A Look Back at Research from 1875

A Look Back at Research from 1875(bcmullins.github.io)

22 points by wannabebarista 251 days ago | 6 comments

This is a fun side project I've been working on now for a few years that looks back at research from 100, 150, and 200 years ago. Some stuff is well-known, others have been forgotten, and still others were never read at the time.

I've had lots of great suggestions from HN readers in the past. If I've missed anything cool that you like, please share!

photonthug 248 days ago | |

Love the premise and I see several years are posted. I like your philosophy of science section especially, because while most would neglect that area, it's probably got good predictive/foreshadowing juice in general (although not necessarily for any given year).

Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1875_in_science the twin studies and behavioural genetics is interesting. The challenger-deep thing too since it's earlier than I would have guessed, but IMHO it would be more exciting/appropriate to categorize as "exploration" than science. Did they publish a "paper" about stuff like that back then, or just tell the royal society, tell the newspapers and call it good?

A pointless but fun question to think about is, how to decide the most important thing that happened in a given year? Sometimes a discovery, sometimes an idea, sometimes a project, election, or war. But for a slow year.. maybe it's just that someone who will have that idea or start that project later was born.

wannabebarista 248 days ago | | |

I find the naturalism vs spiritualism debate to be one of the most compelling parts of what's going on in the late nineteenth century and plan to continue covering it in future installments.

It's always an interesting exercise choosing which books or articles to write about. There's a balancing act between what I want to read, what I think is important or representative, and what do I know enough about to have anything to add.

kibwen 248 days ago |

These are great! I'd read an entire book of this. Especially interesting would be to summarize, decade-by-decade, the prevailing themes, trends, and focuses.

lmm 248 days ago |

> Within the scope of mathematical logic, there’s a counterexample with Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem, which says that any theory sufficiently strong enough to model arithmetic contains a true sentence that’s not provable, called a Gödel sentence for the theory. The Gödel sentence is verifiable by its construction; however, it’s not provable from below.

I don't think this is a valid counterexample. The Gödel sentence is only verifiable from outside the theory, and you can prove it from outside the theory in the same way (e.g. with a large cardinal assumption for ZFC).

wannabebarista 248 days ago | |

You're right that this doesn't work. I seem to have thought of verifiability as provable from outside the theory and discoverable as provable from inside the theory. This clearly doesn't get at what Greg is arguing.

Thanks for pointing this out! I'll update the post.

I'm now not sure what's the distinction between verifiability and discoverability among truths in a formal system.