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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sig who wrote (137871)	6/24/2004 7:15:26 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Sig; Re: "Afraid I cant buy that argument. Take out Qween Isabella and Columbus and what do you have left? An old world. Where would we be without Newton, Vasco De Gama, and Von Braun." Columbus *discovered* the New World, he didn't create it. If he hadn't been around, someone else would have discovered it. The same for science and exploration. We celebrate these guys for being first, not for being only. Without Newton, for example, we'd have Leibniz. They had a big argument over exactly which one of them invented calculus. Well the truth is that neither of them invented calculus, they discovered it. Calculus was always there, waiting to be discovered, and two men happened to find it at about the same time. For that matter, it is Leibniz's "differentials", not Newton's "fluxions" that is taught in school today. The same thing continues to this day. The academic contest in science is not to publish work that no one else would ever figure out, but instead to publish it before someone else gets credit for it. For example, the important "J/Psi" particle was discovered by two groups at the same time. One group called it the "J", the other the "Psi". Maybe we should do the same thing with Newton and Leibniz. Call it the "Fluxiential Calculus". -- Carl