In article <473d776e$1@news.povray.org>, gitran_nospam_@wanadoo.fr 
says...

> 473d6557@news.povray.org...
> >  Finally they had to submit and admit that perhaps physics was not 
> > complete
> > and that there might be something else to it than what they thought.
> 
> There were only 20 years between Kelvin's claim of "There is nothing new 
to 
> be discovered in physics now" and Einstein's Nobel Prize. In fact, there
 
> were 15 years between the publication of Einstein's paper on matter/energ
y 
> equivalence and the Times's headline "Newtonian Ideas overthrown". Not to
o 
> bad for overturning a "Holy Truth" and one wishes regular people would be
 as 
> quick as scientists before accepting new ideas.
> 
> This phenomenon has been called a paradigm shift by Thomas Kuhn, who said
 
> that "successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution i
s 
> the usual developmental pattern of mature science". In other words, that'
s 
> the way science works, and if you've been around scientists, you can see
 
> that at work even in lesser fields of science.
> 
But it isn't how it works. Einstein is only considered a *huge* leap to 
the layman. In scientific circles he did the equivalent of putting the 
pieces together, but most of the ideas existed "in some form", before he 
put them together. Some even came really close, but failed to get it 
right, so had their ideas quickly buried and forgotten. And that is how 
its all been. From the side of the fence that scientists sit its a slow 
plodding change. From the perspective of the outsider, one day they are 
in a horse and buggy, the next they are flying in a 747 to visit the 
Great Wall of China. Sudden leaps are ***rare*** and truthfully almost 
never happen, except in public perception, among those that don't know 
the difference between say what Newton said and what Einstein said 
differently, for example, but only that one superseded the other and a 
lot of people got real excited about it.

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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