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The Natural Philosopher[_2_]

On 30/04/15 13:45, wrote:
On Thursday, 30 April 2015 12:08:40 UTC+1, Simon Brown wrote:
"Chris Hogg" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 30 Apr 2015 20:44:03 +1000, "Simon Brown"
wrote:

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
On 30/04/15 08:39, Simon Brown wrote:

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
On 30/04/15 06:12, wrote:
On Wednesday, 29 April 2015 18:41:38 UTC+1, harry wrote:

Advancement rarely comes by accident these days.
Inventors "stand on the shoulders" of their predeccesors.
So if you have no education, you are unlikely to invent anything.
Or even have an idea of what's possible.

yes

Virtually all the easy stuff has been found out.
No more inventions in garden sheds these days.

utter rubbish

Sadly not true.

Fraid so.

At least in terms of major break throughs.

That isn't true either, most obviously with apps.

Do you really thing apps are a serious breakthrough?

Some of them are, most obviously with an app that can for
example listen to a bird call and show you what bird it is.

Inventing the transistor was a serious breakthrough.

Yes.

Not coding up a bit of java

That can be too when it does something that hasn't been done before.

ROTFLMA! It seems you have no concept of what is meant by a serious
breakthrough!

We'll see...

Are you going to discover the Higgs boson in your shed,

A viable flying machine was produced in someone's shed.

or confine a plasma to achieve nuclear
fusion, or understand Dark Matter?

Viable flying machines are a serious breakthrough.

As time goes on it gets ever harder to invent 'a serious breakthrough,' whatever exactly that means. So the percentage of lone inventors falls, but not to zero. Many inventions are concepts rather than brute force trial, and significant concepts can still be and are still produced by single minds.

The computer is a geat example - although long in the past, it was a piece of elemental conceptual thinking that changed history. Its construction is an example of where money is required, but its invention is not.

For sure if its just an idea, I've got a great one. Instantaneous matter
transfer.

I am sure now you have that idea you can build me a matter transmitter.

NT

--
Everything you read in newspapers is absolutely true, except for the
rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge. €“ Erwin Knoll