Source : « The Great Scientists: From Euclid to Stephen Hawking », from John Farndon

I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato or before, just wanted to share, what a time.

B.t.w., we know about ChatGPT, some about Sam Altman, but nothing about the researchers, and the same goes for every other technology, it’s a choice of society 🤷(, causes&consequences).

Edit : Transcript :

All the same, if anyone wanted a proper education, Alexandria in Egypt was the place to go, and here Archimedes went as a young man.
At the time he was there, the city was the greatest centre of learning in the ancient world. Although the museum or university there was barely 20 years old – the city itself had been founded by Alexander the Great just half a century earlier – it already held an unrivalled library, containing at least 100,000 scrolls, including all of Aristotle’s priceless personal collection.
It was here that the great Euclid taught geometry, that Aristarchus showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and that Hipparchus made the first great catalogue of constellations, categorizing stars in terms of their brightness. And it was here that, much later, Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential book about the nature of the universe for 1,500 years.
Euclid was probably dead by the time Archimedes was there, but Archimedes undoubtedly met Eratosthenes, the brilliant thinker who measured the circumference of the world to within 4 per cent of modern figures, and made a measurement of the year’s length as precise as any until barely half a century ago.

Edit : Now that i think about it, conquering Persia&Egypt&… probably helped them in developing these knowledges/sciences

  • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    We likely don’t know much about the researchers of modern technology because they’re often created by a huge team of hundreds of people. There’s no single person responsible for the bulk of the work. In the case of ChatGPT and the line of work leading up to it, it was very much also the researchers’ choice as well to not name a specific person as being the main contributor. For example, the transformer paper had all the author names shuffled so the credit doesn’t all end up with one person.

    • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Still, some are closer to the source of these ideas than others. And if our “idols” are singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers, then we’ll produce singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers. Why don’t we have emissions that will interview each week an influent researcher ? We have the population we deserve.
      Also, they bring everything but the money goes to the investors.
      And we’re using objects everyday without understanding how they work.
      For now, we’re working all day and spend our free time entertaining ourselves and spending time with our family, i’d certainly be wrong to judge, but if our time ever gets liberated(, e.g., with machines, longevity, …), then i just hope that our civilization will seek a higher purpose than entertainment 🤷.

      • howrar@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Still, some are closer to the source of these ideas than others, think about awards attributed to individuals for example.

        This is where the researchers would disagree with you. I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in research (or startups). There’s a common saying that ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s much more so the work you do that’s important, not the idea itself.

        singers, actors, politicians, or youtubers

        Notice how being in the spotlight is an important aspect of all the professions you’ve listed. That naturally selects for people who are comfortable with or enjoy being on camera and are good at that kind of live performance. Similarly, science selects for people who are good at doing science. Sometimes, there’s an overlap, but it’s not that common.

        If you’re interested in interviews with prominent scientists, Lex Fridman does quite a few of those. But if you want more people to do this, you’ll have to contend with the fact that most scientists simply have no interest in being on camera and probably never developed the skills needed for it.

        • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          It’s much more so the work you do that’s important, not the idea itself.

          Yes and no, i’m not talking about technicians(, even though in a team of technicians there’s still some persons better than the average), but about scientists emiting theories, there’s a reason why theorems or units of measures have the name of a person, and the book cited in the selftext is another justification : some scientists are known in their field for being important(, some are important/known mostly because of their positions, but others because of their groundbreaking ideas/discoveries).
          But sure, it’s a teamwork, only in a few fields such as mathematics can you find a lone person who can attribute h.er.im.self all the merit. If that’s your point then it’s compatible with mine, and i’ll agree that a team in which one believes to be superior to the others makes a poor team.

          As for the other argument, i don’t want to have someone good at that kind of performance, i’m not talking about entertainment but about someone passionate about h.er.is field of study, who cares if s.he is in front lf the camera for the first&last time of h.er.is life, it could eventually be prepared beforehand, but i’m not talking about the guests invited by Lex Friedman, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson or other popularizer/showmen, they may be scientists as well but i wasn’t talking about them.

  • Apytele@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I like that you mentioned we pick and choose who we remember and for what. Do you know why we don’t read in elementary school about the person who discovered that the universe was mostly made of hydrogen? Her name was Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin if you’d like to look her up and come up with any hypotheses as to why.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    My favorite ancient thinker would be Diagoras of Melos. He supposedly threw an idol of Herakles into a fire and said that if he was a god, the idol wouldn’t burn.

    He got chased out of Melos when it burned.

      • Malle_Yeno@pawb.socialEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        What a weird rule, do you know why it exists ?

        Accessibility. A blind person (or someone who just can’t see that well, or who wants to read it at a different font and sizing level) has the opportunity to read this in text form with a screen reader or with adjusted view settings. But those don’t work with images (screen readers may if the image has alt text).

        Ease of search. If someone wanted to find this post down the line, they are not able to search the actual text of the post because it’s an image.

        Quality. In all honesty, what is gained by this post being an image instead of text? What is the visual element adding that couldn’t be accomplished with italics and bolding?

        What should i have done to post this information then ?

        Copy it and treat it as a quote in your written post (same place you put your source). You can add formatting to it if you want to emphasize parts.

        • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          I personally prefer a picture because most softwares for browsing Lemmy require to load the whole post in order to read the selftext, but agree with your arguments/explanations, so if that ever happens again i’ll try not to forget to accompany the picture with a transcript.
          Thank you very much for such an answer/explanation.

      • AnimePhantasm@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Its very unfriendly to screen readers. In a lot of pictures-of-text posts you will see people transcribe the text so that everyone can access the web equally :)

        • soumerd_retardataire@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          1 month ago

          Oh, ok, thanks for the explanation, i hope that their software has an OCR feature since we can easily read this kind of picture nowadays.
          It’d have been easy for me to copy-paste the text in the selftext, i’ll try to remember this if there’s a next time and thus interpret this rule as “no picture unless accompanied with a transcript”, unless i’m wrong in this interpretation.
          Thanks again for this information.

          • delirious_owl@discuss.onlineEnglish
            0·
            1 month ago

            Yeah, posting pictures with text next to a transcription is fine.

            Posting pictures without bothering to copy and paste the text for blind folks is not ok

  • NIB@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato

    There was an Euclid that was a pupil of Socrates. He was a friend(and classmate i guess) of Plato.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_of_Megara

    And dont worry, it wasnt just you who was confused

    "Editors and translators in the Middle Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when discussing the latter’s Elements. "