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Old 12-10-2013, 03:37 PM   #27
Polydamas
 
Join Date: Jan 2006
Location: Central Europe
Default Re: Tech Level appropriate skills

Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
"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
Similarly, being in a culture with the Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis amongst its heritage makes some things possible which are otherwise impossible, and others easy which are very difficult without those ideas and techniques. And brilliant speaker or writer who has never encountered systematic grammar and a theory of rhetoric will also have limits.

The TL system is a crude model, but what skills and ideas one has to work with are important. Perhaps Peter could think of Newton as having used his high skills to make an Invention which is represented as a perk?
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Last edited by Polydamas; 12-10-2013 at 03:42 PM.
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