I heard on NPR that SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, will be making available to the public some bandwidth of their monitoring.
I could just imagine some lone computer/astronomy geek coming up with a new filtering program that processes some huge chunk of the data over time and finds a real pattern - proof of extraterrestrial life! Everything changes! All of a sudden, our history is broken out into “before this person’s discovery” and “after this person’s discovery.”
But that’s pretty far-fetched; probably a low likelihood of the next History-Pivoting Person being the one who discovers proof of alien life…
So: what will the next Historically “Great” / Era-Defining Person actually do?
Continue the work of Newton and Einstein and be lauded for the next level of insight about our Universe? The Grand Unified Theory, or proof for a new definition of gravity (e.g., holographic theory)?
Could that person already be the recently-departed Steve Jobs, for his re-shaping of so many industries and showing what an online/device ecosystem is and how they will transform our lives and societies? Or Mark Zuckerberg - look at the Arab Spring and the role of Facebook and Twitter. Is Zuckerberg the new Gutenberg, opening access to a new voice, the way printing did?
Some political player who achieves a new level of power through peaceful or war-based means?
Whaddya think?
ETA: oh, and by “insider” vs. “outsider” - will they be someone with a long history in their field, or will they come out of left field, like Einstein the patent clerk, or my imaginary lone computer/astronomy geek? Given the emergence of online working - team-based or crowd-sourcing like with SETI Live, I wonder if it increases the likelihood than an outsider can find an audience for their insights?
I suppose the other dimension will be “pace of realization” - i.e., how long will it take to judge the accomplishment? If you discover proof of alien life, you’ve done it - pencils down. Stuff like the long-term impact of Jobs or Zuckerberg requires the long-term to play out over a few more decades…
No, it would have to be something much more fundamentally different. The genius of Jobs and Zuckerberg is essentially good old-fashioned marketing. (They understood that the vast majority people who are going to buy or use computers really just want to goof off, rather than “be productive.” The IBM types simply didn’t get that.)
I hear you - isn’t that the question right now? Will those guys be looked at as genius marketers or digial Gutenbergs and Edisons? Given how perniciously Facebook and Apple devices seem to be burrowing into our lives - a huge percentage of the population can’t imagine life without them anymore, and they are being used within the context of big political and social happenings - I see the argument for that side, too.
Well, the Gutenberg press didn’t only make more people want to read. It actually changed the means of production, so that more people actually could read (and publish, too). In the process, it changed extremely important societal power structures (i.e., the Church, etc.) I don’t think the Arab spring (while definitely important) will ever come to be anywhere near that great of a change. (Nor will things such as the fact that prospective employers are reading Facebook pages as part of the hiring process, and so on.)
This is a great question, Wordman, but I think we need to expand the perspective–such as your suggestion of being able to comprehend extraterrestrial life in some way.
Oh - I have another Applied Science one: the person who invents a game-changing battery. Something that has energy to burn, yielding charge-once-a-month smart devices, and electric cars that are as convenient as gas cars, if not more so. The spread of smart devices would explode even more…
There’s been some recent work on slow-discharge capacitors. If you can get a device that holds a day’s worth of charge, doesn’t discharge it all at once, and can be fully charged in seconds, then you’ve got a better mousetrap to say the least.
Does anyone know of websites that ponder this type of stuff? Seems like it would be out there, but I wouldn’t know how to search for it. Google Pivoting History - ;)?
It would be fun to have a bracket tournament - lay out 16, 32 or 64 ways to Pivot History and then debate pairings. The beauty of real life is that I am sure the bracket would be nowhere close to reality as it played out - but the discussion would be fun - “another genocidal despot” vs. “game-changing battery inventor”? “Social network creator” vs. “disease curer”?
I believe the term is “futurism” or “futurology” or something similar. I know there are people who write books on the subject, though I’ve never read one myself.
The trouble with capacitors is that in order to send enough current into them quickly enough, you usually need some extremely heavy-duty connectors. Such things may never be easily available for home use; we may go from having gas stations to power stations. Besides, charging in seconds would be a neat trick but it’s unnecessary-- you only need to be as quick as a gas fill-up. Five or ten minutes would do just fine. You might be able to charge it slowly at your home, but I don’t think it would ever be as quick as a gas fill-up simply because the connectors required are somewhat complicated.
As to the OP, I think it’s important to distinguish between world-changing ideas and inventions whose time had come and were inevitable, like Newton’s invention of calculus or Darwin’s theory of evolution or Watt’s steam engine, and ideas that required a true stroke of genius, like Newton’s laws of physics or Einstein’s general relativity.
It’s important to appleciders, but no, nothing about this discussion is important at all. However, it’s a really fun subject, and I’m glad you started it!
Well, I guess I find it more impressive to make a leap forward that didn’t have the weight of history behind it, although I’m struggling to put it into words. To give an example, I feel like without Albert Einstein, relativity might have taken decades to come into the scientific venue, with profound macrohistorical results. But if James Watt hadn’t invented the steam engine, someone else would have done so in short order. It was an invention whose time had come, and while both discoveries turned their world on its ear, Einstein’s seems more impressive because it was so much a surprise and more important because had he not done so, there’s no reason to think that someone else would have shortly thereafter. I guess I feel like an invention whose time has come is less important because it seems to require less of a stroke of genius to discover, and those sorts of “Great People” aren’t remembered as widely or for as long. For instance, how many people on the street could tell you who invented calculus, as compared to the three laws of motion? It’s Newton both times, of course, but he’s more remembered for his revelations in physics than mathematics.
ETA: OK, so my citation of Darwin in my first post actually works against my point. So sue me!
Henri Poincare (wiki link) might disagree with you about Relativity popping out of nowhere. (French scientist/polymath, who among other things did some of the fundamental thinking that led to the Special Theory).
Sorry - I am totally picking nits, and Einstein as a random patent clerk certainly came out of nowhere in 1905.
But the “sui generis/left field discovery” vs. “inevitable step in advancement” remains fascinating. Not wanting to beat a dead horse, but the tech that Apple/Jobs assembled for the iPhone was around, but getting all of the right pieces in place the right way is appearing to be revolutionary, at least in a near-term culture change sorta way, with the jury out on macro impacts…
…but yeah, a left field discovery can have far more drama. The Historical Pivot point seems so much more defined…
Well, okay, so nothing comes totally out of nowhere, but Einstein’s discovery of special and general relativity did come most out of left field. Compare that to what he actually won his Nobel for-- the photoelectric effect, which was a worthy accomplishment but wholly unexciting and would be a complete footnote (and almost certainly not Nobel-worthy if not for his other work) if not for his relativity work. I mean, I’m sure I would have no idea who did that if I didn’t already know the man for his life’s work.
Apple/Jobs is another interesting one. I’d be perfectly prepared to write them off as inventors who discovered something whose time had come if they didn’t do it so damn reliably (and I say this as someone who thinks rather poorly of Apple products). Still, I think the majority of their genius lies in marketing, not actual technological innovation. Few of their products are truly revolutionary, but they certainly affected the culture by making smartphones and mp3 players mainstream.
Oh, fiddlesticks. Einstein was not a “random patent clerk,” he was a graduate of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich (where he was admitted when he was 17) and held teaching certificates in physics and mathematics. He worked as a patent examiner because he couldn’t find a teaching position. He published several papers in influential journals in the years preceding his “great year,” and can in no sense be said to have “come out of nowhere.” His success came fast because he was brilliant – he published those 4 great papers when he was 26, for god’s sake, the same year he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Zurich.
He didn’t enter the mainstream until 1919 with the trip to check the light-bending he predicted. So he may have been somewhat known in science circles.