Thomas Kuhn made a related point in his classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that precedence in science is somewhat arbitrary—a matter of perspective rather than fact—because new discoveries are rarely tied to the work of just one person or team.
3 comments:
I really like a lot of the ideas in this article, particularly the part about stretching out of your focused field. However, the article didn't touch upon the genesis of ideas through collaboration. Sometimes being able to bounce ideas off of another person gives you some insight which you wouldn't else get, leading to new ideas.
There is the idea in writing that there is no such thing as an original idea, that all stories are remixes and retellings of the same five or so stories that have been told and retold since the beginning of humanity. Also, nanotechnology is really, really cool, but physics gets really, really weird at that level. This also raises the question, what are we defining as an original idea? Nothing is created in a vacuum, and so everything is based on what has gone before, even if it’s just by doing the opposite. I would love it if this article would define what original is, and maybe talk about what had been in place before the original ideas talked about in the article, to give a sense of what is truly revolutionary about each new discovery. One of the best things I have found at Carnegie Mellon is its desire for interdisciplinary thoughts and actions, best exemplified by the very fact that we have our BXA and SHS programs.
This is a really interesting perspective on how creativity works. In terms of the claim that breaking into other fields of study can bolster creativity, I think that while it's true that this allows you to look at things differently, something that also needs to be taken into consideration is that oftentimes you would still need a great deal of experience in whatever second subject you chose before a "breakthrough" will be made. Of course people should continue to explore as much as possible and expand their horizons, but I hope nobody is expecting to completely alter the course of some field after reading about it on Wikipedia.
Also, taking into account Alex's comment, I started wondering if there could have been other individuals that were crucial to say Aristotle or Shannon's work. In some cases, we don't have a complete picture of history, and so the only thing we have to go on is the names of the people who take credit (after all, history is written by the victors). Aristotle could have been inspired by someone else, even a muse, so to speak, but we might never know the whole truth behind it.
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