Quote: “Hutton was by all accounts a man of the keenest
insights and liveliest conversation, a delight in company, and without rival
when it came to understanding the mysterious slow processes that shaped the
Earth. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his notions in a form that
anyone could begin to understand.”
Comment: This excerpt from the book denotes the importance
of clarity and communication. Despite his brilliant contribution to the study
of geology, James Hutton could not articulate his ideas clearly in his numerous
books. Due to his lacking articulation abilities, geology’s popularity did not
increase until his friend, John Playfair, explained Hutton’s ideas in clear
detail. Though his brilliance was clear to those who knew him, his written
communication abilities were so bad that they caused the growth of the geology
to be delayed.
Hutton’s experience enlightened me with the following:
discoveries are open source and should always be presented in an articulate
fashion. The reason being that science is a universally grown by every culture,
and if nobody can understand the idea that is being attempted to portray,
nobody will ever be able to build upon said idea.
Comment2: It was interesting to me how the close speculation
of a farm gave Hutton a clue as to the erosion of earth. His method of
discovery reminds me of scaled experiments, and how one could find the outcome
of a very largely scaled project, by testing it in a smaller scale. It is amazing to me how this method of science
was cognitively being used that long ago.
Question: Why didn’t Playfair help him write from the beginning?
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