Is tradition good or bad? Of course, they are a huge part of our life and a way of transferring knowledge, and many of them are really useful. But, unfortunately, not everything that is said about "so accepted" is tested by common sense.
There were times when science, opposing itself to the church and its inviolable dogmas, was a kind of "revolutionary". Now, despite a huge leap forward, conservatism flourishes in the depths of the scientific community, as well as an unwillingness to go beyond the boundaries established in the past by "authorities".
The scientific method and the accumulated knowledge base act as traditions in science. In addition, there is a strict hierarchy in the scientific community. What does the word of a young scientist stand against the opinion of an authoritative academician? And even if a young and talented shoot proves the significance of their discovery, many venerable scientists remain with theirs.
Why? Because a person who has devoted his whole life to the study of the phenomenon is difficult to convince of his wrongness, he treats with ideological attachment to his creation. To promote new knowledge, you need to become an undeniable authority, and it remains to be hoped that a person will have time to do this in the time allotted to him. Therefore, science develops slowly, and we may simply not learn about many interesting discoveries.
Yes, science often works effectively and helps us in life, it is useful, but this does not mean at all that its way of describing the world is the only truly correct one. And those people for whom the authorities are not gods, and who are ready to defend their point of view, often turn out to be pioneers. A striking example of such a "breakthrough" is the discovery of the writing of the ancient Maya.
Work on deciphering the Maya writing was carried out since the 18th century, but scientists could not understand the ancient texts, they knew the meaning of only some of the signs. It got to the point that the famous German researcher of Mayan culture Paul Schellhas (1859-1945) despaired at the end of his life and published an article entitled "Deciphering the Maya Writing - an Insoluble Problem."
The American scientist Eric Thompson (1898-1975) was considered the main specialist in the world on deciphering the Maya writing. He was so fascinated by the Mayan civilization that he even went on a honeymoon with his wife to the American jungle.
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Thompson categorically rejected the idea that Mayan hieroglyphs were letters or words. He considered them only symbols, pictures that express ideas, not sounds. This theory made deciphering the Mayan hieroglyphs an impossible task - it was impossible to guess what symbolic meaning the Indians put into each of their many hundreds of drawings! Not only was Thompson wrong, he also did not tolerate dissent. To speak out to a linguist against the theory of Thompson, a scientist with world authority, meant to be unemployed.
But there was a scientist who was free from the opinion of authorities.
Our compatriot Yuri Knorozov (1922 - 1999) was a linguist, a specialist in ancient languages. And his home was a small room, filled with books up to the ceiling, in the famous St. Petersburg museum - the Kunstkamera. Knorozov disassembled museum exhibits damaged by the recent war, and in his spare time studied strange drawings of the ancient Maya Indians.
Yuri Knorozov with the cat Asya.
Knorozov perceived the problem of decoding the Maya writing as a personal challenge: "What is created by one human mind cannot but be deciphered by another!" Without leaving his office, the brilliant Russian scientist did what no one else could do: he found the key to the mysterious writing of the ancient Maya.
The key to the "Mayan code" for Knorozov was the book "Reports of Affairs in Yucatan", written in the 16th century by the Franciscan monk Diego de Landa (1524-1579). Diego was the second bishop of Yucatan and a highly controversial personality. On the one hand, he showed an interest in Indian culture and invented the "Latin version" of the Maya language, on the other, he established the Inquisition and burned most of the ancient manuscripts, thereby destroying the cultural heritage of this great people.
For Yuri Knorozov, the study of Diego de Landa's work was a turning point in his work. The bishop considered his main goal to convert the local population to Christianity, and decided that missionaries should use their language and writing for preaching. To match the language of the Spaniards and the Maya, Diego drew on the Indians and compiled a list of correspondences between hieroglyphs and letters. In the end, the list turned out to be inaccurate, because the structure of the two languages was very different. For this reason, most researchers subsequently did not take into account the works of the bishop, or even considered them to be falsifications.
Yuri Knorozov, unlike the others, realized that despite the mistakes, in the writings of Diego there are most of all "clues" for decoding the text. He also guessed that most of the signs are not whole words and concepts, but syllables.
Then he studied three surviving Maya manuscripts and calculated that 355 characters were used to write their Maya texts. After analyzing how these characters are combined and with what frequency they are repeated, Yuri Valentinovich identified different parts of speech and members of the sentence. And then the most interesting thing began - reading the manuscripts and, finally, in 1963, his monograph was published on the methods and result of decryption.
This discovery was so important that the world scientific community compared it to the conquest of space. And it is not surprising, because by compiling a catalog of Mayan hieroglyphs, the scientist made it possible to study a civilization that left a huge legacy: cities, books, hundreds of thousands of samples of culture and art.
However, the merit of Yuri Knorozov is not only in his great discoveries. It is also in the fact that he, by his example, showed how important courage, determination to go his own way and question even the most authoritative opinions. After all, who knows how many important issues can be solved using a new approach and out-of-the-box thinking.