Plagiarism or the shoulder of giants ?

In science the worst crime you can commit is plagiarism. To steal from another scientist is the ultimate betrayal of the principles of objective philosophy. Finding new knowledge or disproving old knowledge (which is how science often progresses) is on the surface straightforward. The reality is slightly different as I have discovered in my readings over the last few years. I will illustrate my point by using the discoverers of three of the greatest scientific theories. Evolution,?the Laws of Physics and Relativity.

Initially, I thought it was an odd event when I read that Charles Darwin discovered his theory of evolution concurrently with Alfred Russell Wallace. Earlier about 500 years before the common era the Greek thinker Anaximander had first speculated that possibly, human beings had descended from some other type of creature, maybe we should say ascended. He also proposed we then might have come from the sea, and it seems he was correct. I found it intriguing that two people at the same time could have discovered the theory of evolution but only one seems to have received all the praises.?Darwin hurriedly published this theory when he discovered that Russell in 1858, was about to publish his own findings.

Later as I was reading Isaac Newton, I uncovered the same problem. When this the greatest of scientists was proposing his fundamental laws of physics he built them upon a central hinge, the inverse square law. It seems Robert Hooke discovered the inverse square law much earlier in a book called Micrographia (1665), and there was significant controversy at the time, between these two men. Newton was later caught up in another fight with the eminent German scientist Gottfried Leibnitz about the discovery of calculus, both claiming independence, this controversy continued until Leibnitz’s death in 1716.

The third illustration is from Albert Einstein. The theory of relativity is often presented as one man’s heroic description of the space-continuum in a new and elegant theory. However, there is extensive evidence to show the theory was built from some of Newton’s ideas, the mathematics of Hermann Minkowski who taught Einstein mathematics and first described the four-dimensional space model as a key feature of Einstein’s theory. There was David Hilbert, who claimed discovered the field equation that is key to relativity claimed to have sent his discovery five days before Einstein published his work. Many accused Einstein of stealing.

Is it possible our three greatest scientists were plagiarists? It might appear so on the surface. A significant feature from all three stories that I have not revealed is that these men all had regular correspondence with the people they were accused of stealing ideas from and here lies the conundrum. Darwin with Russell. Newton, with Hooke and Leibnitz, and Einstein with Hilbert. This is where the thin line comes in, where do you draw it? What these three giants shared was, that they took these ideas and developed them fully and completely. They labored for very long to tease these greatest of ideas. Darwin for twenty-three years, Newton for twenty years, and it took Einstein for ten years. It took a combined 33 years of backbreaking thinking and postulating. Science advances by accretion, like alluvial soil, through the slow deposits of regular steady thinking, often building off the bits of fragments of the thinking of other great minds. Talking and discussing, in the process ideas become muddled and mixed, even the greatest ones, do not build knowledge out of anything. There is no scientific alchemy. Everyone builds off the ideas of other people. Some just steal the ideas outright without putting in the hard work. The line remains, though, thin, and slippery.