Dim Brilliance

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."
Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

Innovations are very often obvious, but usually only in hindsight.

It is hard to imagine, for example, what the world was like before any of our current technological innovations.  Yet each of them involved a struggle for survival.  A machine that can make instant copies seems like a no-brainer now, yet it took inventor Chester Carlson 20 years to convince anybody that his xerographic device had any value at all. 

We can think of this as the obvious turning into a breakthrough or the unusual as common sense.  Plain as the nose on the face you never noticed before.  It all points to the fact that a kind of dim brilliance has to go into our Ingenarium.  An ability, that is, to see the apparent in a new light, to think of the commonplace as a special place.

Like a switch we have to turn on that makes what is right there in front of us important enough to be an insight.

When the Challenger disaster happened, top scientists began to study the explosion of the rocket to see what might have caused it.  Leaks due to some of the gaskets known as O-rings were one possibility and at a conference on the issue, one expert after another presented theories, measurements, studies, guesses.  Richard Feynman, Nobel winning physicist and a famous gadfly of common thought, made a dimly brilliant move when he bluntly took one of the O-rings on the table and plopped it into the glass of ice water on the table in front of him.  The O-ring cracked when ye took it out.  Ta-dah!  The gasket was fragile in the cold. 

Ordinary brilliance is not stupidity, just simplicity.

On the other hand, the obvious is not always so obvious, which is why it is sometimes brilliant just to notice to it.

Take Copernicus, for example, and the notion that the earth revolved around the sun. 

It was revolutionary in part because it involved a breakthrough in visualization.  Look up and it simply does not appear as though it is the earth that revolves as you watch the sun going across the sky, due to the earth’s rotation.  His insight came from a more potent source than common sense or direct observation...the brute force of intuition based on the measurements of others.

But the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asked a very interesting question: “why do people always say it was natural for men to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating.  The answer is usually, “because it looks as if the sun is going round the earth.  To which he replied, “Well, what it would have looked like if it looked like the earth was rotating?”  The answer of course is that it would look exactly the same, because it looks the way it does and the earth does rotate.

If seeing the obvious were so obvious, anyone could do it.

Which leads us to the Tale of the Bear in which a genius and a jerk were hiking in the mountains and encountered a bear preparing to attack.  The jerk tore through his knapsack, searching for his sneakers to make a run for it while the genius quickly analyzed the terrain, the distance, the velocity of bears and humans.

As the genius explained that they could never outrun the bear, the jerk simply put his sneakers on.  The bear started to advance and the genius calculated vectors and climate and physiologies and detailed that there was positively no hope in outrunning it. 

The jerk laced up.

The bear tensed and the genius went into how chaos theory and fractals and probabilities made it impossible for them to get away, but the jerk simply got down in a trackstart position.

“It's useless!” the genius shouted.  “Don't you understand what I've been saying?  We can't outrun the bear!”

The jerk looked up at him sadly.

“If you say so,” he said.  “But of course, I don't have to outrun the bear.  I only have to outrun you!”

And off he went.

Sometimes it takes looking at the obvious in a new way to make it stand out.