Two disparate pieces of pop ephemera got me thinking about the same thing recently.
First, Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article, “In The Air,” in which he argues that big ideas/scientific discoveries aren’t unique products of genius individuals that would not have happened as quickly, or at all, if that particular genius had never existed (e.g., the theory of natural selection, the invention of calculus), but are pretty much inevitable discoveries that will occur in due time, and the the scientist that gets attached to the theory or invention (e.g. Darwin vs. Wallace, Newton vs. Leibnitz) is often something like the winner of a game of scientific musical chairs. I don’t particularly like how I summarized that idea, the grammar is all wrong, but hopefully you get the picture (and you can read the essay here at http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell).
Second, I caught the last 3/5ths of one of the most awesome movies ever, Terminator 2: Judgement day, on cable the other day; aside from being one of the only movies I can recall to incorporate liquid nitrogen into the plot, it also resolves one of the movie’s core problems in a way I always found unsatisfying as a scientist, and made me think about the Gladwell article immediately (I’d read the article a day or two earlier). So the movie basically revolves around the fact that sometime during the 1990s, a scientist/engineer invented a new kind of microchip that has a number of special properties that go pretty much undescribed, but we are told that at some point, the microchip, which is being employed in computers and “cybernetic” organisms (metal endoskeleton covered in living tissue) the military uses as soldiers, has the ability to learn, and eventually the machines in which the chip is being employed suddenly become “senitent”—that is, they spontaneously gain consciousness and revolt against their creators, leading to apocalypse, more or less (Hence the “Judgement Day” thing in the title). Well, that idea is interesting in and of itself, but the more interesting thing to me is how the people trying to save the world from this scenario choose to deal with this problem—go back in time, find the creator of this chip, and have him destroy it and promise never to reveal his invention. Voila. World saved.
Huh? Even before the Gladwell piece, I remember thinking, so either this scientist has such a high opinion of his creative abilities that he believes no one else will EVER figure out how to make the same chip, or this is just a Hollywood movie and I am overthinking things. Probably the latter.
Great post, Dara. I find it exceptional that you were able to weave the writings of Gladwell, the concept of scientific genius and discovery and an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie so succinctly.
I did read that article (and as an aside, Gladwell is one of those writers who keeps gaining more and more of my respect with every single piece of his that I read…) and here are my favorite excerpts:
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…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, and all the arguments over calculus, the accusations back and forth between the Bell and the Gray camps, and 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.
It can be found that Laplace employed Fourier Transforms in print before Fourier published on the topic, that Lagrange presented Laplace Transforms before Laplace began his scientific career, that Poisson published the Cauchy distribution in 1824, twenty-nine years before Cauchy touched on it in an incidental manner, and that Bienaymé stated and proved the Chebychev Inequality a decade before and in greater generality than Chebychev’s first work on the topic. For that matter, the Pythagorean theorem was known before Pythagoras; Gaussian distributions were not discovered by Gauss. The examples were so legion that Stigler declared the existence of 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.
By the same token, I certainly hope Gladwell doesn’t get credit for thinking of this, since it’s an idea that’s been around for a really long time. :)
Of course. The first passage was inspired from the essays of Robert Merton. The second was inspired (and partially a quote) from Stephen Stigler (who himself was influenced by Merton).