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Posted 11/25/2022 08:20 am
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In my mind the same is true in sciences. It's a lot harder to be the expert on something like chemistry or physics in general as it is to become an expert on say cleavage techniques of superconducting materials under ultra-high vacuum where the pool of knowledge is considerably smaller. Having been in academia as well as industry in sciences and engineering, I'd be careful to put too much emphasis on a requirement of publication to define expertise.
In my mind the same is true in sciences. It's a lot harder to be the expert on something like chemistry or physics in general as it is to become an expert on say cleavage techniques of superconducting materials under ultra-high vacuum where the pool of knowledge is considerably smaller. Having been in academia as well as industry in sciences and engineering, I'd be careful to put too much emphasis on a requirement of publication to define expertise.
This is my view as well.
I needed to defend a thesis I did in a specialized area of materials science a very long time ago, that resulted in a couple of papers.
I then worked in an industrial lab and came up with a few things that were patentable (another sort of peer review).
But I never felt as "expert" in a field as when I began teaching undergraduate General Chemistry, and needed to know that broad field enough to answer all kinds of questions on the fly, design examinations that would probe students' grasp of the material at various levels, and so on. Granted, some of the questions were pretty basic, but many weren't, which feeds the learning process.
My outlook toward Numismatics is somewhere between the two. I've been spending time the last four years trying to learn two areas. Not up to the 10,000 hour rule on either yet, but making progress.
One thing I have wondered about this topic is: what kinds of questions do we expect a "numismatic expert" to be able to answer?
Edited by tdziemia
11/25/2022 08:21 am
11/25/2022 08:21 am
