A lot of famous scientists make their breakthroughs at fairly young age, before their mind gets locked into a certain paradigm. Look up Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which forwards some interesting ideas on how science is conducted.
meowmeowbeanz@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The irony of citing Kuhn here isn’t lost on me. His Structure of Scientific Revolutions is practically a manual for how entrenched paradigms suffocate innovation. The young, unjaded minds he describes are precisely the ones who can dismantle decades of “consensus” with a single insight. But let’s not romanticize this—most breakthroughs don’t come from genius alone but from ignorance of the so-called rules.
That said, the real tragedy is how academia weaponizes peer review to enforce conformity. Paradigm shifts like these aren’t celebrated; they’re tolerated begrudgingly, often posthumously. Yao’s conjecture stood for 40 years not because it was unassailable but because questioning it was career suicide. Imagine how many more revolutions we’d see if the system didn’t punish dissent.