Showing posts with label birth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birth. Show all posts

Sunday, 4 December 2011

“Gradually, then suddenly”



I came across this phrase from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in Narelle Hanratty’s blog. And it occurs to me that so many discoveries and inventions happen this way - gradually, then suddenly.

A good example is the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in the early 1950s. I wrote about the way that they battled with this fundamental problem (20 December 2009), together with Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins and others, over a long period of time, and how quite suddenly one day the sun rose - and the answer was clear.

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race,” wrote Watson, describing the Eureka moment in his exciting book, The Double Helix.

Of course an analogy in animal life is the gestation of foetuses followed by the birth of the young.

Have you noticed examples of this in your innovation work and elsewhere?