squeak program delivery, etc

Bijan Parsia bparsia at email.unc.edu
Sat Dec 5 05:44:40 UTC 1998


At 6:01 PM -0500 12/4/98, Marcus Denker wrote:

[snip]
>
>There's a good article by Tim O'Reilly in Esther Dyson's "Release 1.0":
>
>|Imagine for a moment, if Newton had withheld his laws of motion, and
>|instead gone into business as a defense contractor to artillerists
>|following the 30 Years War. "No, I won't tell you how I know about
>|parabolic trajectories, but I'll calibrate your guns for a fee." The
>|very idea, of course, sounds absurd. Not only did science not evolve
>|this way, but it could not have evolved this way. Such secrecy would
>|have kept science from developing and evolving at all.

Except, as I recall, Newton *was* secrative and piggy. Indeed, this is want
caused Liebniz to (re)invent the calculus (thanks god, or we'd all be
messing with fluxions ;)).

Secrecy, jealousy, improper pride (and proper pride), greed, sloth,
dishonesty, etc. all are manifestly present in the history of
science--which is, after all, a human history. Scientific advance is
possible in (so-called) closed conditions, and I seriously doubt that we
*know* that open conditoins are inherently more effective (money and
leisure are big factors ;)).

(Plus, when I first read the phrase "withheld his laws of motion" I had the
incogurous vision of stopped pendulums ;))

Cheers,
Bijan.





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