Arthur E. Berman
Twenty years ago a friend and I
had a brilliant idea: if people could
pay for their groceries with a credit card instead of writing a check,
supermarket lines would move more quickly and the companies that owned the
stores would have immediate payment. We
researched the concept and consulted experts who told us that the idea would
never work for a variety of reasons that aren’t important now. What is important is that many of us now
routinely pay for groceries and most other purchases with a credit or debit
card. I don’t even have a check book
anymore and only use a few computer-generated checks each month to deal with
the rare and somewhat backward companies that don’t yet have a way to pay bills
electronically.
Not everyone, of course, has
embraced electronic payment of purchases and bills. I sometimes still find myself behind someone
in line at a store who is writing a check, showing their driver’s license and,
ironically, waiting for electronic approval of their check. While it seems inevitable that some day
everyone will abandon check books, it may actually take years or a generation
before the newer idea of electronic payment has become the norm.
This raises two questions that
are pertinent to us as geologists and scientists: how do new ideas originate and how do they
spread? I believe these questions go to
the core of geological inquiry and human psychology. After a quick look at the history of new
ideas that have been accepted in science, I’ll describe how this applies in the
petroleum exploration and production business.
Consider the beginnings of
geology. The ideas of James Hutton and
Charles Lyell about the Earth, its age and the processes that governed the
development of the crust and its sedimentary strata were considered radical in
their time. These ideas were not easily
or quickly accepted by the contemporary scientific community, much less the
educated public. New notions about the
Earth’s history along with ’s
observations on the origins of life a few years later significantly disturbed
the belief structure of 19th century society.
New Ideas: Archetypal Ideas,
Theories, Discoveries and Inventions
The origin of new ideas has been
debated since at least the time of Socrates.
I will briefly and humbly add my views on where ideas come from to those
of Plato, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant.
It seems to me that there are
relatively few truly new ideas. Ideas of
God, the spirit or soul, the after-life or reincarnation may be examples of
truly original thought. The idea of tools, language and writing must have
originated more-or-less independent of observation or explanation. These are what may be called primordial or
archetypal ideas and may, in fact, prove to be somehow hard-wired into our
psyche, stored in our DNA, or to be self-replicating by some mimetic
process.
Many new ideas in science are
really theories. Theories attempt to
explain phenomena or make mysteries somehow comprehensible, but are based on
conjecture and probably lie beyond experimental or tangible proof. Newton’s theory of gravitation, Darwin’s
theory of evolution and Einstein’s theory of relativity, while based on
observational science and at least partly supported by fact, represent
astonishing and unifying insights that place them in the rarified realm of new
ideas. A structured theory may be called
a model.
Most new ideas are really
discoveries or inventions. Discoveries
and inventions result from observation and experimentation, respectively, and
often arise from trying to solve a problem. Use of fire was probably discovered
after lightning ignited a tree or a rock falling on another rock produced a
spark: these were observations. Learning
to produce fire was an invention and was probably successful only after
considerable trial-and-error. The wheel
likely was an invention that resulted from observing a rounded object—a tree
limb or a rock--roll. Similarly the
development of agriculture or domestication of animals probably was more of a
discovery based on an observation than a truly new idea. We observed something growing that we could
eat, discovered its seed, and experimented to grow the plant intentionally.
Most great scientific advances
are likewise inventions or discoveries rather than new ideas. Steam rising from boiling water developed
into the hypothesis that perhaps a gas was a form of matter; experimentation
with fire, water and machine produced the steam engine. The train resulted from an experiment to
marry the steam engine and the wheel with a modification—the track. The automobile resulted similarly from the
observation that ethanol (or, later, petroleum) produced energy and, combined
with the wheel and an engine, could result in a new invention, the car.
Discovery may be spontaneous and
un-premeditated depending on the circumstance or point of view. The discovery of penicillin, for example, is
commonly portrayed as a kind of accident whose significance was immediately
grasped by Alexander Fleming. In fact, the development of penicillin occurred
over a period of several decades, beginning with Louis Pasteur’s discovery of
the antibiotic properties of certain bacteria. Fleming accidentally discovered
the particular strain of penicillin but it was Howard Florey after him who
finally perfected the culturing of the bacteria for medicinal application.
The ability to identify and
deduce new connections and patterns in nature and technology is the basis of
experiment and invention. The development of new ideas is seldom an individual
phenomenon but it born in the creativity of the collective ingenuity of the
many.
The Origin of New Ideas
The impetus for new ideas
originates in personal experience that is, above all, grounded in the moment,
in the present and, for the most part, separate from the ego or the
intellect. New i