climbs to great heights with a dwarf on his shoulders to show him his greatest thought. Once there however, the dwarf fails to understand the profundity of the vision and Zarathustra reproaches him for "making things too easy on [him]self." If there is to be anything resembling "progress" in the history of philosophy, Nietzsche in "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks" (1873) writes, it can only come from those rare giants among men, "each giant calling to his brother through the desolate intervals of time", an idea he got from Schopenhauer's work in Der handschriftliche Nachlass. Contemporary references NASA’s official film of the Apollo 17 lunar landing mission was titled On the Shoulders of Giants The British two pound coin bears the inscription STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS on its edge; this is intended as a quotation of Newton. Stephen Hawking stated: "Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein." The Lubavitcher Rebbe said that our generation is compared to "dwarves standing on giants' shoulders". Although we may appear to be on a lower spiritual level (dwarves) than previous generations (who were like giants on a spiritual level), when our (much smaller) achievements are added to their (much larger) achievements, the combined achievements ultimately bring us to the era of Moshiach! Google Scholar, a search engine for academic literature, displays the phrase "Stand on the shoulders of giants" below the search field. See also Derivative work Great Conversation References External links Overview of history of the expression Latin proverbs Metaphors referring to body parts Sociology of scientific knowledge Tradition Isaac Newton 12th-century neologisms Quotations from science