. So, two geniuses. Are you trying to sound like an idiot? Don't be so narrow minded. > Maybe you should stop using such terrible examples and maybe you should stop being so damn badly informed. This is a very typical argumentation failure. I make a statement where specifics of the examples are entirely irrelevant to the point, and you cherry pick one of them and throw some info about it that you presume I'm not aware of. You then go whole hog straw-man, trying to tear me down over the apparent ignorance, which you manufactured. Yet, it remains that you missed the entire fucking point. Let me get my crayons out: Academia does research into many, many problems, and some of it is 'pure', meaning there is no accompanying application. Some other research does have immediate applications. Nevertheless, research is a highly complex process, but has tremendous value... beyond it's immediate commercial ramifications. This is why people are complaining about the NRC's recent claims, which are bullshit. >I'm not, the standard academic propaganda that you stated above is the disinformation. The truth is that academics often don't give a shit about applications. They care about getting publications and about getting tenure. I'll grant you that some, even many, academics are highly driven by things like publications, fundable research and tenure. However, if you'd had any experience in academia (and kept your eyes open!) you would have seen that this is merely a circumstantial hoop, and often times the top level academics who are doing this are also the ones get the funding to allow all sorts of other research to continue for its own sake. Sometimes applications come early, sometimes not. You're being naive to think that all academics are simply giving us 'the run around'. > If you instead suggest something which you can actually make, which will be helpful for Aunt Tillie, which she actually might be able to buy in her local shop, he'll say something like "That's not SCIENCE!" and veto you. Go on, try it. I dare you. And he would be correct to do so. Getting something into the shop for people to buy is not the job of academia. Go buy a year supply of ramen noodles and drop out of that's what you want to do. You may not like it, but science actually, really does have a theoretical component to it, and a lot of your fancy shit (which you bought in stores) is the direct result of people using academic research. If you can't understand that, then you're the one who is badly informed.