This link has been bookmarked by 80 people . It was first bookmarked on 05 May 2008, by FruFru FourOne.
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28 Apr 13
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25 Dec 12
Tim McCormickThis profile of Intellectual Ventures, by Malcolm Gladwell!, is hilariously shortsighted in retrospect. http://t.co/0h3mrooi
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16 Nov 12
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Invention has its own algorithm: genius, obsession, serendipity, and epiphany in some unknowable combination.
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This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common
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Jason Bardi writes in “The Calculus Wars,” a history of the idea’s development.
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“If Newton and Leibniz had not discovered it, someone else would have.” Calculus was in the air.
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Merton’s observation about scientific geniuses is clearly not true of artistic geniuses, however. You can’t pool the talents of a dozen Salieris and get Mozart’s Requiem. You can’t put together a committee of really talented art students and get Matisse’s “La Danse.” A work of artistic genius is singular
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our persistent inability to come to terms with the existence of multiples are the result of our misplaced desire to impose the paradigm of artistic invention on a world where it doesn’t belong.
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13 Nov 12
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This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern.
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Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland.
“There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England,” Ogburn and Thomas note, and they continue:
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The law of the conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842. There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope. Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the “exclusive” discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.
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For Ogburn and Thomas, the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: 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.
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But five people came up with the steamboat, and nine people came up with the telescope, and, if Gray had fallen into the Grand River along with Bell, some Joe Smith somewhere would likely have come up with the telephone instead and Ma Smith would have run the show. Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them, which is how a group of people can sit down to dinner, put their minds to it, and end up with eight single-spaced pages of ideas.
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“Lowell came in looking like the Cheshire Cat,” Myhrvold recalled. “He said, ‘I have a question for everyone. You have a tumor, and the tumor becomes metastatic, and it sheds metastatic cancer cells. How long do those circulate in the bloodstream before they land?’ And we all said, ‘We don’t know. Ten times?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘As many as a million times.’
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They also knew that finding cancer cells in blood is not hard. They’re often the wrong size or the wrong shape. So what if you slid a tiny filter into a blood vessel of a cancer patient? “You don’t have to intercept very much of the blood for it to work,”
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A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight
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15 Mar 11
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17 Sep 10
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02 Apr 10
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unconscious associations
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Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems.
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Insight could be orchestrated:
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The first kind of creation was sui generis; the second could be re-created in a warehouse outside Seattle
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02 Jan 10
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22 Nov 09
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12 May 09
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Horner asked Myhrvold if he was interested in funding dinosaur expeditions
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“Our expeditions have found more T. rex than anyone else in the world,” Myhrvold said. “From 1909 to 1999, the world found eighteen T. rex specimens. From 1999 until now, we’ve found nine more.” Myhrvold has the kind of laugh that scatters pigeons. “We have dominant T. rex market share.”
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He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
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n his living room, Myhrvold has a life-size T. rex skeleton, surrounded by all manner of other dinosaur artifacts. One of those is a cast of a nest of oviraptor eggs, each the size of an eggplant. You’d think a bird that big would have one egg, or maybe two. That’s the general rule: the larger the animal, the lower the fecundity. But it didn’t. For Myhrvold, it was one of the many ways in which dinosaurs could teach us about ourselves. “You know how many eggs were in that nest?” Myhrvold asked. “Thirty-two.”
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19 Nov 08
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24 Sep 08
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He likes to say that the only time a physicist and a brain surgeon meet is when the physicist is about to be cut open—and to his mind that made no sense. Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems.
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This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call “multiples”—turns out to be extremely common.
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A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.
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Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them,
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17 Sep 08
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26 Aug 08
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19 Aug 08
amar kasapn the previous weeks, he and his staff had reviewed the relevant scientific literature and recent patent filings in order to come up with a short briefing on what was and wasn’t known about self-assembly. A short BBC documentary was shown, on the early wo
economics business history culture technology creativity essay
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10 Aug 08
Katie Day"Who says big ideas are rare?" Profile of Nathan Myhrvold, eccentric inventor and man of many passions. Leads into a discussion of where ideas, discoveries, and patents come from. See also his TED talk on being a polymath.
science technology innovation history malcolm_gladwell inventions
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The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
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maybe the extraordinary process that we thought was necessary for invention—genius, obsession, serendipity, epiphany—wasn’t necessary at all.
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Good ideas are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them, which is how a group of people can sit down to dinner, put their minds to it, and end up with eight single-spaced pages of ideas.
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n the nineteen-sixties, the sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote a famous essay on scientific discovery in which he raised the question of what the existence of multiples tells us about genius. No one is a partner to more multiples, he pointed out, than a genius, and he came to the conclusion that our romantic notion of the genius must be wrong. A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.
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Stigler’s Law: “No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.” There are just too many people with an equal shot at those ideas floating out there in the ether. We think we’re pinning medals on heroes. In fact, we’re pinning tails on donkeys.
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29 Jul 08
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08 Jun 08
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“Lowell is the living example of something better than the Internet,†Jung said after the meeting was over. “On the Internet, you can search for whatever you want, but you have to know the right terms. With Lowell, you just give him a concept, and this stuff pops out.â€
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“Lowell is the living example of something better than the Internet,” Jung said after the meeting was over. “On the Internet, you can search for whatever you want, but you have to know the right terms. With Lowell, you just give him a concept, and this stuff pops out.”
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28 May 08
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27 May 08
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19 May 08
Ari R"Who says big ideas are rare? The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time." by Malcolm Gladwell
ideas history science design culture creativity business innovation phones malcolmgladwell paleontology dinosaurs alexandergrahambell trex billgates
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18 May 08
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A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.
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15 May 08
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14 May 08
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13 May 08
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12 May 08
tony shengThe original expectation was that I.V. would file a hundred patents a year. Currently, it’s filing five hundred a year. It has a backlog of three thousand ideas. ..... It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the
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11 May 08
Ian YorstonWant more innovation? It turns out that insight can be orchestrated. Give a group of smart people (with different backgrounds, temperaments + perspectives) something new to think about - together - and you are pretty much guaranteed a fresh perspective.
Innovation Enterprise CriticalThinking Ideas Thinking UnreasonableMan
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10 May 08
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09 May 08
charlesijonesAre ideas scarce? Gladwell uses the large number of "multiples" -- instances where a particular idea is developed simultaneously by more than one person -- to argue that maybe ideas are not as scarce as we commonly think.
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Paul SweeneyGood ideas "have their time": I so, so agree.
innovation gladwell creativity technology for:dhinchcliffe for:sadagopan
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08 May 08
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turknytNathan Myhrvold, by Malcom Gladwell
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FruFru FourOneThe history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
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06 May 08
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05 May 08
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