Every once in a while you read an article that makes you feel like the top of your head has been blown off. That’s how I feel about “In The Air,” an article by Malcolm Gladwell from a recent New Yorker magazine.
Everyone assumes that good ideas are rare, and that those who can come up with good ideas are rarer still. No one expects that there are ever going to be a lot of Einsteins, or Edisons, or Darwins walking around the planet. And yet, when you look at the history of science, nearly every major breakthrough was made by more than one person. It’s really just for convenience that we remember Darwin instead of Wallace for the concept of natural selecton. In fact, according to the article, a 1922 paper lists multiple discoverers of 148 major scientific ideas:
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….”
It begins to look as if many scientific discoveries are inevitable—they are simply “in the air” at a particular time. What if, instead of waiting for some genius to put it all together, we began to systematically look for the hundreds or thousands of brilliant ideas that are in fact all around us?
A man named Nathan Myhrvold and his company Intellectual Ventures are attempting to do just that. A former Microsoft whiz kid and dinosaur enthusiast, Myrhvold decided to systematically look for dinosaur fossils in Montana, instead of doing the traditional catch-as-catch-can, kind of gold-prospector fossil search as it has generally been done. His teams “found dinosaur bones by the truckload…. People weren’t finding dinosaur bones, and they assumed that it was because they were rare. But—and almost everything that Myhrvold has been up to during the past half decade follows from this fact—it was our fault. We didn’t look hard enough.” From 1909 to 1999, the world found 19 T. Rex specimens. Since 1999, Myrhvold has found nine more.
As I understand it, Intellectual Ventures attempts to mine ideas in a similar way, by putting smart people together to systematically search for good ideas. It is not the proverbial million monkeys at their typewriters, and neither is it the lonely man of genius toiling at his Great Idea for years on end. Instead, it’s more like running a sieve through the contemporary air and seeing what gets caught. The samples—Intellectual Ventures is patenting more than 500 ideas per year—mentioned in the article are frequently breathtaking. Take for example nuclear power:
“[Legendary physicist Edward] Teller had this idea way back when that you could make a very safe, passive nuclear reactor,” Myhrvold explained. “No moving parts. Proliferation-resistant. Dead simple. Every serious nuclear accident involves operator error, so you want to eliminate the operator altogether. Lowell and Rod and others wrote a paper on it once. So we did several sessions on it.”
The plant, as they conceived it, would produce something like one to three gigawatts of power, which is enough to serve a medium-sized city. The reactor core would be no more than several metres wide and about ten metres long. It would be enclosed in a sealed, armored box. The box would work for thirty years, without need for refuelling. Wood’s idea was that the box would run on thorium, which is a very common, mildly radioactive metal. (The world has roughly a hundred-thousand-year supply, he figures.) Myhrvold’s idea was that it should run on spent fuel from existing power plants. “Waste has negative cost,” Myhrvold said. “This is how we make this idea politically and regulatorily attractive. Lowell and I had a monthlong no-holds-barred nuclear-physics battle. He didn’t believe waste would work. It turns out it does.” Myhrvold grinned. “He concedes it now.”
It was a long-shot idea, easily fifteen years from reality, if it became a reality at all. It was just a tantalizing idea at this point, but who wasn’t interested in seeing where it would lead?
I don’t remember the exact figure, but something like two-thirds of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive now. It follows that there are a lot of ideas in the air. Ideas that can really make a difference, maybe even get us out of some of the messes we have gotten ourselves in. I found this article to be a revelation. A reason to get excited, and a reason to hope.