Yep, definitely! The reason why these are big tomes is IMO largely downstream of the distribution methods at the time.
What distribution differences do you mean? Kepler and Bacon lived before academic journals, but I think all the others could easily have published papers; indeed Newton, Darwin and Maxwell published many, and while Carnot didn’t many around him did, so he would have known it was an option.
It seems more likely to me that they chose to write up these ideas as books rather than papers simply because the ideas were more “book-sized” than “paper-sized,” i.e. because they were trying to discover and describe a complicated cluster of related ideas that was inferentially far from existing understanding, and this tends to be hard to do briefly.
I think that is for most forms of intellectual progress, a better way of developing both ideas and pedagogical content knowledge
It sounds like you’re imagining that the process of writing such books tends to involve a bunch of waterfall-style batching, analogous to e.g. finishing the framing in each room of a house before moving on to the flooring, or something like that? If so, I’m confused why; at least my own experience with large writing projects has involved little of this, I think, though I’m sure writing processes vary widely.
I don’t think papers were set up for wide distribution at all. Like, how would Newton, Darwin and Maxwell have published 10+ papers and distributed them all to their target audience?
Papers and books are aimed at different audiences. Papers are aimed at a small community of experts which has a lot shared epistemic prerequisites, so the average contribution is short. Books are aimed at larger audiences.
The modern internet enables you to write in small batches to both audiences (or any audience) really. I am more talking about the ability to write things like blogpost series, or have people follow your Youtube channel, or follow your Twitter, etc. (Like, I am not saying Youtube and Twitter are bastions of intellectual progress, but they enable distribution mechanisms that I think generally outperform previous ones).
What distribution differences do you mean? Kepler and Bacon lived before academic journals, but I think all the others could easily have published papers; indeed Newton, Darwin and Maxwell published many, and while Carnot didn’t many around him did, so he would have known it was an option.
It seems more likely to me that they chose to write up these ideas as books rather than papers simply because the ideas were more “book-sized” than “paper-sized,” i.e. because they were trying to discover and describe a complicated cluster of related ideas that was inferentially far from existing understanding, and this tends to be hard to do briefly.
It sounds like you’re imagining that the process of writing such books tends to involve a bunch of waterfall-style batching, analogous to e.g. finishing the framing in each room of a house before moving on to the flooring, or something like that? If so, I’m confused why; at least my own experience with large writing projects has involved little of this, I think, though I’m sure writing processes vary widely.
I don’t think papers were set up for wide distribution at all. Like, how would Newton, Darwin and Maxwell have published 10+ papers and distributed them all to their target audience?
Papers and books are aimed at different audiences. Papers are aimed at a small community of experts which has a lot shared epistemic prerequisites, so the average contribution is short. Books are aimed at larger audiences.
The modern internet enables you to write in small batches to both audiences (or any audience) really. I am more talking about the ability to write things like blogpost series, or have people follow your Youtube channel, or follow your Twitter, etc. (Like, I am not saying Youtube and Twitter are bastions of intellectual progress, but they enable distribution mechanisms that I think generally outperform previous ones).