Or not as good a scientist as he could be otherwise. At least, that's what I think Argos was saying (at least initially).

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I don’t think it is up to Argos to define who is or isn’t a “scientist”. I recall seeing some old newsreels of Edison in the 1930s and he was huffy, rude, arrogant, secretive, and he tended to steal ideas from other scientists. We could call him an “inventor” and not a “scientist”, but I think of him as a scientist who was an inventor. When I turn on my light bulbs and phonographs (CDs now), I don’t care if he was “huffy”, insulting, secretive, or a believer or non-believer. None of those things have anything to do with his scientific discoveries and inventions.

If I remember correctly, Edison opted for direct current.
What we use today is alternate current (proposed by Tesla?).

(Well, most appliances transform the a.c. from the mian into d.c..)

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

I know I´m bad at english, but I´m focusing, as I tried to say earlier, in the historiographic (is there such word in English?) aspects. I trying to deconstruct (fancy word) his romantic aura of a typical scientist. I´m discussing the conveniency (or lack of) of classifying (I´m a classification maniac) him as a scientist. Just a chit-chat. An exercize. Nothing important.

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"As truth is gathered, I rearrange,
Inside out, outside in - Perpetual change." - A British rock band

I think you are right. I think there is something about AC that allows it to be transmitted further without loss of energy/power in the electric power lines (but I’m not exactly sure why AC turned out to be better).

By the way, I was taught as a school kid in the 1950s that Edison invented sound recording. But years later I read a late-19th Century book by Tendall and he said that brief sound recordings were made as early as the 1850s and ‘60s. They were basically sine waves etched on smoked glass. What Edison actually invented was a more permanent and less delicate way to record the sound and a way to play it back.

That's relatively easy to understand.
The issue is power loss over long distances.
High-voltage, low-current lines have lower losses than low-voltage, high-current lines (for the same amount of power).
AC allows going from low-voltage to high-voltage and viceversa.
So, the power station can produce low-voltage and transform it into high-voltage. This goes along the line and is transformed back into low-voltage (which is safer) at a local station and then distributed.
This is not possible with DC.

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

Well, as long as it’s not important, then I guess we can all relax. It’s not like this is a “test question” on a university exam, so we don’t have to get all frustrated over it.

I think we can classify different “kinds” of “scientists”. Like Edison and the Wright Brothers were “inventors”. So were they also “scientists”? I would say “yes”, they were “inventor-scientists”, but others might disagree.

I’ve been studying Doppler lately. He was basically a high school teacher, who worked on an “idea”, and then he published his idea a year or so after he became a technical institute professor. So was he a “scientist”? I don’t know. I guess so. I find it interesting that he, above all other “scientists”, has his name mentioned the most by the American media today. More than Newton, Edison, and Einstein. Because today we have “Doppler radar,” and, thus, the American media mentions Doppler’s name several times every day.

Ok, I keep saying that. Can you imagine a scientist so paranoid about his work today? Again, another pillar, if not of the of the modern scientific method, but at least of the scientific ethics, is the principle of publicity: you report your finding as soon as you have one. With the scientific research depending on the money of third parties, as corporate and governmental instances, a scientist can´t get away with the results, or keep them hidden. The lone hermetic scientist is no more.

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"As truth is gathered, I rearrange,
Inside out, outside in - Perpetual change." - A British rock band

I vaguely recall hearing that AC power is also somewhat safer than DC power for biological reasons. That claim was that an alternating current tends to cause muscles to spasm, so if you accidentally connect a high voltage source using yourself as the circuit, you'd often be thrown free quickly, whereas direct current tends to lock one's muscles, so holding you in place and allowing current to continue flowing.

I don't even recall the source and it was a long time ago. Can anyone confirm or deny it?

Are you trying to sabotage "my" thread?

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"As truth is gathered, I rearrange,
Inside out, outside in - Perpetual change." - A British rock band

An individual scientist maynot be able to be so secretive but a lot of research now days is bigbuisness and millions are spent on researching drugs, electronics etc.... and scientists work in teams.

Information may indeed be shared within a team but a lot of money spent on research could go down the plug if information were to be leaked from within that team to the outside world, to a competitor.
Althought there is a scientific comunity this by no means means that all research information is shared, espesialy if that research for the millitary.

I challenge that one. Publication is a principle of science today (in the public sector!), but that was not always so. Remeber the competition between Cardano and Tartaglia.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I'm sure you meant "hijack". :wink:

(I should know this, since I'm a hijacking champion myself. )

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Oops, sorry! Okay, I'll try to add something useful. I'd agree that inventors like Edison or the Wrights are a borderline case. Unlike Sam5, I'd tend to not consider them scientists, but, like Sam5, I wouldn't quibble too much with those who would disagree with that.

As for Newton, I think he probably qualifies. At the time he lived, science was still just becoming distinct from philosophy in general. But at least a good portion of his work was done using a model of experiment, drawing generalizations from the results, experimenting further to test those hypotheses, and eventually forming a consistent theory of some phenomenon. That certainly sounds like science to me.

No, in fact I hadn´t realized that he was responding to a previous post about Edison. I thought that Grey was really trying to throw shoes at the gear.

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"As truth is gathered, I rearrange,
Inside out, outside in - Perpetual change." - A British rock band

Ok. It´s interesting how all this tradition of secrecy taps directly into the hermetism of the alchemists. In modern times secrecy, in the public´s mind, relates to the image of the "mad scientist".

__________________
"As truth is gathered, I rearrange,
Inside out, outside in - Perpetual change." - A British rock band

But that's unrealistic. A lot of military and private research is still kept secret today, at least for a while.

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire