SCIENCE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE

SCIENCE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE

Innovators are guided by a simple motto: ‘the possible we do today, the impossible takes a little longer’. The statement is paradoxical only on the surface. Contemporary life is replete with its illustration.

Flight by humans was once impossible. Today, people jet across the continents in matters of hours. Travel to space was inconceivable. Today, there is a permanent space station that is regularly inhabited and a spacecraft roving the surface of Mars and gathering information.

Not long ago, the idea of being able to call others around the world with a small wireless gadget was far-fetched. Today, it is the norm of ordinary people’s lives.

The idea that information anywhere in the world may be retrieved from anywhere else used to be the stuff of science fiction. Today, we call it a google search among other things.

It is all because there are people who think the impossible can be done, if only they invest enough time and brain energy. There are the theoreticians such as Isaac Newton, Albert Eistein and Claude Shannon. And there are the inventors like Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison.

What they all have in common is a deep conviction about the order of nature and the human capacity to discover them. And then there is their singular dedication and the commitment to building on the knowledge others had established.

‘We imagine that inventions occur in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor towards a startling epiphany’ writes Jon Gertner in the “The idea factory,” a book about the Bell Labs that led to several innovations in telephone and digital communication.

“In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin.” Innovations crystalise “as a group of people and ideas coverage, until over the course of months or years (or even decades) they gain clearity and momentum….”

Newton refers to this cumulative nature of intellectual innovations when he said, ‘if I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulder of giants.”

Sometimes those giants stumbled through a myriad of false paths, which nonetheless provide useful insights as to what is possible and what isn’t. a visit to a museum of flight, for instance readily demonstrates that the path to jet flight was filled with failures, some which in retrospect will seem whimsical and even foolish.

Early in human history, innovators thought that humans can fly like birds by constructing and attaching wings. It is an idea that is captured in the Greek mythology of Icarus, who met his death while flying with such wings. According to the Legend, Icarus’s was that he flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax that glued his wings. In reality, of course, anyone who attaches wings and tries to fly like birds would come crashing in split seconds.

Indeed, the history of aviation is the history of failures and tragedies. But that never deterred the quest. Every failure served as the impetus for subsequent success. Even now, the Aerospace giant Boeing is trying to make a battery that can safely power its new super jumbo jet across the world. The overheating batteries have defiled all solutions. But it is almost a given that the behemoth of a plane will be ferrying passengers across the world again very soon.

The people who make these technological wonders possible are often cultural and social misfits. They are the kind of people our societies disdain. Einstein, who is widely acclaimed as the brightest mind of the 20^th century, indulged in eccentricities. For instance, he reportedly would pick up cigarette butts from the streets, retrieved the tobacco for his pipe and smoked while riding his bicycle carefree like a boy.

Edison, the inventive genius, was known for going for days without taking a bath. The resulting body odour made him not too pleasant to be around. He routinely put in 16-hour work days, sometimes catching a nap by stretching out under a table. His understanding wife had to have a bed installed in his workplace.

Shannon whose mathematical theory of information was the impetus of our digital age, was a shinny introvert who shunned social interactions even with his colleagues at the Bell Labs. Shannon’s colleagues where skeptical about his postulate that all information may be reduced to their bare essentials and transmitted digitally without loss of detail. But they rose to the challenge of transforming the theory into practice. The chess master turned his back on their efforts, becoming pre-occupied instead with developing a computer that could play chess is gaining wide application in everything from weather forecast to medical diagnosis. Just like every other aspect of life, it can only take time.