Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen
That'd certainly be an attempt at being simulative: Newton didn't kick the vast amount of scientific butt that he kicked because he had something called "a Perk". He did it because he was "very skilled" (and one layer deeper: and he was skilled because he had great potential, that he then got the opportunity to develop on).
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"Very skilled" does not account for it. Tycho Brahe was incredibly skilled at Astronomy; his naked eye observations had ten times the precision of any previous astronomer's. But he didn't come up with heliocentric astronomy, or even believe Copernicus's version of it. On the other hand, Kepler was able to figure out, through years of painful struggle, that Mars's orbit was an ellipse with the sun at one focus,
using Tycho's observational data. Kepler had figured out a different way of looking at the problem, such that his struggles with the data led him to the right result, despite the mystical rubbish he believed in and his own tendency to jump onto sidetracks.
Bill Stoddard