<quote=Wikipedia>An epiphany is an experience of sudden and striking realization.
The term describes scientific, religious or philosophical realisation anywhere an enlightenment allows a problem or situation to be understood from a better perspective leading to innovation.
Epiphanies are relatively rare occurrences and generally follow a process of significant thought about a problem. Often they are triggered by a new and key piece of information but a depth of prior knowledge is required to allow the leap of understanding.
Famous epiphanies include Archimedes‘s discovery of a method to determine the density of an object and Isaac Newton‘s realization that a falling apple and the orbiting moon are both pulled by the same force.</quote>
Newton’s laws of motion are not Newton’s Laws. That understnding wasn’t an epiphany. I got the realisation from reading a translation of his book Principia. One section starts with the concepts as am introduction. He may have formulated the latin phrases from the work of Galileo who divided gravity and muliplied time by inventing slopes to study free-fall. That was the epiphany of physics.
Where did Nichholas Kopernik get the idea that the word rotated about the sun?
An epiphany?
Nonsense. The Jews and Arabs new of the workings of the solar system long before the Vatican was able to accept such dogma.What epiphanies came to the Allies in WW2 in order to invent the atomic bomb in 3 years?
Granted they threw men and money at the project and granted there were many lucky insights that came out of nowhere. A year after the attack on Pearl Harbour the first nuclear furnace was operating. Another year later and they were producing weapons grade Plutonium.
By the same time in 1944 they all but had a nuclear bomb. 10 years later he was dead. He died of cancer. I don’t know if this was related to his employment but a slew of nuclear physicists seem to have gone that way in the good old days.
<quote=Enrico Fermi>What is the good of working to collect a few facts which will bring no pleasure except to a few long-haired professors who love to collect such things and will be of no use to anybody because only few specialists at best will be able to understand them?
History has consistently taught us that scientific advances in basic understanding have sooner or later led to technical and industrial applications that have revolutionized our way of life.
It seems to me improbable that this effort to get at the structure of matter should be an exception to this rule. What is less certain, and what we all fervently hope, is that man will soon grow sufficiently adult to make good use of the powers that he acquires over nature.</quote>
It’s one thing to have insights. It is quite another to get the cultures we live in to make good use of them. More likely to happen is that man will continue to dominate man for profit.
I was going to write about the speed with which the people who worked on the Manhattan Project turned out their product and compare it to the results of a lifetime’s research into creating fusion.
The only epiphany there is with that problem is that there is no such result.
And that there may not be a result possible.
The sun produces visible light. Almost all of the radiance leaving that star is in the frequencies we know and love. About half of sunlight is visible as the rainbow and all but a small percentage is ultraviolet and infrared.
I can’t even see where the magnetic material of the solar wind comes from. Granted, it is not magnetic when it leaves the sun but it cools down fairly quickly. I imagine it is still within recall when it regains its magnetism?
Where is it going?
And why?
No quote facility and not ability to edit.
What am I wasting my time here for?
“About half of sunlight is visible as the rainbow and all but a small percentage is ultraviolet and infrared.” should read:
About half of sunlight is visible as the rainbow and all but a very small percentage of the rest is ultraviolet and infrared.
“Where is it going?
And why?”
Sunlight goes to the stars.
It goes there in tyhe process or regeneration that all the stars will continue to time indefinite.
Why?
Because on the way there it controls the direction of sunlight. It applies the power and efficiency of the product; that “not for nothing” is the word of god expended.
I would agree with one point: Epiphany is a revelation.
Being an Eastern Orthodox Christian, for me the word puts emphasis on the baptism of our Lord by John, with Jesus revealing himself to the world as God’s own Son. 🙂
“Being an Eastern Orthodox Christian, for me the word puts emphasis on the baptism of our Lord by John, with Jesus revealing himself to the world as God’s own Son.”
The word comes from the festival celebrating the outpouring of holy spirit giving the disciples gathered as commanded an insight into the workings of god. But we can all ask for such insight. I did. A man like me can get it so anyone can.
Yes, I think I would agree with that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpe-LKn-4gM
A good watch in itself but it contains the thought that everyone once thought that the 4 minute mile was impossible until Roger Bannister ran one. (7:10 2 months later 16 people had broken the 4 minute mile.)
Once something is shown to be possible everyone can do it. Epiphanies are given to people in order to help us move on.
Once the Russians realised there was the ability to get energy from radio active elements they had one. There is no such thing as secret. All the spies in the world?
They are not necessary. All the police in the world and security people?
They can’t stop people finding out things that have already been done. They can’t even stop people knowing what has never been done; the impossible.
The reason is that people thinking about things, impossible things, find the answers
All those rumours of great inventors being murdered to keep a secret?
Cars that run on water?
Perpetual motion engineers?
All those conspiracy theories abounding on the net?
It can’t be done. Time and again things get invented for the first time …in duplicate.
And suddenly an whole generation has a completely different culture.
Whole reams of technological produce go to the scrap-heap. Whole areas of work are redundant.
How many different people invented the telephone?
The TV?
Who invented radio?
Or photography?
The moving pictures?
Dozens of people worked on the bicycle in the early days.
We get to know the names of a few immortals such as Dunlop and Hoover.
They start out as small components then take over the world to become household names. A lot of them don’t deserve to but that’s the way things work from time to time.
The reasons for that are mere financial mores. People use a new name for things out of habit. Nobody knows who invented the velocipede or the derallieur gear system. (You do now: An Anglo/French chap called Dérailleur in 1878 came up with it. He built his first factory in Leeds which town lent its name to the famous winner of the Tour de France:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derailleur_gears)
Now hopefully you appreciate the most important thing about education:
Check your facts.
Even people who have epiphanies can be wrong. How many lunatics have committed murder thinking they were doing god a favour?
To save you looking it up, the answer is ten.