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TGGP's avatar

Copernicus didn't get rid of epicycles, or even reduce their number. His heliocentric model had MORE epicycles than the latest Ptolemaic ones. What he abolished was the equant, because it went against his idea of building everything out of perfect circles. https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/dont-rely-on-yglesias-for-kuhns-copernicus-revisionism/ His model was both complicated & inaccurate for that reason. It was Kepler's "refinement" of replacing circles with ellipses that actually explained the most accurate data the most simply.

I don't think special relativity displaced Newtonian mechanics for most practical calculations, and I'm pretty sure every physicist has to learn Newtonian mechanics first before later learning the relativistic modification necessary to handle speeds near that of light.

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Kaleberg's avatar

TFP doesn't depend on research so much as management practice. My impression is that there are lots of great new ideas being developed in universities and garages, but large corporations have their own priorities. In fact, it often pays for a company to suppress innovation. We saw this in the 1960s with IBM slowing progress in computing by using its massive corporate power. We saw this with Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s until the Japanese were well on track to take over the car market completely. We're seeing it now with companies like Google, Facebook and Apple maintaining walled gardens and using their corporate power to suppress new technology. Why isn't TFP going up? That's easy. The money isn't in raising TFP. The money is controlling the market and suppressing innovation.

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