Michael Bhaskar - Human Frontiers - The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking

1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 8

Also by Michael Bhaskar

The Content Machine

Curation

The Oxford Handbook of Publishing

2021 Michael Bhaskar

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

First published in the United Kingdom by The Bridge Street Press, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Sabon by M Rules.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 978-0-262-04638-1

10987654321

d_r0

For Monty and Dougie

As the investigation goes on, additions to our knowledge cost more and more, and, at the same time, are of less and less worth.

C.S. PEIRCE

I fear that the mind may keep folding itself up in a narrower compass forever without producing new ideas, that men will wear themselves out in trivial, lonely, futile activity, and that for all its constant agitation humanity will make no advance.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

Ideas are powerful. Ideas drive change.

ABHIJIT V. BANNERJEE AND ESTHER DUFLO

Archimedes was worried. Hieron II, King of Syracuse, had summoned him several weeks before. Always with that slightly baleful look in his eye. Straight away, Archimedes knew it was going to be difficult. Keep your head down, he told himself. Stay out of trouble. In fact, why not go back to Alexandria and work in peace at the Library?

It turned out Hieron had been given a golden crown.

Wonderful, said Archimedes, most justly deserved!

But there was a problem. Hieron was convinced he'd been swindled,thatthegoldencrownwasadulteratedwithsilver. He needed, absolutely needed to know for sure. OK, thought Archimedes. If we melt the crown we can check its volume, whichwilltelluswhetherornotit'spuregold.

Melt the crown! Hieron almost hit the roof. Melt the crown? Laughable, disgusting, impossible. Not going to happen. Go and figure it out, said Hieron. You're clever.

So that was what Archimedes had tried. But all the usual tricks didn't work. He couldn't concentrate on his other projects: a paper on geometry, refinements of a design for a new kind of pulley. He paced the sea-lapped city walls, felt the breezeandbroodedontheimpliedthreatinHieron'swords;the impliedthreatdespiteallhe'ddoneforSyracuse,andonamatter so pointless. He sighed: this was the problem withtyrants.

Archimedes had always been fastidiously clean and in the chaosofpapyrus,parchmentandmodelsthatwashishousehold,theonemomentoforderwashisdailybath.Timeatlast to forget about Hieron and his ridiculousrequests.

Thatday,asArchimedessteppedintothebath,henoticed something both utterly trivial and yet extraordinary: as he got in, the water level rose. His body displaced the water. The volume of water displaced equalled the volume of hisbody.

He instantly knew two things: first, that he'd solved the riddle of the crown. Second, that the insight was of much greater importance: here was a universal means of gauging volume, a breakthroughmoment.

Eureka!hecried,leapingfromthebath.EurekaIfound it! The residents of Syracuse were used to the eccentricways of the sage, but even for them the sight of this wizened man running naked through the central market and the port, past the temples and battlements, again and again shouting Eureka!, wasunusual.

ButArchimedesdidn'tcare,thiswasnoordinarydayand no ordinaryidea.

In hindsight it seems so simple. But like every good idea, it wasn't.

Everyone knows the story. When we think of big, breakthrough ideas, we think of something like this, the original, endlessly rehearsed Eureka moment. A flash of insight, a crystalline idea, a new plane of thought. In one sense this is right, in that it suggests ideas aren't equal, that some ideas are more difficult, more significant, than others. In another sense it couldn't be further from the actual messy, grounded, discursive, agglutinative, coincidental, resource-hungry process of ideation.

It won't come as a surprise to hear that the above story is probably apocryphal. But in fact the truth of Archimedes and Eureka is far more instructive for the history of ideas.

Archimedes lived an extraordinary life, his interests ranging across the span of classical knowledge. His breakthroughs were often abstract: he helped invent the concept of pi and pioneered the mathematics of parabolas, levers, spheres, cones and irregular solids. We can't be sure of the bath and the crown; we can be sure that Archimedes was a world-leading expert in the study of fluids and mathematics.

But he was also intensely practical, not only an heir to Euclid but an engineer working at the forefront of Hellenistic technology. He built engines of war and mechanical inventions including pulleys, winches, the gear wheel and the hydraulic screw. He combined high-level academic work with a hands-on approach, evident in the unification of astronomical discovery with mechanical genius in the creation of one of the world's first orreries. Each alone would make him a giant of antiquity.

In the third century bce , Syracuse, in Sicily, was the capital of Magna Graecia greater Greece and of the entire central Mediterranean. It lay at the centre of Greek culture and trade, a place where Aeschylus wrote plays, a city frequented by Plato. Embroiled in the epic Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, Syracuse sided with the Carthaginians. It was a mistake. But as the might of Rome was thrown against the city, Archimedes the astronomer and scholar threw himself into its defence, creating a system of powerful countermeasures.

When, in 212 bce , the Roman consul Marcellus stole into the city thanks to a treasonous Syracusan, Roman historians report that he gave two orders: that the royal treasure be respected and that Archimedes life be spared. But, supposedly lost in a complex problem, the inventor was killed by a legionary ignorant of his identity.

The Eureka moment was actually a slow, no doubt difficult process of cross-pollination as much as it was a sudden flash; the culmination of decades, not seconds.

We also know that Archimedes worked far from alone. He was educated by and deeply plugged into a wider research network. The pivotal role of Syracuse in the Mediterranean was helpful it connected Archimedes to the Library of Alexandria, the great scholarly hub of the classical world. Archimedes studied under Conon of Samos in Alexandria and was familiar with thinkers of his age like Philo of Byzantium, the astronomer Aristarchus, who expounded a heliocentric cosmology, and the proto-scientist Eratosthenes, who calculated the circumference of the Earth.