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How Common Is Multiple Invention?
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Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#22From science fiction author Charles Fort in his 1931 book titled Lo! “If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever…
I quite like this. While we experience our own thought process as unique, and see it that way in other people who come up with ideas we'd never have thought of, there is nevertheless an entire ecosystem around even the most brilliant genius.
I also think there's something about the nature of reality which suggests that if we try, we will eventually discover what is there to be discovered. As David Deutsch puts it, "everything that is not forbidden by laws of nature is achievable, given the right knowledge". Of course the "invention" is about discovering the right knowledge, in what order and how we come about that.
(And, to throw in a fun pet issue of mine, this infuriated me about Atlas Shrugged - the idea that solitary geniuses can invent mind-boggling technology and that therefore the rest of society needs to bow down to them. Like, no - once it was known that free energy could come out of the air, the world's scientists would be racing to reproduce this finding, and would probably do so in short order.)
Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#23From science fiction author Charles Fort in his 1931 book titled Lo! “If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time. For whatever…
I quite like this. While we experience our own thought process as unique, and see it that way in other people who come up with ideas we'd never have thought of, there is nevertheless an entire ecosystem around even the most brilliant genius. I also think there's something about the nature of reality which suggests that if we try, we will eventually discover what is there to be discovered. As David Deutsch puts it, "e…
Discoveries unlock more discoveries. When, not if.
Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
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Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#25Carl Friedrich Gauss invented the FFT. Many reinvented it afterward until Cooley and Tukey popularized their reinvention of it.
Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#26Vaguely related: I own a fun little board game called U.S. Patent No. 1 (made by Cheapass Games), which is obviously inspired by the story of Alexander Graham Bell beating Elisha Gray to the patent office by just a few hours. In that game, you play as one of several people throughout history who have invented a time machine, and all of you are racing to get to the U.S. Patent office first (i.e. the minute it opens), so that your time machine can hold the coveted U.S. Patent Number 1.
This has almost nothing to do with the article, of course. :-)
Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#27Vaguely related: I own a fun little board game called U.S. Patent No. 1 (made by Cheapass Games), which is obviously inspired by the story of Alexander Graham Bell beating Elisha Gray to the patent office by just a few hours. In that game, you play as one of several people throughout history who have invented a time machine, and all of you are racing to get to the U.S. Patent office first (i.e. the minute it opens),…
The game concept sounds very fun! Would you not just travel back in time to get there first though? Hoping that kind it twist is in the spirit of the game…
Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#28I think it is very common. In particular on the "big" ideas that are obvious to people in respective fields (making a thinking machine, a flying machine, let's turn this into a bomb etc.) where you would have multiple dispersed people somewhat competing, somewhat stealing ideas from each other.
And I also think there is quite a bit of winner writes the history / reverse history writing. Like had the Germans won World War II, German inventors would be widely credited in computing. Or the stuff on who invented the neural net brought up by the recent Nobel prize.
Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#29There’s an interesting weird theory about how we get ideas (related to Platonic philosophy) called “morphic resonance”. Basically the theory is that ideas are actually like radio waves, in the environment, and our brains are like radio receivers that pick up ideas existing in the universe. If so, then multiple simultaneous invention makes total sense. Proponents of morphic resonance actually posit a number of other weird related coincidences and experimental evidence for their hypothesis. For example rats who master a maze in one part of the world make it easier for unrelated rats anywhere in the world to master the same maze pattern — it’s as if the learned skill/idea is “broadcast” to all rat brains. Or chemical formulations of new molecules becomes easier and faster over time, even with no change in technique.
Re: How Common Is Multiple Invention?
#30“It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There's a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slipping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer's head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist‘s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn't. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target, hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of wild horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succor and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration thereby fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contributing to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.”
― Terry Pratchett, Sourcery