发现的风险
发现的风险
2017年1月
因为著名科学家的传记往往删去他们的错误，我们低估了他们愿意承担的风险程度。而且因为著名科学家所做的任何不是错误的事情现在可能已经成为传统智慧，这些选择似乎也不具风险。
例如，牛顿的传记 understandably 更关注物理学而不是炼金术或神学。我们得到的印象是他无误的判断力直接引导他走向了别人没有注意到的真理。如何解释他在炼金术和神学上花费的所有时间？嗯，聪明人往往有点疯狂。
但也许有一个更简单的解释。也许聪明和疯狂并不像我们想象的那么分离。物理学对我们来说似乎是一个有前途的工作领域，而炼金术和神学明显是浪费时间。但那是因为我们知道事情的结果。在牛顿的时代，这三个问题似乎大致同样有前途。还没有人知道发明我们现在称之为物理学的东西会有什么回报；如果他们知道，就会有更多的人在做它。而炼金术和神学在当时仍然属于Marc Andreessen所描述的”巨大，如果为真”的范畴。
牛顿下了三个赌注。其中一个成功了。但它们都是有风险的。
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The Risk of Discovery
January 2017
Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because anything a famous scientist did that wasn’t a mistake has probably now become the conventional wisdom, those choices don’t seem risky either.
Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had noticed. How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology? Well, smart people are often kind of crazy.
But maybe there is a simpler explanation. Maybe the smartness and the craziness were not as separate as we think. Physics seems to us a promising thing to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes of time. But that’s because we know how things turned out. In Newton’s day the three problems seemed roughly equally promising. No one knew yet what the payoff would be for inventing what we now call physics; if they had, more people would have been working on it. And alchemy and theology were still then in the category Marc Andreessen would describe as “huge, if true.”
Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky.
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