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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Popular posts
-
I checked the Duckstack today and read the latest, " Comb Tomb ." One bit is about crime: Most nonviolent crime is a crime of oppo... -
Following up on the idea that the pecked are no longer alone in their bodies , reader Ben Pratt has brought to my attention these remarks by... -
I post at Winking Back from the Dark , but only to make a terrible pun. Don't say you weren't warned!
-
But Men shall remember Atlantis's name Come hell or high water! Sith both of them came, It rests unforgotten, and what we now tell Skill...
-
I've been dreaming about books again . I remember the blurb on the back cover said, "One of the most horrifying books of the d... -
Google is being weird again. Update: I published this post at 10:59 a.m. Exactly 47 minutes later, at 11:46, I photographed this logo, whic... -
After work this evening, I checked America's flagship meme post and saved this one: I've never seen the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger m... -
I had had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, but the client called to ask if we could reschedule it to 7/22. Minutes later, I was readi...
-
From this 4chan thread (via AC ): I've shown this picture to several people, and the reaction is always the same: What the hell is that...
-
As I was waking up, a rapid-fire series of voices said things like "Kill John Wayne!" "John Wayne shot!" "Shoot Joh...
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.
Post a Comment