By the way, I have become convinced that Harv is one of those people who believe no new thought is possible (actually surprisingly close to Alan's belief that we knew it all when we were children).

This is not correct. Although, I do think new ideas are much more difficult to come by than many are willing to admit. It is very, very difficult to produce an original idea that is not somehow easy to discount. Alan might have produced some very original ideas (e.g., entropy is optional and is had by counting and avoided by not counting), but such ideas are easy to discount by the discriminating physicist. Even if an idea is original, it is all but certain that the idea is a derivative of an idea that has already been proposed - perhaps with a different set of purposes and agendas.