Re: Non-orthogonal decompositions

On 21 Nov, 06:03, "SteveSmith" <Steve.Smi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Rune,

Ouch.

I hate threads that wander, so I’ll just briefly respond and let you
have the last word.  Here’s the problem with what you are saying:
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Darwin, and on and on.  These men
revolutionized scientific knowledge by pushing the envelope far beyond
conventional thinking, often at great professional ridicule.

They did, but they also knew their contemporary state of the art.
They weren't just idiots and dreamers who came up with some wild
isea, they were craftsmen who used their hard-earned skills
to extent from a well-known basis.

  Granted,
most scientists and engineers simply trudge through their careers, never
questioning authority, never exploring new territories.  Not everyone can
be an Einstein or Darwin, but why would you possibly aspire to be part of
this second group instead of the first?  

I would settele for becoming a skilled craftsman in my trade.
And have a reasonable hope that my colleagues have similar skills.

*Aspriring* to be listed between the names you mention is what
makes the proverbial 'mad scientist' mad.

The Norwegian writer Andre Bjerke wrote in the preface to his
translation og Goethe's "Faust" about Copernicus that

"...polakken Niklas Koppernigk, en forsagt og forsiktid kirkens
tjener som ikke ville gjøre en katt fortred, men som altså
kom i skade for å svi av et verdensbilde."

[ ... the pole Niklas Koppernigk, a diffident and meek clerk who
wouldn't hurt a fly, but who incidentially happend to smash a
view of the world into smithereens.] (my translation.)

 When Galileo and Darwin
challenged the conventional scientific thinking of their day, which side of
the fence would you have been on?  

I would be on their side, just as I am on Svensmark's side in the
global warming question. The reason is that these people knew the
elementary basics of their crafts and *demonstrated* why their
contemporaries were wrong.

*After* they established their point.

They didn't go into something saying "all these people are
idiots, I'll show them the truth." They knew their crafts
well enough to see solutions to questions no one else knew
how to ask. They didn't search for solutions to the obvious
questions of their day. If they did, we would still be
debating how many angles fit on the tip of a needle or
the temperature in purgatory.

Rune
.

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