This link has been bookmarked by 28 people . It was first bookmarked on 05 May 2008, by Paul Ryan.
-
06 Feb 09
-
15 Oct 08
J. DunnShakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him, as none other before or since could. Bell owned the telephone because his patent application landed on the examiner's desk a few hours before Gray's.
culture culture.commentary culture.zeitgeist history history.ofscience history.intellectual ideas ideas.counterintuition ideas.craft ideas.creativity ideas.emergence ideas.imagination ideas.intelligence ideas.paradigmshifts ideas.specialization ideas.time
-
05 Oct 08
Matt KramerGo Back
Print this page
The New Yorker
Skip to content
Subscribe to The New Yorker
* SUBSCRIBE FOR JUST 85¢ AN ISSUE
* Give a gift
* Renew your Subscription
* Subscription Questions
Annals of Innovation
In the Air
Who says big ideas are rare?
by Malcolm Gladwell May 12, 2008
Text Size:
Small Text
Medium Text
Large Text
Print E-Mail Feeds
The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
Keywords
Myhrvold, Nathan;
Intellectual Ventures;
Inventors;
Bell, Alexander Graham;
Gray, Elisha;
Dinosaurs;
Telegraph
Nathan Myhrvold met Jack Horner on the set of the “Jurassic Park” sequel in 1996. Horner is an eminent paleontologist, and was a consultant on the movie. Myhrvold was there because he really likes dinosaurs. Between takes, the two men got to talking, and Horner asked Myhrvold if he was interested in funding dinosaur expeditions.
Myhrvold is of Nordic extraction, and he looks every bit the bearded, fair-haired Viking—not so much the tall, ferocious kind who raped and pillaged as the impish, roly-poly kind who stayed home by the fjords trying to turn lead into gold. He is gregarious, enthusiastic, and nerdy on an epic scale. He graduated from high school at fourteen. He started Microsoft’s research division, leaving, in 1999, with hundreds of millions. He is obsessed with aperiodic tile patterns. (Imagine a floor tiled in a pattern that never repeats.) When Myhrvold built his own house, on the shores of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—a vast, silvery hypermodernist structure described by his wife as the place in the sci-fi movie where the aliens live—he embedded some sixty aperiodic patterns in the walls, floors, and ceilings. His front garden is planted entirely with vegetation from the Mesozoic era. (“If the ‘Jurassic Park’ thing happens,” he says, “this is where the dinosaurs will come to eat.”) One of the scholarly achievements he is p -
16 Aug 08
-
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. 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: 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.
-
-
31 Jul 08
-
23 Jun 08
sandra rogersIn the Air
Who says big ideas are rare?
by Malcolm Gladwell -
19 Jun 08
-
13 Jun 08
-
31 May 08
Darren DraperThe wisdom of the group (Hargadon's law) explained by "outsiders".
-
22 May 08
-
20 May 08
-
19 May 08
-
18 May 08
Ewan McIntosh"The eight of us sat down at a table and the attorney said, ‘Do you mind if I record the evening?’ And we all said no, of course not. We sat there. It was a long dinner. I thought we were lightly chewing the rag. But the next day the attorney comes up
business creativity entrepreneur innovation research ltsinspirations2 startups genup
-
Munish GandhiScientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place.
-
14 May 08
-
12 May 08
-
11 May 08
-
08 May 08
-
07 May 08
-
05 May 08
Paul RyanWho says big ideas are rare?
by Malcolm Gladwell
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.