Epiphany

<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.