Jag kom att tänka på ödmjukhet som en intellektuell dygd häromdagen, apropå att det är många som ägnar sig åt epistemiska överträdelser i dessa dagar.
Men så kom jag över en artikel av Freeman Dyson om James Clerk Maxwell (PDF; via: Matt Webb), som när han – Maxwell – presenterade sin teori om elektromagnetiska fält i en föreläsning 1830, gjorde det på ett så ödmjukt och försiktigt sätt att ingen i publiken eller i efterhand förstod hur banbrytande teorin var. Dyson skriver:
The moral of this story is that modesty is not always a virtue. Maxwell and Mendel were both excessively modest. Mendel’s modesty setback the progress of biology by fifty years. Maxwell’s modesty setback the progress of physics by twenty years. It is better for the progress of science if people who make great discoveries are not too modest to blow their own trumpets. If Maxwell had had an ego like Galileo or Newton, he would have made sure that his work was not ignored. Maxwell was as great a scientist as Newton and a far more agreeable character. But it was unfortunate that he did not begin the presidential address in Liverpool with words like those that Newton used to introduce the third volume of his Principia Mathematica, “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the frame of the system of the world”. Newton did not refer to his law of universal gravitation as “another theory of gravitation which I prefer”.
Freeman J. Dyson, “Why is Maxwell’s Theory so hard to understand?”