

The Difference Between An Amateur, A Scientist, And A Genius - aheilbut
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/05/the_difference_between_an_amat.html

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jpwagner
This article is poorly articulated (consider the definitions/categorizations
for amateur, professional, scientist, genius, and pre-med.) Even the example
does not clearly show his point. Is it "genius" to consider that spectral
intensity changes gradually rather than suddenly?

Anyway, I get the point because it's mundane and everyone's thought about it
before.

~~~
zzkt
The genius was in measuring the temperature outside the visible spectrum, and
proposing a theory for it.

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bayareaguy
I'm not sure I agree with this catagorization but the article does make me
interested in learning more about Herschel.

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RiderOfGiraffes
<http://xkcd.com/242/>

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messel
that made my day, thanks RiderOfGiraffes

~~~
wallflower
<http://xkcd.com/585>

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william-newman
I don't think amateur-vs.-scientist-vs.-genius is a very good set of names for
the distinctions he is trying to make, especially if you're going to reach
back to Herschel's time. To pick some influential folk who fit into that
period, consider Babbage, Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur, Boltzmann, Cantor,
Semmelweis, the Wright Brothers, and Wegener. Consider also their rivals and
critics. (Since I included a number of controversial folk, various of their
rivals and critics are still remembered.) We can come up with generalizations
about what the influential folk did right, but I don't think it works to say
that, e.g., they were scientists while their critics and rivals were amateurs.

Or consider all the advice in an essay at the level of Hamming's "You and your
research." It doesn't seem to me to be useful to try to boil down the multiple
properties discussed there into boolean predicates "is this person a
scientist" or "is this person an amateur," or even to try to choose particular
points in those multidimensional property spaces as typifying "scientist" or
"amateur" or "genius."

I wholeheartedly approve of people writing about some of the principles in
this essay, notable the ones often summarized as "genius is 99% perspiration"
and "a month in the lab can often save a day in the library." Those are very
important principles, and very often people don't appreciate them enough. But
trying to define the amateur/scientist/genius terminology on top of those
principles doesn't seem very sensible.

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Eliezer
Very little of what is said about genius is anything like correct. This
article is an exception.

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edw519
loop until done

For a genius, done = "aha!"

For a scientist, done = "hypothesis == true" or "hypothesis == false"

For an amateur, done = lunch time

~~~
jodrellblank
"In the 4th century BC, Aristotle asked why the heat of the sun prompts us to
sneeze, whereas the heat of the fire does not. A partial answer came two
millennia later, when the English natural philosopher Francis Bacon showed
that his photic sneeze had nothing to do with heat at all: if he closed his
eyes when going into the sun, he didn't sneeze even though the heat was still
there. While Bacon's application of the scientific method was beyond reproach,
his conclusions are distinctly iffy to a modern nose. "The cause is not the
heating of the nostrils," he asserted, "but the drawing down of the moisture
of the brain."

\- [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227041.400-why-
some-...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227041.400-why-some-people-
sneeze-when-the-sun-comes-out.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=brain)

