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On Thursday, 30 April 2015 12:08:40 UTC+1, Simon Brown wrote:
"Chris Hogg" wrote in message
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On Thu, 30 Apr 2015 20:44:03 +1000, "Simon Brown"
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"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
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On 30/04/15 08:39, Simon Brown wrote:


"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
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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,'

I'm not convinced. The personal computer is in fact just as
much a serious breakthrough as a viable flying machine was.

DNA was clearly a serious breakthrough by any measure.

whatever exactly that means. So the percentage of lone inventors falls,

Even that is arguable. Yes, the detail has changed with us not
seeing as many small mechanical inventions as we used to,
but in fact what we have seen is the lone inventors keeping
on doing that in other areas, particularly with apps now.

That change has been seen in the past too with lone inventors
mostly inventing mechanical stuff that helps with agriculture
and domestic stuff in the past, moving on to electronics, radio
and stuff like that, and then on to the personal computer and
now on to apps.

but not to zero. Many inventions are concepts rather than brute force
trial,

Yes, even the wheel is that.

and significant concepts can still be and are still produced by single
minds.

Yes, particularly with apps now.

The computer is a geat example - although long in the past, it was
a piece of elemental conceptual thinking that changed history.

And is just one of the things that did that, with everything from
plant and animal breeding through to firearms, fire itself, tools,
language, myths, legends all sorts of things doing that as well.

Its construction is an example of where
money is required, but its invention is not.

Very little money is needed with apps now.