Warning! Do not read this! Press the "back" button, or shut off your computer. This article is so boring it may cause death.
first, read these examples, and see if you can find the pattern that i want to discuss:
A.
RSA is an algorithm for public-key cryptography that is based on the presumed difficulty of factoring large integers, the factoring problem. RSA stands for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who first publicly described the algorithm in 1977. Clifford Cocks, an English mathematician, had developed an equivalent system in 1973, but it wasn't declassified until 1997.[citation needed] (quoted from wikipedia)
B.
Thomas "Tommy" Harold Flowers, MBE (22 December 1905 – 28 October 1998) was a British engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages. (quoted from wikipedia)
The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician Charles Babbage.[2]
It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's Difference engine, a design for a mechanical computer. The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete.[3][4]
Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding.[5][6] It was not until the 1940s that the first general-purpose computers were actually built. (quoted from wikipedia)
ENIAC (/ˈini.æk/ or /ˈɛni.æk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)[1][2] was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems.[3]
C.
Is the universe expanding? einstein denied it, and introduced a special constant into his relativity equations to stop the universe expanding (mathematically.) the first cosmology that the universe is expanding came in 1922 from alexander friedmann, who found an algebraic error in einstein's relativity. he corrected the error and found that mathematically the universe can expand, contract or oscillate. an astronomer named slipher had in the same year collected a list of 40 galaxies of which 36 displayed red shifts, evidence that the universe is expanding. einstein acknowledged friedmann's work in a letter, but friedmann died of pneumonia unaware of the importance of his achievement. five years later Lemaître unwittingly repeated friedmann's calculations arriving at the same result. but like friedmann his work descended into obscurity (from "the red limit" by t. ferris) hubble, who is credited with the discovery that the universe is expanding, never acknowledged it himself with confidence, and it appears that he may not have believed it. (this paragraph is paraphrased from the "red limit" by timothy ferris.
now all this is referred to generically and without drama as....(in the order of the people who developed it)
The Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker (FLRW) metric is an exact solution of Einstein's field equations of general relativity; it describes a homogeneous, isotropic expanding or contracting universe that may be simply connected or multiply connected.[1][2][3] (If multiply connected, then each event in spacetime will be represented by more than one tuple of coordinates.) The general form of the metric follows from the geometric properties of homogeneity and isotropy; Einstein's field equations are only needed to derive the scale factor of the universe as a function of time. Depending on geographical or historical preferences, a subset of the four scientists — Alexander Friedmann, Georges Lemaître, Howard Percy Robertson and Arthur Geoffrey Walker — may be named (e.g., Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) or Robertson–Walker (RW) or Friedmann–Lemaître (FL)). This model is sometimes called the Standard Model of modern cosmology.[4] It was developed independently by the named authors in the 1920s and 1930s. (quoted from wikipedia)
but there was drama. imagine friedmann doing examples of einstein's relativity math (which einstein himself did not understand because he had to be tutored in tensors, that's right - tutored in tensors, by a man named "grossman.") and friedmann, whom you have never heard of, i feel very confident, did not have a computer! he did it all with a pencil or a piece of chalk. then, people did not acknowledge his work because no one believed that the universe was expanding. there probably were not 20 people on earth who could even understand the difference between his math and einstein's but you can bet most people believed einstein and not friedmann. then, friedmann went up an a meteorology balloon and supposedly contracted pneumonia (which is absurd, but so the story is told.) he died, and five years later the guy in quebec, deprived of google and unable to google previous research literature on einstein's errors, repeated the work. then, more guys repeated the work, and then the theory had 4 names attached to it, and apparently the limit to the number of names of independent discoverers of something is equal to four. but you can bet a lot of people have done it again. do you believe it's true? a lot of people still believe that the universe is not expanding.
my conclusion:
the pattern i have noticed throughout my reading is that people repeat each others' work without recognizing it. people are credited with theories which are later discredited by new information. meanwhile, the subject of all these theories itself continues to change, which in simple terms puts the idea of knowledge in jeopardy. i was never more conscious of this than while living in cambodia. i have met hundreds of people in cambodia. not one person here is familiar with any of the ideas presented above. and i feel like i have a glimpse here of what life was like before science. cambodian people have computers but just use them for facebook, email, and occasionally excel. it might as well be fire. i mean, no one understand how the computer works here. few people on earth for that matter understand why quantum mechanics makes a laser possible and that everything "civilized" people do is dependent upon the laser. so we might as well be cavemen playing with fire for all we really know. but people continue to be self-impressed for their achievements. they tend to forget that every achievement in science is abused by industry, which is hungry for new technology to sell. i feel like heisenberg. he must have felt lonely. knowing that you can't really know.