Old books can be useful, but for the old books in a field to be essential reading today, something must have gone badly wrong with the field. Some fields have indeed gone badly wrong.
I mentioned biology and economics, philosophy and psychology. I could go farther if desired. However, really, since academia promotes reading old books, I’m happy to place the probablistic burden of the claim that academia is mad on it.
That doesn’t seem so for mathematics, physics, chemistry...the hard sciences in general. It may be an ornament to one’s education to read Euclid, Newton, and Einstein, but it is not necessary. The books that endure in these fields are the exceptionally good textbooks rather than the original works.
Biology is the hot science right now. Knowledge about evolution was going to be very superficial until genetics came along. Now that tools are available, we are learning all sorts of things at an amazing clip.
Would this be a fair summary?
Old books can be useful, but for the old books in a field to be essential reading today, something must have gone badly wrong with the field. Some fields have indeed gone badly wrong.
Yep, except that I’m saying that virtually all fields have gone badly enough wrong for old books to be useful.
Do you have any specific examples in mind, or is this an expression of the general idea that the academia is mad?
I mentioned biology and economics, philosophy and psychology. I could go farther if desired.
However, really, since academia promotes reading old books, I’m happy to place the probablistic burden of the claim that academia is mad on it.
That doesn’t seem so for mathematics, physics, chemistry...the hard sciences in general. It may be an ornament to one’s education to read Euclid, Newton, and Einstein, but it is not necessary. The books that endure in these fields are the exceptionally good textbooks rather than the original works.
Biology is the hot science right now. Knowledge about evolution was going to be very superficial until genetics came along. Now that tools are available, we are learning all sorts of things at an amazing clip.