Quantcast
ZME Science
  • CoronavirusNEW
  • News
  • Environment
    • Climate
    • Animals
    • Renewable Energy
    • Eco tips
    • Environmental Issues
    • Green Living
  • Health
    • Alternative Medicine
    • Anatomy
    • Diseases
    • Genetics
    • Mind & Brain
    • Nutrition
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
    • Feature Post
    • Art
    • Great Pics
    • Design
    • Fossil Friday
    • AstroPicture
    • GeoPicture
    • Did you know?
    • Offbeat
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact
No Result
View All Result
ZME Science

No Result
View All Result
ZME Science
No Result
View All Result
Home Science Psychology

Psychologist claims the age of genius scientists is over

Mihai Andrei by Mihai Andrei
January 31, 2013
in Psychology

 

Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, has published a comment piece in the journal Nature, where he makes a rather shocking and disturbing claim: mankind will never produce a genius like Newton, Einstein or Darwin. He claims that this will happen because we’ve already discovered all the most basic ideas that describe how the natural world works, and any new work will only slightly tweak our current knowledge.

albert einstein

Well now, that’s a claim – and you can be sure reactions will pop, both from in and out of the science world. After all, geniuses have been driving our society forward for hundreds of years, giving us an entirely new perspective on how things work; without them, how will we be able to make the necessary leaps ? Also, claiming that we have basically figured out how the world works… then where’s our unified theory of physics? What are memories? Is there non-carbon life based out there? What is dark energy, dark matter? These are all fundamental question we are nowhere near answering – and you can bet that many more fundamental questions (of which we can’t even think of yet) are unanswered.

Simonton has been studying geniuses and their contributions to science for more than 30 years and has even written books on them. He also claims that the way science is encourage to work nowadays, in teams instead of encouraging lonely but true insight, only adds to the problem; the past decades only offer proof in this area. He explains that after Einstein, the world has practically been devoid of such personalities.

Get more science news like this...

Join the ZME newsletter for amazing science news, features, and exclusive scoops. More than 40,000 subscribers can't be wrong.

   

Ultimately, Dean Keith Simonton fears that surprising originality in the natural sciences is a thing of the past, as vast teams finesse knowledge rather than create disciplines. Now, as far as I understand things, this is not something you can definitely prove or disprove, so we’re just making educated assumptions; highly educated assumptions in the case of Simonton, but still, asumptions. Come to think of it, you could have written the same study 40 years after Newton, or after Aristotle. What bugs me the most is the underlying idea that we cannot fundamentally change our view of the Universe – for me, this is nothing less than arrogance. We must not forget that we are just scratching the surface of universal knowledge, just taking baby steps towards universal knowledge; no matter how laudable and utterly fantastic our scientific discoveries are, we should always remember to put things into perspective.

Via Nature

Mihai Andrei

Mihai Andrei

Andrei's background is in geophysics, and he's been fascinated by it ever since he was a child. Feeling that there is a gap between scientists and the general audience, he started ZME Science -- and the results are what you see today.

Follow ZME on social media

ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
  • Coronavirus
  • News
  • Environment
  • Health
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
  • More

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Coronavirus
  • News
  • Environment
    • Climate
    • Animals
    • Renewable Energy
    • Eco tips
    • Environmental Issues
    • Green Living
  • Health
    • Alternative Medicine
    • Anatomy
    • Diseases
    • Genetics
    • Mind & Brain
    • Nutrition
  • Future
  • Space
  • Feature
    • Feature Post
    • Art
    • Great Pics
    • Design
    • Fossil Friday
    • AstroPicture
    • GeoPicture
    • Did you know?
    • Offbeat
  • More
    • About
    • The Team
    • Advertise
    • Contribute
    • Our stance on climate change
    • Privacy Policy
    • Contact

© 2007-2019 ZME Science - Not exactly rocket science. All Rights Reserved.