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Old 23-June-2009, 02:20 AM
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cfgauss cfgauss is offline
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Location: University of Washington, Seattle
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I think most of the founders / big names of quantum mechanics and field theory, GR, string theory, solid state physics, and a number of other areas qualify pretty easily. As well as many many mathematicians.

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Originally Posted by Delvo View Post
Just knowing a bunch of stuff doesn't seem to fit the meaning of the phrase to me. To qualify as I see it, one would need to not just be familiar with various sciences, but also make real contributions to more than one relatively unrelated field (or have real success as measured in some other way for non-scientific fields, such as Leonardo's paintings).
What? Tons of scientists do things in multiple fields. Particularly physicists. Lots of physicists make significant contributions to math, biology, chemistry, economics, and pretty much every other field. Even the guys who write for Futurama have advanced degrees! (masters and phds in CS, math, physics, IIRC). And there're a few actors/supermodels out there who've published scientific papers.

It is more difficult, in some ways, to do the variety of things that you could a few hundred years ago, but that's because we know more! Every good science student has had "obvious" ideas while thinking about something that turn out to be well-known. But there are still plenty of scientists who are still able to do this.
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