Do you guys think it's possible to publish something that's as groundbreaking and as influential as works like Newton's Principia, Smith's Wealth of Nations, Marx' Das Kapital, Darwin's The Origin of Species and so on?
Academic books/papers that reshaped not only their respective academic fields but also society.
Or has everything become so advanced and specialized that making a huge dent like past academic giants is near impossible? Is there too much noise? Too many publications of absolutely useless shit in which bigger nuggets of wisdom just go under?
For the longest of times I have had a very idealistic view of academia, then I became part of that whole world and feel like we've become absolutely stagnant in advancing human civilization. Fucking bloggers make more of an impact than scientists do....
off-topic: absolutely loving old books
>>7913924
>groundbreaking and as influential
>Newton's Principia
... perhaps over-estimating the impact of Principia?
Don't forget The Art of War
>>7913924
>Darwin's The Origin of Species
>groundbreaking and influential
HAHAHAHAHAHA, children.
>>7913941
>influential
>The Art of War
It's fucking shite and the only reason people care about it's from the Far East. Academic hipsterism. Even the Bhagavad Gita shits all over the Art of War.
>stagnant in advancing human civilization
Yes. modern academic research is a guild system, where randomly selected members of the guild have the right to veto publication of anything that could upset their feels / position.
>>7913946
This lol. Evolution isn't real it's just a theory.
Pic related: Believes in evolution.
>>7914240
>/sci/ science and mathematics
>>7914251
>/sci/ - Evil00sjun and Kwantom Mekonics
>>7913958
>required reading in like every military school
>just about every famous general in the past century has read it
>not influential
Yes.
Someone please give Sociology some more structure. Right now it's just a breeding ground for cultural Marxists and third wave feminism.
I think there is a large body of work to be done in that field
>>7913924
Do you know over how much time the works you mention were written? Do you know how long it's been since the last one was written? Academia isn't stagnating. You shouldn't expect paradigm-shifting discoveries every couple years.
>>7914274
Sociology isn't going to become more empirical by appealing to your biases.
>>7913946
Shit bait
>>7914381
>/sci/ - Gorillas & Homework
>>7914422
>Gorillas
You're thinking of /k/
>>7913924
CRISPR-Cas9
It's literally a toolbox to edit every single parts of a genotype.
The problem is that the inventors are 2 females and /sci/ is patriarcal.
They could Nobelized there husbands btw.
The Iliad is pretty important but no one gives a fuck about the message it gives.
>>7913924
"A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems"
No secured e-transactions without this paper.
That means that the e-world that we know now would've been totally different.
>>7914195
>randomly selected members of the guild have the right to veto publication of anything that could upset their feels / position
Sad but true
>>7913924
You still see references to SGA and FGA all the time, and for a lot of things in them there are no better references.
I'd say they were pretty influential within the field.
>>7913924
A lot of people also point to Chomsky's syntactic structures for jump starting cognitive science and looking beyond naive behaviorism.
Also, the mathematical theory of information hypothesized most modern theories of abstract circuitry, bandwidth, digital noise, etc.
Turing's "on computable numbers" pretty much started the modern form of CS.
These are within the last 70 years, and I bet there are a lot that are more recent that just haven't made as much of a public impact yet.
>>7914422
>Gorillas
kek
>>7913924
There are two problems with trying to do that in 2016; lack of foundational fields to work in (like Newton or Gauss dealt with) and many more colleagues.
In the 1600s there weren't very many physicists and communications/publications were shit; you largely worked on your own for a long time, maybe wrote a few letters, until you had something complete.
It's not like that nowadays; you have at least dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of people working on what you are, they're all publishing little incremental papers slowly pushing the subject forward, and you can communicate with all of them instantly.
The culture lends itself more to gradual development than everything being compiled by one guy into one book.
>>7914499
Grothendieck's work half counts, in my opinion. It certainly passes for revolutionary effect and originality but it's just so sophisticated that outside of algebraic geometry (which even some math undergrads may never have seen) it's effect is virtually nil.
>>7914378
Given the fact that academia is bigger than ever before, employs unseen amounts of collaboration, technology, and resources, it's not like he'd be expecting too much by wanting paradigm shifting discoveries every decade or so.
>>7914539
Right but I don't agree with the lack of foundational fields. Those great scientists, philosophers,mathematicians, dialectics, etc. already gave use the foundational fields to work. The problem is that the tip of the iceberg has been found but the underlying science cannot be solved by human mind alone. It can be solved by a Quantum Computer or some sort. Just like the P = NP problem. You just can't know or check something that you already don't know yet.
