Rapid Growth of Physics

As a result of the phenomenally rapid change and growth of physics, the men and women who did their great work one or two generations ago may be our distant predecessors in terms of the state of the field, but they are our close neighbors in terms of time and tastes. This may be an unprecedented state of affairs among professionals; one can perhaps be forgiven if one characterizes it epigrammatically with a disastrously mixed metaphor; in the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side-by-side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.

Notes:

Reminds me of the rapid growth of IT, where working with people just 10 years older marks a phenomenal difference in technological understanding.

Folksonomies: physics information science culture change generations

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Keywords:
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Entities:
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On the Recent Past of Physics

Periodicals>Journal Article: Holton, Gerald (1961), On the Recent Past of Physics, American Journal of Physics, (1961), 29, 807., Retrieved on 2012-06-05