Stand on the shoulders of giants

[KBK]

Google Scholar

[pinkmouse]

Nice

[SY]

Great stuff! I found out that I have a publication in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that I didn't know about.

[KBK]

bumpity

[jackinnj]

my wife, a cancer researcher/molecular biologist uses it.

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" -- most commonly refers to Newton's statement "If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants".

an art history teacher told me it analogically referred to the West Portal of Chartres in which the New Testament figures are placed above the prophets, kings and queens of the Old Testament.

[pinkmouse]

Newton actually used the phrase as a veiled insult to Robert Hooke, (of Hookes Law), a "small" gentleman with whom Newton had fierce disagreements, and when Newton became chairman of the Royal Society he virtually wrote Hooke out of the history of English science.

[jackinnj]

I don't want to get sin-binned again, but as a teenage physics student we used to describe Hooke's theorems as relating the tendency of certain parts of the female anatomy to oscillate at specified frequencies, and those factors which could damp the oscillation.

[pinkmouse]

I think best we leave that to people's imaginations!

[johnnyx]

We may have to leave it to our imagination, but the subject has very serious ( ) research. The potential sales for a company that gets it right are enormous, so they treat it very seriously indeed, (although the schoolboys amongst us may snigger).

[lgreen]

If you are familiar with the band REM, you will know that the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold" appears in their song "King of Birds" off the Document album. Lyrics here . So how's that 1 line for perspective? Think about it.

Anyway, getting to the phrase itself we just look at a fan site to see that this has been written about this particular line from the song (though it doesn't explain the cold part, as it should):

"Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold"

Though usually attributed to Newton, [this quote] is not his originally. The following appeared in "The Decline and Fall of Footnotes" by Bruce Anderson, in Stanford: "As Sir Isaac Newton modestly noted in a letter to Robert Hooks. 'If I have seen further [than you and Descartes] it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants.' [Footnote:] Not only did Newton's work build on that of others, his comment to Hooke did, too. This aphorism was apparently a commonplace in the 17th century. It has been used for almost 2,000 years, by writers ranging from Lucan to George Herbert, from Bernard of Chartes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Robert K. Merton explored it fully in his short book, On The Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (Free Press, 1965)." [calbear]

So there you have it, verification from some music that everyone that posted above is correct.

Oh, and it rocks!