Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson. Consilience, noise, cascading knowledge through centuries, hunches, openness are some of many flames which bring good idea to the world and unknowns are still plentiful. A wonderful book decimating that idea of sole genius in the basement - it's humbling.
On hunches:
"In the summer of 1951, a World War II Navy veteran named Wilson Greatbatch was working at an animal behavior farm affiliated with the psychology department at Cornell, where he was studying under the G.I. Bill. Greatbatch had long been a ham radio enthusiast; as a teenager, he had built his own shortwave radio by cobbling together the descendants of de Foresta Audion. His love of gadgets had drawn him to the Cornell farm because the psychology department needed someone to attach experimental instruments to the animals, measuring their brain waves, heartbeats, and blood pressure. One day, Greatbatch happened to sit at lunch with two visiting surgeons and got into a conversation about the dangers of irregular heartbeats. Something in their description of the ailment triggered an association in Greatbatch's mind. He imagined the heart as a radio that was failing to transmit or receive a signal properly. He knew the history of modern electronics had been all about regulating the electrical signals passed between devices with ever more miraculous precision. Could you take all that knowledge and apply it to the human heart?
On hunches:
"In the summer of 1951, a World War II Navy veteran named Wilson Greatbatch was working at an animal behavior farm affiliated with the psychology department at Cornell, where he was studying under the G.I. Bill. Greatbatch had long been a ham radio enthusiast; as a teenager, he had built his own shortwave radio by cobbling together the descendants of de Foresta Audion. His love of gadgets had drawn him to the Cornell farm because the psychology department needed someone to attach experimental instruments to the animals, measuring their brain waves, heartbeats, and blood pressure. One day, Greatbatch happened to sit at lunch with two visiting surgeons and got into a conversation about the dangers of irregular heartbeats. Something in their description of the ailment triggered an association in Greatbatch's mind. He imagined the heart as a radio that was failing to transmit or receive a signal properly. He knew the history of modern electronics had been all about regulating the electrical signals passed between devices with ever more miraculous precision. Could you take all that knowledge and apply it to the human heart?
Greatbatch stored the idea in the back of his head for the next five years, where it lingered as a slow hunch. He moved to Buffalo, started teaching electrical engineering, and moonlighted at the Chronic Disease Institute. A physician at the institute recruited Greatbatch to help him engineer an oscillator that would record heartbeats using the new silicon transistors that were threatening to replace the vacuum tube. One day, while working on the device, Greatbatch happened to grab the wrong resistor. When he plugged it into the oscillator it began to pulse in a familiar rhythm. Thanks to Greatbatch's error, the device was simulating the beat of a human heart, not recording it. His mind flashed back to his conversation on the farm five years before. Here, at last, was the beginning of a device that could restore the faulty signal of an irregular heart, by shocking it back into sync at precise intervals. Within two years, Greatbatch and a Buffalo surgeon named William Chardack deployed the first implantable cardiac pacemaker on the heart of a dog. By 1960, the Greatbatch-Chardack pacemaker was pulsing steadily in the chests of ten human beings. Variations of Greatbatch's original design have now saved or prolonged millions of lives around the world."
On Noise:
"The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it. When Kevin Dunbar analyzed the data from his in vivo studies of microbiology labs, one of his most remarkable findings was just how many experiments produced results that were genuinely unexpected. More than half of the data collected by the researchers deviated significantly from what they had predicted they would find. Dunbar found that the scientists tended to treat these surprising
On Noise:
"The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it. When Kevin Dunbar analyzed the data from his in vivo studies of microbiology labs, one of his most remarkable findings was just how many experiments produced results that were genuinely unexpected. More than half of the data collected by the researchers deviated significantly from what they had predicted they would find. Dunbar found that the scientists tended to treat these surprising
outcomes as the result of flaws in their experimental method: some kind of contamination of the original tissue perhaps, or a mechanical malfunction, or an error at the data-processing phase. They assumed the result was noise, not signal.
Transforming error into insight turned out to be one of the key functions of the lab conference. In Dunbara's research, outsiders working on different problems were much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise. Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the correct result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful. As the science writer Jonah Lehrer has observed, this pattern appears in one of the great scientific breakthroughs of twentieth-century physics, the discovery of cosmic background radiation, which was mistaken for meaningless static by the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson for more than a year, until a chance conversation with a Princeton nuclear physicist planted the idea that the noise was not the result of faulty equipment, but rather the still lingering
reverberation of the Big Bang. Two brilliant scientists with great technological acumen stumble across evidence of the universe's original evidence that would ultimately lead to a Nobel Prize for both of them and yet their first reaction is: Our telescope must be broken."
And my favorite lines from Darwin; what we can learn from Coral Reefs...
Darwin described it best in the chapter on his Keeling Islands investigations from The Voyage of The Beagle: “We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”
Transforming error into insight turned out to be one of the key functions of the lab conference. In Dunbara's research, outsiders working on different problems were much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise. Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the correct result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful. As the science writer Jonah Lehrer has observed, this pattern appears in one of the great scientific breakthroughs of twentieth-century physics, the discovery of cosmic background radiation, which was mistaken for meaningless static by the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson for more than a year, until a chance conversation with a Princeton nuclear physicist planted the idea that the noise was not the result of faulty equipment, but rather the still lingering
reverberation of the Big Bang. Two brilliant scientists with great technological acumen stumble across evidence of the universe's original evidence that would ultimately lead to a Nobel Prize for both of them and yet their first reaction is: Our telescope must be broken."
And my favorite lines from Darwin; what we can learn from Coral Reefs...
Darwin described it best in the chapter on his Keeling Islands investigations from The Voyage of The Beagle: “We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals. This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”
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