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Thomas comments on Rationality Quotes March 2012 - Less Wrong
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Thomas Henry Huxley - about Darwin's theory of evolution
Meh. That's just hindsight bias.
Galileo Galilei (translated by me)
With the great historical exception of quantum mechanics.
I suspect this is because we're still missing major parts of quantum mechanics.
Richard Feynman's famous quote is accurate. Before I studied physics in college I was pretty sure that I still had a lot to learn about quantum mechanics. After studying it for several years, I now have a high level of confidence that I know almost nothing about quantum mechanics.
Try reading this.
In fact, most people don't understand the Relativity. Most still rejects Evolution. It wasn't easy to understand the Copernican system in the Galileo's time.
It is easy to understand for a handful, and it seems obvious only to a few, when a new major breakthrough is made. Galileo was wrong. It may be easier, but not "easy to understand once a truth is revealed".
I suppose people didn't understand it because they didn't want to, not because they couldn't manage to. (Same with evolution -- what the OP was about. I might agree about relativity, though I guess for some people at least the absolute denial macro does play some part.)
More like stuff that was true back them is no longer true now.
I suppose not. Why? People either have an inborn concept of the absolute up-down direction, either they develop it early in life. Updating to the round (let alone moving and rotating Earth) is not that easy and trivial for a naive mind of a child or for a Medieval man.
A new truth is usually heavy to understand for everybody. Had not been so, the science would progress faster.
I don't see how that contradicts my claim that it's not that people couldn't understand the meaning of the statement “the Earth revolves around the Sun”, but rather they disagreed with it because it was at odds with what they thought of the world. iħ∂|Ψ⟩/∂t = Ĥ|Ψ⟩, now that's a statement most people won't even understand enough to tell whether they think it's true or false.
Historical? I know you count many worlds as “understanding”, but I wouldn't until this puzzle is figured out. (Or maybe it's that I like Feynman's (in)famous quote so much I want to keep on using it, even if this means using a narrower meaning for understand.)
I certainly hope that EY means that the problem of the origins of the Born rule is still open, not that the MWI has somehow solved it.
IIRC he said something to the effect that it is no longer true that nobody understands QM since we have the MWI; my point is that I wouldn't count MWI as ‘understanding’ if the very rule connecting it to (probabilities of) experimental results is still not understood.
I would say instead that many truths are easy to understand once you understand them. But still hard to explain to other people.
Generally, yes. But in this particular casa we can trust, that the later Darwin's bulldog really felt that way and that this was a justified statement. He obviously understood the matter well.
All those English animal breeders had a good insight. It was more or less a wild generalization for them. Non so wild for Huxley.
So that I can google for it - what's the original text? Thanks!
The version I've read is "Tutte le verità sono facili da capire quando sono rivelate, il difficile è scoprirle!" But that sounds like suspiciously modern Italian to me, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it's itself a paraphrase.
ETA: Apparently it was quoted in Criminal Minds, season 6, episode 11, and I suspect the Italian dubbing backtranslated the English version of the show rather than looking for the original wording by Galileo. (Which would make my version above a third-level translation.)
ETA2: In the original version of Criminal Minds, it's "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them" according to Wikiquote. (How the hell did point become difficile? And why the two instances of discover were translated with different verbs? That's why I always watch shows and films in the original language!)
ETA3: And Wikiquote attributes that as “As quoted in Angels in the workplace : stories and inspirations for creating a new world of work (1999) by Melissa Giovagnoli”.
Edited Wikiquote - thanks!