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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The 75th World Science Fiction Convention (commonly known as WorldCon) is being held this weekend in Helsinki, Finland. The convention is where the annual Hugo Awards are presented, and today, the convention announced the latest recipients.
This year, women almost completely swept the Hugo Awards, taking home the top prizes for literature in the science fiction community. That's particularly notable, given how the awards have been increasingly recognizing works from female and minority creators. The trend prompted a counter-movement from two group of fans, the self-described "Sad Puppies," and their alt-right equivalents, the "Rabid Puppies." These groups gamed the awards and forced a slate of nominees onto the Hugo ballot in 2015, prompting widespread backlash within the wider genre community. Another award, the Dragon, faced similar issues earlier this week when several authors asked to pull their nominations over concerns about Puppy interference and the award's integrity.
This year's sweep by female creators seems to be a strong repudiation of anti-diversity groups. 2017 also marked the year the ceremony earned its own award: a representative from the Guinness Book of World Records certified that the Hugos are the longest-running science fiction awards ever.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 17 2017, @01:51PM (1 child)
I think this is going to come down to an argument over who's a "plodder" and who's "brilliant". You mention that several other prominent people were close to discovering what Einstein did; but weren't those people also possibly part of the "brilliant" group? I misworded what I said before with "I seriously doubt it"; what I really meant to dispute is the idea that physics would have developed Einstein's theories without someone as brilliant as Einstein, not Einstein himself. Sure, without him, some other brilliant person could have come up with it before long. But without any brilliant people, I'm not so sure. My claim is that the brilliant ones are necessary to make these big advances.
As for Heaviside, that makes a good case for my prior assertion that both types of people are necessary (if we assume that Heaviside really was a "plodder" and not at all "brilliant").
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Thursday August 17 2017, @02:12PM
Ah, I believe we are actually agreeing :)
I guess I was putting the barrier for "brilliant" a bit high - but if this category encompasses the likes of Pauli, de Broglie, Lorentz, Born, Heisenberg, Bohr, Rutherford, etc, (all of whom were quite impressive) then yes, absolutely, without such folks, scientific progress would grind to a halt.
Just to be clear: I would not want to label Heaviside a plodder in general. His work in cleaning up the Maxwell equations can be considered "plodding" though (as I understand things).