Very true. People have been talking about moving conferences to the web for at least 15 years, and it has never happened. Webinars are one or a few people talking to the audience, a very different thing.
This is also why technology centers, like Silicon Valley, are so hard to dislodge. People talk to each other, and shift jobs with very little disruption.
To me a more interesting observation is how simultaneous discoveries are sometimes made with absolutely no connection, and by people significantly separated by distance, culture, and language. I guess coincidence can explain it – I got nothing better
1.) Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (1236—1311) and his student Kamāl al-Dīn al-Fārisī (1267– 1319) published an account of the formation of the rainbow by refraction and reflection within spherical raindrops. They performed experiments with spherical flasks of water to visualize the paths of rays within the raindrop for both primary and secondary rainbows. They also are the first ones to see (in the “laboratory” the tertiary rainbow. at almost the same time, Theodoric of Freibourg (AKA Dietrich, AKA Thierry) (c. 1250 – c. 1310) did the same thing. His extant drawings look as if they could come from a modern optics textbook. Aside from having the sun on a nearby “sky hemisphere”, it’s pretty modern-looking. He correctly shows the light rays in the primary and secondary rainbow, and shows how the paths are slightly different for different colors.
al-Farisi and al-Shirazi worked in Persia, modern-day Iran, while Theodoric was in France – some 2,000 miles apart. There’s been no path of communication traced between them. They both drew on the same reference works, but it’s a huge step from them to both the experimental and theoretical explanation of the rainbow they both came up with. and for hundreds of years afterwards people trying to explain the rainbow appear to have been unaware of their work, and took completely wrong paths. How and why these two groups, separated in space, language, and culture (but not time) explained the rainbow in the same way and using the same experiments is a mystery to me.
2.) The variability of stars and the measurement of the periods of variation was, I have argued, known in the ancient world (and papers over the past two decades show that classical scholars and astro-historians are coming to agree), but the first big burst of measurement, after a few efforts in the 17th and 17th century, really came in the 18th. These people knew of each other, so it’s not surprising that there should be several doing it at the same time. What amazes me is that a deaf British teenager – John Goodricke – and a solitary German amateur – Johan Gerg Palitzsh – both measured the period of variability beta Persei (Algol) and came up with almost precisely the same value at almost precisely the same time. Their results were published as contiguous articles in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1783. It’s not as if this was a suddenly hot topic, or that articles on variable stars were extremely common. The times between publications were generally pretty large. That they should both make the same observation at the same time, with no communication between them or their associates is pretty odd.
Surely, the first great American scientist was Benjamin Franklin? Yes, yes, he’s also famous for a number of other reasons, but his scientific work was not insignificant.
As for conferences, I’ve always found that the most important collaboration occurs not in the laboratory, or the conference room, or through mail or e-mail, but across the lunchroom table. This might be partly because you don’t choose who to eat lunch with based on their specialty, and so you end up getting perspectives you wouldn’t from your direct colleagues.
And, as I read in IEEE Spectrum today, Franklin coined the terms positive and negative for current, and charge and discharge for capacitors.
Another plus is that lunch tables are not selected by seniority. At my very first conference I sat at a table with a guy who wrote the paper that got me into the field.
And lots of collaboration occurs in the hallways outside the meeting rooms too. I was involved with one workshop, founded by a famous Stanford professor, which was sited in an out of the way place (no internet and bad cell service for much of its life) and which had one hour sessions and one hour breaks, which encourage interaction.
He was certainly a man of many accomplishments, but he wasn’t alone. One of his contemporaries was David Rittenhouse, America’s foremost astronomer. He measured the Transit of Venus in 1769, observed Uranus, was a member of the Philosophical Society and a Trustee of the College of Philadelphia, and was Professor of Astronomy there for three years. He constructed the first deliberately made diffraction grating and all but performed the first measurement of the wavelength of light. He did everything but the final calculations, feeling he had done enough to answer the questions raised by fellow Philosophical Society member Francis Hopkinson. You can calculate the values from his measurements. It remained for the British scientist Thomas Young to repeat the measurements and do the needed calculations two decades later.
Hopkinson was on the committee that designed the US Flag (Betsy Ross was not in any way involved), and it has been argued that he suggested putting that canton filled with (at present 50) stars in the upper left as a tribute to astronomer Rittenhouse.
The same thing happened with calculus.
I’m guessing because science and technology are like a pyramid, each layer is built on the previous layer. Perhaps people are just born when what constitutes cutting edge is the same and they discover the same thing.
I don’t doubt that this is true, and the fact that multiple geniuses have access to the same background information means that it’s not all that surprising when more than one of them makes the same discoveries at about the same time.
What makes the case of al Farisi , al Shirazi, and Theodoric different is that the background material was available for hundreds of years (if you regard Alhazen as the needed background. Otherwise it’s arguably a thousand years), yet the discovery of the rainbow light paths was simultaneous (to well within 20 years), then just as rapidly forgotten. That’s not the usual pattern at all.
And of course, the most famous expression of that concept – “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants,” – comes from Isaac Newton, one of the two “inventors” of calculus.
When you consider how rudimentary and embryonic math, science and technology were in the 17th century, that statement just sounds kind of ludicrous today. He really didn’t have shoulders of giants to stand on. Obviously he didn’t invent math and other people contributed both in contemporary and historical times. But the amount of knowledge a person could tap into to create new knowledge was rudimentary back then. But still, without it he couldn’t have invented his theories.
Of course humans in the 24th century will consider our math, science, medicine and technology to be embryonic and rudimentary too. They’ll probably look at our understanding of natural sciences like we are children who are just learning the alphabet.
I like the way Murray Gell-Mann puts it:
“If I have seen further than others, it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs”.
The primary set of shoulders Newton stood on were those of Galileo, plus an assist from Kepler… but that was for his physics work. The only precursors to calculus that I know of came from Archimedes, and that was even more ancient for Newton and Leibnitz.
(Galileo did in fact do some musings on the subject of proto-calculus, but his work was so wrong there that he had his shoulders buried underground)
Joseph-Louis Lagrange, among others, credits Pierre de Fermat rather than either Newton or Leibniz as “inventor of calculus.”
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Science? Yes. Maths and technology, no.
Mathematics already had a pretty rich history by that point. And “technology” is not only iPhones; it’s basically any tool-building, which is a thing humans were doing before they were even humans.
However, point taken: the progress before Newton looks painfully slow compared to what followed. Newton was a pioneer of the scientific method.
We should also grant that Newton’s studies of the occult built on an ancient tradition of mysticism and religiosity and he made…equal progress to anyone else on those topics 
I’m not A mathematician or a physicist, but when I was in college the implication was that credited math courses start with calculus and physics starts with classical mechanics.
Obviously there is math before calculus. Arithmetic, algebra, trig, geometry, etc which predated Newton. But for the purposes of higher education credits, none seem to count until you get to calculus.
So it seems like the most rudimentary tools of modern math and physics started with Newton.
I thought bacon invented the scientific method. Maybe it was more of a transitional process that sped up during the scientific revolution, I don’t know.
I don’t follow your logic.
It’s not that college students don’t need algebra. It’s just assumed they did this already in the preceding 13 years of studying maths.
Besides, what you do before or during college is somewhat flexible; if I study calculus in high school does that mean it’s now not part of modern (true scotsman) math?
Secondly remember the context for this. Even if the teaching of mathematics were to begin with calculus, that does not mean that a statement of “standing on the shoulders of giants” is necessarily wrong. Calculus may have folded in the preceding mathematics in a neat way that we don’t need to teach those topics separately. That’s if it were true that teaching started there.
I said Newton was a pioneer. Not the inventor.
I believe that the earliest known form of it was written by Alhazen. I have argued, previously, that the Renaissance was really a spin-off from the Islamic Golden Age. It kicked off the European search for knowledge, then fizzled. That it isn’t generally taught in school is probably the biggest oversight in Western European history courses.