nostr:npub1u5tpktgc8gv8jw22cyjyh5gy5nr07v88hmrvtut7zkr06q0py6fs30xmf3 nostr:npub1g0uss0sjsgxwmhqxgnvlj0zv9ru89xwfyktkcjc0kgy8syxj79ss383vfw You know, I actually agree with this, in a way. It’s what I find so tragic about science. These “greats” were romanticized but the discoveries would have happened without them, give or take a few years. Ideas seem to arise from their own mechanics and then animate the people who later claim credit for them. I think Hegel’s dialectic is meant to be a theory of how humans are just the avatar of ideas working themselves out, but I can’t speak to that. In the movie (as in real life) the Germans *are* ahead at first, and that is *why* America must try hard tk build the bomb. This is the flip side of Mutually Assured Destruction which often goes unappreciated.

This lack of agency is something I deeply identify with. Kill Oppenheimer, kill Einstein, hell, kill all the proponents of Judenphysik, kill the Nazi geniuses, kill the Soviet megaminds, kill all of them - you cannot stop the “next big thing”, the new “one weird trick”. Someone will do it because the field is ripe and the market is efficient. Einstein tried to stop quantum mechanics but it was already “in the air.”

It’s also why I find beauty in things like Kekule’s story. Benzene is canonical, it follows from the laws of our universe, it came before humans and it will exist long after. But it is because Kekule thought of it first that we associate it with the ouroboros.