The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next

This is one such quote that actually made some sense, infact lot of sense, in orkut's today's fortune archive. I sat upto spend my mid semester break on something and this shows up , leaving me in a state of serious thinking about the history of various scientific breakthroughs. Immediately i wanted to log this somewhere, like this place.
Speaking of 'log' I remember reading about the discovery of log[logarithm], which is one such invention that startled everyone who didnot know that a sequence of flip-flops could actually compute the value of 453876 x 182725 , now i seriously doubt if anyone know what the application of a log function is. Right in my school days i used to see my friends hating the exercises of computing multiplications and divisions using log-tables. But no one ever knew that such complicated operations turned out to be simple additions and subtractions. I was fascinated by the simplification offered by log-function. The person to be praised for this is the great mathematician john napier , he is such a fascinating personality that he got this idea like bolt from the blue. There was no history for log-function, he is the person who created it. All other things in mathematics are mostly developed progressively. Hats-off to that genius..........