The Map of Critical Thinking and Modern Science

Jamie noticed an interesting map of critical thinking and science done in a sort of subway style. You can track Newton and Einstein and Tesla and so on. It's actually pretty interesting to navigate.

Only One Half of the World Covered in This Map

[eldavojohn]

This map at first glance appears to be decidedly western individuals only.

Re:Where are the women?

[theghost]

There's still a lot of cultural pressure telling women (everyone really) that the important things in life are popularity, beauty, love, and child-rearing.

It's kind of a wonder that anyone at all goes into science these days. Maybe they should make a "Real Physicists of MIT" show.

Re:Where are the women?

[_gladius_]

There's still a lot of cultural pressure telling women (everyone really) that the important things in life are popularity, beauty, love, and child-rearing

Their culture isn't telling them that--it's their genes.

Of course women can do well in science, it's just that most women are not interested in a scientific career, regardless of culture.

Re:Where are the women?

[radtea]

none of that intellectual potential goes into moving the frontiers of the hard sciences

Science and engineering are both pretty sucky careers, and like men have been brought up in an environment where male self-sacrifice is held up as an ideal and "Men Last!" is a highly admired sentiment. So it only makes sense that they would be dominated by men, in the same way that jobs that kill people are dominated by men.

Women are more than capable of doing these things, they just haven't been indoctrinated with the irrational willingness to sacrifice themselves that men have.

Re:Only One Half of the World Covered in This Map

[Haxamanish]

Arab and Persian scientists had the habit of citing their sources in the Middle Ages, Westerners did not do that yet. So, a lot is lost due to our (=Western) lack of decent citing in those times. For example, we say it is 100 degrees Celcius or Farenheit, but we do not say it is 20hrs 08 minutes and 59 seconds Al-Nasawi.

Re:Where In The World

[mspohr]

But what issues of actual substance has Glen Beck ever raised?

Those that you mention are just the radical conservative ideology rants... nothing of actual substance there.

Some of the overlap is interesting.

[JoshuaZ]

Some people are listed on multiple tracks. So for example Emmy Noether is listed for both math and physics. But other decisions seem questionable. For example, I'm not at all convinced that Einstein should be listed for both math and physics rather than just physics. Similarly Sheldon Glashow is listed as both math and physics whereas I'd put him down almost completely as physics. But Riemann only gets math and no physics? What's up with that? And there are also some odd choices to leave out. For example, G.H. Hardy is not included at all (presumably would go in both the math and natural history lines). There are also a lot of gaps in the math line in the last few years. The different lines seem to also end in slightly different times. The physics end has a fair number of fairly young physicists but the math end lacks Terry Tao for example (in fact the math line seems to be very sparse over the last few years). I'd be very curious as to how they made their various decisions for whom to include or not.