(October 23, 2021 at 12:34 pm)Rahn127 Wrote: The physics classes I had in the early 90's spent a little time on the history. Tycho Brahe stands out in my memory.
He has been described as "the first competent mind in modern astronomy to feel ardently the passion for exact empirical facts". Most of his observations were more accurate than the best available observations at the time.
We all stand on the shoulders of giants. The availability of books and then computers and now the internet has made learning nearly any subject possible by anyone around the world. And this information is difficult if not impossible to remove.
In the past, a rare book could be destroyed and all that it contained, lost for all time. But now in this digital age, it would nearly be impossible to destroy modern books in physics, math, astronomy.
This is also a double edge sword. We gain all of the good ideas but we are also stuck with religious texts as well that often impede educational progress.
I disagree here. paper books last for thousands of years in many cases. How long do you think a hard drive or flash drive will last? How many of our books will go away if there is ever a serious and fairly permanent power outage?
And this is not to mention that our encoding techniques change fairly quickly. The machines to read data from the Apollo missions are already rare to non-existent. Even being able to *read the tapes* isn't a given without some serious effort. How many different USB standards have we had? Have you tried to read something on a floppy drive in the last few years?
I am a LOT less assured that the information we have cannot be removed. if anything, I feel like we are cutting very close to the edge of losing a LOT of information simply because nobody has updated it.