Gizmodo
Malcolm Gladwell (smart guy, puffy hair) has a feature in this week's
The New Yorker about the history of simultaneous invention, the best example being Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both patenting the telephone on the same day. There are many other examples, leading to the conclusion that "scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place." The story is put into modern perspective by including scenes drawn from meetings of members of the company called Intellectual Ventures. The founding member, Nathan Myhrvold, also founded Microsoft's R&D labs. His idea for IV was to see if "the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered." The whole point being the creation of powerful ideas. Bill Gates, who works with them on H.I.V prevention, is quoted:
Bill Gates, whose company, Microsoft, is one of the major investors in Intellectual Ventures, says, "I can give you fifty examples of ideas they've had where, if you take just one of them, you'd have a startup company right there." Gates has participated in a number of invention sessions, and, with other members of the Gates Foundation, meets every few months with Myhrvold to brainstorm about things like malaria or H.I.V. "Nathan sent over a hundred scientific papers beforehand," Gates said of the last such meeting. "The amount of reading was huge. But it was fantastic. There's this idea they have where you can track moving things by counting wing beats. So you could build a mosquito fence and clear an entire area. They had some ideas about super-thermoses, so you wouldn't need refrigerators for certain things. They also came up with this idea to stop hurricanes. Basically, the waves in the ocean have energy, and you use that to lower the temperature differential. I'm not saying it necessarily is going to work. But it's just an example of something where you go, Wow."Worth reading, if you've got a bus ride in your near future. [The New Yorker]
Comments
My friends and I have exactly the same "invention sessions" where we come up with exactly the same half-baked ideas. But we just call it "smokin up".
Does this mean that Al Gore really may have invented the Interwebs?
I didn't think so.
I love how the New Yorker can take 500 concise, meaningful words and turn them into 5000.
@Pope John Peeps II: Oh nice joke, and late at night, too. Kudos, Pope.
@AndyDuncan: Dude, this thing is packed. It's 5000 dense words. I'm not going to stand here and let you shit-talk the new yorker. I mean, you're commenting on a blog. We, sir, don't have the right.
but he invented Manbearpig.
half man.
half bear.
half pig.
Happily, a wonderful boost for inventions. Sadly, a terrible time to patent any of them.
I did not read the article yet. But I always read Gladwell's stuff.
Anyway, just the little quote from it, about inventions being in the air, made me think about Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Which isn't about this EXACTLY (it's about the shifts in big scientific paradigms which come along once in a while), but you still imagine the new paradigm floating around in the air with lots of scientists thinking about it, but none quite able to break through and dump the old one convincingly, until a Newton or an Einstein comes along. Does anyone read Kuhn anymore?
This is bad for innovation. These guys basically try to patent everything that they can think about without making it work and then lock-up the business.
We must change patent law or entrepreneurs and inventors will be a breed of the past. Protecting innovation. But real innovation. The oner that you construct into real solutions.
Else the collective of all science fiction books would have every invention and patent on the planet as they foresaw most everything decades before things get "invented".
In fact take Microsoft: What have they invented again? What did Bill Gates or Steve Balmer invent exactly? They are the best business minds of their generations, but please don't give them the power to patent the universe!
I thought it smelled funny in here.
Okay - Not a good idea to start trying to control the weather_
This would be bad_
Microsoft has just 50 ideas? I have thousands and just like them, I have no idea how to how to make them actually work. Sure ideas about wave energy powered super thermoses that keep hurricanes hot forever are cool, but knowing how to build them would be even better.
Some people believe that there is a "God" who "reveals things" to people, but scientifically advanced folks know that that isn't true. Obviously, ideas just somehow magically appear and float around in the air until they choose to attach themselves to one or more individuals who have managed to put themselves into alignment with the proper naturally-occurring frequencies.
Religion is dumb! All hail science!
So does this mean I can patent the idea I had about how I could possibly one day come up with a way for man to achieve flight with the help of some sort of implant that I haven't thought of yet?
"We think we're pinning medals on heroes. In fact, we're pinning tails on donkeys", in talking about genius...and, "credit does not align with discovery" are some good lines.
Overall, I'm disappointed he didn't mention Popper's, "The Logic of Scientific Discovery". Nor did he mention the idea of "determinism" at all, which always seemed to be implied by examples simultaneous discoveries.
I guess the article was more about Myhrvold's "think tank" than anything else.
@ldsdj: Einstien believed in god and was rather devoutly religious. As are/were many scientists throughout history.
@jackbrown: I think Kuhn's "paradigm shift" might have been something of a fad. I haven't read any philosophy of science in a while though.
You are violating my patent on human thoughts and expression. Pay up.
@ParJoe: *examples of simultaneous discovery.
@ParJoe: No! That is a lie spread by theists!
Einstein did not believe in God. He used the word "God" to mean the "forces that govern the universe".
Quote: "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
@LittleJon:
Quote: "every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe -- a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive."
...also from Einstein. So you're right and you're wrong. Einstein was convinced in the deterministic nature of the universe. The idea that there's an underlying order (or structure) to the universe.
Either way, I was just trying to contend what the previous poster wrote. I could have as easily had used Newton as an example. (Personally, I am not religious.)
Why the fuck are we talking about god in this thread?
Because god was simultaneously (and repeatedly) invented and patented by different cultures over the centuries. It's just one of the first culturally significant inventions.
@ldsdj: I think you are getting your Bible a little confused.
God did not make men out of straw.
Unlike some Christian denominations (e.g. Catholicism), Judaism has no dogmatic definition of God. Einstein's concept of God is as valid as any other. His concern for humanity defines his religious convictions.
@jackbrown: Kuhn's insights about the sociology of science have just been absorbed into the way we look at science.
What all the soft science people who love to trot them out miss is how incredibly data- and number- heavy most modern science is. A paradigm shift has to account for all the math that works with the old paradigm. Sure, in previous scientific revolutions there were numbers that didn't fit, but the new one eventually has to account for all the old numbers and the anomalous results. That's where current global warming critiques collapse.
What's sad is how crackpots and denialists think Kuhnian sociological critiques of scientific progress somehow make their non-mainstream ideas plausible. "If only the sheep scientists would stop worshipping at the temple of Darwinism/anthropogenic global warming/zero-point energy can't be harvested/vaccines are safe/whatever, they'd wake up and accept my chosen paradigm shift! Galileo/Einstein/Kelvin was laughed at as well!" You have to deliver more than hand-waving attacks to justify a revolution.
Wikipedia summarizes the criticisms.
@altus:
If you had paid attention all the way to the end of the article, you might have noticed this line: "It [Intellectual Ventures] just licensed off a cluster of its patents, for eighty million dollars."
A mere portion of the patented ideas have already made $80M. Clearly they are doing something right. Have a look at the litany of inventions from that one single paragraph.
"And the kinds of ideas the group came up with weren't trivial. Intellectual Ventures just had a patent issued on automatic, battery-powered glasses, with a tiny video camera that reads the image off the retina and adjusts the fluid-filled lenses accordingly, up to ten times a second. It just licensed off a cluster of its patents, for eighty million dollars. It has invented new kinds of techniques for making microchips and improving jet engines; it has proposed a way to custom-tailor the mesh "sleeve" that neurosurgeons can use to repair aneurysms."
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