Five days previous, on November 6, James Watson had died. I mostly agree with Bruce's assessment that with his death there are no great scientists still living (Roger Penrose being the one exception I would make).
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
It's unfortunate that all of the great explorers have already passed away.
This sentence -- created for the purpose of practicing certain subtleties of English pronunciation, its meaning being quite beside the point -- is in one of the textbooks I use, and as things worked out, November 11 was the day I had my students repeating it again and again.
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4 comments:
I suppose one big difference about Penrose is that a *very* small proportion of people have heard of him or could say what he did. Watson was like many more in the earlier generations of scientific genius, in that he was a household name and so was his major achievement.
I feel Anonymous Conservative has the right idea on this topic. It's probable that, for several decades, people of such calibre have either been pulled into secret projects, suppressed (pushed well out of mainstream view or killed off), or shunted/discouraged into alternative activities. Generalising it all as "the surveillance" (and/or Jews, as AC's saying more and more lately) is too simplistic for my liking though.
If you go back far enough, even some philosophers were household names, at least locally. After Kant died, the ground was too frozen to bury him, so his body was displayed for 10 days and many Konigsbergers came to see it.
WG, that's likely. "The conspiracy" would have to be active in all former genius-producing nations, but that's not that much of a stretch of the imagination.
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