On the shoulders of giants?

One of the most frequently quoted remarks of the great English scientist, Sir Isaac Newton, in 1676: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Such generosity and warmth and humility. And this from the creator of the most important laws in physics until the discoveries of Einstein more than two centuries later.

No doubt Newton had in mind Galileo, Descartes, Kepler and others.

But is it always true? Surely much more frequently significant scientific progress is made when a known problem is creatively solved, or when an inadequate existing hypothesis is superseded. That’s essentially what the Wright brothers did.

What would that be? Standing on the shoulders of dwarfs?

The picture, by the way, is “Newton” by William Blake.

“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”

This was the judgement of Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, in 1895, just eight years before the Wright Brothers actually did it. And he repeated this pronouncement the year before their historic first flight in 1903.

Of course, attempts to fly had been made for centuries. The earliest documented is from Ancient Greece. Leonardo da Vinci famously designed a sort of helicopter in 1493. Over the following centuries dozens of inventors, many of them excellent engineers, had tried and failed.

Was Kelvin an ignorant fool? Quite the reverse. As Bill Bryson notes in his A Short History of Nearly Everything: “He was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten… In the course of a long career he wrote 661 papers, accumulated 69 patents (from which he grew abundantly wealthy) and gained renown in nearly every branch of the physical sciences. Among much else, he suggested the method that led directly to the invention of refrigeration, devised the scale of absolute temperature that still bears his name… His theoretical work, in electromagnetism, thermodynamics and the wave theory of light, was equally revolutionary.”

No. The central problem was that Kelvin assessed the possibilities of powered flight as an expert, and as the revered President of the Royal Society, from the perspective of existing knowledge and experience, all of which appeared to confirm his judgement.

This is exactly the problem facing senior managers when they are confronted with any breakthrough idea. Experience often tells them that it’s been tried before and didn’t work. That it’s not feasible. That it’s quite likely even "absurd". I often think that it’s a kind of miracle when big new ideas get approved for implementation by senior management, especially in large, often risk-averse organisations.

How do you address this issue? And how do you ensure that you’re not being a latter-day Kelvin yourself?

Wishful thinking

I don’t know about other cultures, but in Britain “wishful thinking” is what you get accused of when the apparent facts don’t support the claim - imagining against the evidence. Daydreaming.

My mother used to accuse me of it regularly as a child.

Yet wishing is the most powerful start point when you want to innovate. Wishing is the single act that best enables us to get out of the pit of experience, to set off into unknown regions.

Edison wished that he could light the world. The Wright brothers wished they could fly.

“Thy wish, Harry, was father to that thought,” says King Henry IV to his son when Prince Harry lifts the crown from his father’s head, thinking him already dead.

What’s one of your unfulfilled wishes?

The Pursuit of Perfection

The problem is this: if you wait till it’s perfect, first of all, you’ll never get there. And you’ll get beaten to market by a competitor.

For goodness sake, what’s perfect? If we demanded perfectly safe airplanes, we’d be sailing in ships. In point of fact, the Wright Brothers would never have taken off. If we wanted ships that never sank, we’d never leave harbour.

The real question is: when have we reached a threshold of acceptability? When that point has arrived, try it out, learn and adapt.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Do you have experience of losing out in this way?