Re: [FRIAM] Classification of ABM's

[Steve Smith]

Phil Henshaw wrote: Owen, You say: Clip... I'm sure you don't mean to put yourself in the same class as Emmy Noether, right? She's of the same historic stature as most of the early 1900's best scientists, and her symmetry discoveries surely should have won her a Nobel. [ph] Well, equally, I'm sure you don't mean that pretense is important in scientific questions either, right? I had not known of Noether's theorem before Saul mentioned the similarity between my prior comment to Steve and her extension of the conservation laws. It does seem similar to the one I did that I was referring to, and my general theorem would seem, initially, to have Noether's theorem as a limited case. This reminds me of the difference in idiom between the person who says "Did you notice that I look a lot like Russel Crowe?" and the one who says "Did you notice that Russel Crowe looks a lot like me?"   It is (more) conventional to compare ourselves to those (through popularity or recognized work) rather than them to us.   I believe that both are  correct and  somewhat factually symmetric, but illuminate a critical difference in perspective. I admit that when I discover that something I'm working on has been well covered by someone previous to me, that I have a mix of satisfaction (I *knew* I was on the right path), of jealousy (it's not *fair* that someone already took credit for this discovery), and hope (maybe my approach, unsullied by the "conventional" has something new to offer that was missed the first time). I sense that those of us (active?) on this list range across the spectrum from folks who thoroughly study "previous work" as we proceed, and those who proceed without necessarily being so thorough.  Sometimes it is the ignorance of previous work that allows us to find something new, rather than being limited by what might have been minor mistakes or lack of perspective in previous work.  On the other hand, we can spend our entire lives simply re-inventing (discovering) things that were long-since well understood. One of my areas of interest is in the emergence of new concepts in Science as well as the convergence of Scientific Disciplines.   It is common for researchers in one field to not be aware of previous work in another and to reproduce it under slightly differing contexts, terminology and assumptions.   Ultimately someone in one field or the other (or in a unifying or spanning field like nonlinear systems, operations research, modeling and simulation, etc.) to recognize the overlap of work and do the (then) hard work of resolving one against the other.   This is why being a research librarian or working in a patent office might be a great way to become a great inventor/discoverer. Our recent discussions about Cladistics are apropos of this topic.   In the process of classifying sets of systems or artifacts, one often discovers interesting overlaps and redundancies. - Steve

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