Franklin vs. Einstein: FIGHT!

So, the basic concept here is that, back when Ben Franklin was around, and, more importantly, I suppose, the time of the American Revolution, the US (such as it was) had a total population of about 2.5 million (which, the more I think of it, the bigger a number that is, given that there just wasn't that much land in the "US" at the time, but anyway). That's 2 orders of magnitude less than there is now, some 200+ years on. At this time, the largest city in the US was Philadelphia with 20,000 people in it (NYC, by comparison, had about 5,000).

Now if you're anything like me, this strikes you as a really small number. So, if you're a Benjamin Franklin - man (person?) of ideas - and you have some means (which, honestly, I don't recall if he did or not, so hopefully you'll look kindly upon the spirit of my argument here if he was not), then you don't have much competition for ideas. Most people, bless them, just aren't ideas folks. They're busy tending the necessary things that need tending, or they are pushing the boundaries of what it means to have a human body. Half of the remaining are going to be caught up chasing their mystical tails (tales?) to over worry about what we might call "invention". So, right off the bat, you're in a good place.

Now, also consider that the "Western World" was in the knee of the intersection between scientific-like rationalism, and the beginning of the industrial age (I know, the actual industrial age isn't for more than 100 years, but its roots are certainly visible here). People were thinking of things in the right way, such thinking was at least tolerable, if not downright fashionable, and the materials for playing with these new thoughts were more available than ever.

So Ben had his printing press for poking fun where it needed to be poked, and the like because they were there (or so very nearly there) for him to have access to. Which means that an ideas man like himself found himself in a veritable cornucopia of things to think about and pursue. He could be exploring science in the morning (as gentlemen were wont to do), explore politics in the afternoon, and write satire in the evening. So many fronts were unexplored, so few doing the exploring, and all the tools nearly at ones fingertips with which to do it.

None of this is to say that Mr. Franklin was a slouch in any way. Quite the contrary! Surely he was a genius as well as a man of charms.

What it IS to say is that he was a person in a moment that were perfectly fit for each other to make an impact on the world and on history.

Physics was a fairly narrow field of study at the time, and electricity a small spark of it (exciting and illuminating thought it was). A man of proper attentiveness and wile could endeavor to understand it substantially during his lifetime, while giving equal measures to Greek classics, the whole extent of botany, and the intricacies of foreign affairs. Did I mention that there was no TV? If you don't have to spend your life toiling, and aren't interested in spending your life exploring the wilderness, what is one to do, really? There weren't even the weekly tabloids. Which reminds me: for the fields that you were interested in, you could readily keep up with the advancements in the monthly "magazines" of the times.

Again, no small effort this, and no small mind to keep it in, just a small world of people to compete with.

Fast forward to the time of Einstein's youth. I have no way of comparing the minds of these two men, but humor me enough to suggest that they may have had minds of equal power at least at the outset here.

Much has changed since the time of Mr. Franklin. The bodies of knowledge in physics, botany, politics, or what have you have increase exponentially. You could perhaps devote your lifetime to one of these - MAYBE two - but you weren't going to scratch deeply into the font of human knowledge like you could in Ben's time. So Einstein specialized. He took some quirky aspects of the relative edge of physics and blew them out in a previously unexpected direction (unexpected by most; there were some thinking his General direction already). At least as powerful a mind as Ben's, but concentrated in a much narrower field.

Yes, he still had interests and abilities outside of the physics he worked on, but nowhere near that of Mr. Franklin's time. Was he a more hardwired specialist to Franklin's generalist? I could be convinced, but that only goes to show that the state of knowledge had advanced to the degree that a deeply insightful specialist like Albert could flourish. If you were a deep specialist a hundred years earlier, you invariably hit the end of the road half a career down it.

Jump ahead to modern times. The US now has about 300 million people in it. If you assume that the same proportion of people in Franklin's time are of Franklin's intellect or better, then we're looking at hundreds, if not thousands of Franklins kicking back in front of Jeopardy daily at 7 (maybe thousands). And if you take Einstein to be a rarer breed of bird, then you're still looking at tens if not hundreds of him wearing Vulcan ears in front of a Star Trek TOS marathon on SyFy.

And what does it take to master a field? Pretty much any field that Einstein would have been aware of, even at the end of his life, would have exploded into a complex ecosystem with tiny sub-sections that might take years to really understand. Even by people in the field. And those minuscule areas of understanding would have exploded into their own complex ecosystem with even finer-grained specializations that take nearly a career to master. And it's probably possible to argue that those specialties have also exploded and have nano-specialties of their own.

And that's just in physics. All of human understanding has been doing this specialization-explosion-specialization over and over again throughout time. It was fairly slow (probably "punctuated equilibrium" would be more accurate) for most of time, but has been going faster and faster as newer discoveries travel through faster connections to increasing numbers of Einsteins, which fuel new ideas, which repeat the cycle again. And we haven't even talked about the rest of the world yet. Countries like India and China (and, to a different degree, Russia and Brazil) are boostering their immense populations into the interconnected, learn-all-you-want-about-anything, data system that is the Internet.

More later. 'Cause this ain't it quite yet.

The Innovation Balloon

[THIS IS SOMETHING THAT I WROTE IN MY 750WORDS.ORG ACCOUNT. AS SUCH, IT'S MORE NOTES THAT A FORMAL ARTICLE. I APOLOGIZE FOR THAT.]

This is the idea that there is a surface of "innovation" that is continually expanding. Each point on the surface represents some specific area of innovation. This surface is like a balloon in that is constantly growing. Innovations that were once small specs on the surface become large areas as people understand the innovation, dig deeper into it, and create new micro-innovations based on it. The "pressure" inside comes from the increase in innovation. As new things are conceived of/discovered, that adds pressure to other points on the surface (a rising tide raising all boats). Not all innovations increase every other innovation, but, on average, the increase in innovation generally adds pressure to other innovations. This pressure is a positive influence, and represents the ability to move innovations forward. There are two broad areas of interest on an innovation surface.

The first are areas where extra effort has been put into a "technology" (using this word as generically as possible) to move it forward ahead of the rate of expansion of the balloon. A prime example of this is the US space program starting from around the time that Sputnik was launched. At the natural rate of expansion of technology, the US would not have been able to go to the moon by 1970, but the US poured huge amounts of financial and personnel resources into the project, moving technology in the "space" area of the balloon (and related technologies) forward. These areas are "pushed out" from the surface as they have expanded faster than the general rate of innovation.

The second area of interest are surface areas where innovation has not moved along as expected. An example of this might be in foosball tables. There are many ways that the classic game of foosball could be advanced (e.g. score detectors), but it hasn't moved ahead as that area has not been deemed worthy of exploration (there are many MUCH better examples, I'm sure, but this is all that comes to me at the moment). These areas appear as depressions on the surface of the balloon as they have not kept pace with the general rate of innovation. These areas of depression are of interested because they represent places that could leap forward rapidly from their "current" state of innovation. Foosball, for example, could benefit from detectors in the rods, interactive screens as the playing field, and the like (again, a horrible example). (Worth nothing that the reason that Foosball is a horrible example is that increasing innovation does NOT need to imply added complexity. In fact, it may typically mean reduced complexity. The examples of improving foosball generally add more points of failure and expense than they may add fun to the game. Therefore these aren't necessarily radical leaps forward for the game, but could actually hinder interest, but hopefully you get the point of where I'm trying to go here.)

So why are these areas depressed to begin with? There could be any number of reason. Innovation of any sort requires the confluence of many factors, and the lack of any one of them can retard progress. Generally it probably comes down to things like: people actually paying attention to a space (many things get under-attended because they are out of fashion, or just not in the public consciousness much), people thinking that there is no room for innovation in that field or that innovations would be too hard to apply (this might be the case with foosball, for example), or that there are countervailing forces attempting to maintain the status quo. The latter case is illuminating to why a lot of areas of innovation move forward rapidly, and then stop moving at all (to the point of falling behind the innovation rate).

Take again the US space program. Moving it forward was a herculean effort. And it worked! But to keep the program going, we had to solidify ways of thinking about going to space because the innovation surface hadn't caught up to the point that other options were viable. If, for example, we would not have gotten into space for 20 more years had no "race" been in effect, then you could say that effort had to go in to maintaining this advance for 20 years. Again, this solidified thinking around going to space, and, importantly, resulted in huge bureaucracies being put into place to help maintain both the effort of making the parts to go into space, and the effort to keep up our ability to go into space. Once the innovation surface caught up, there was already a vested interest in a particular way of thinking about the problem, and a lot of "we have to get our money's worth" kinds of thinking that went along with the huge budgets that the space program had been given.

Now we see the emergence of commercial space travel, and non-governmental entities gearing up to go into space. But this commercialization may have happened many years earlier if we hadn't pushed very hard to move the technology ahead of the surface.

In a way, you can think of the surface as an indicator of when it is efficient to push a technology ahead. Of course, there is no actual visible surface, and its interactions are extremely more complex than I've outlined here, but hopefully this provides a useful framework for how to think about innovation when considering problems like why it still costs $10,000 to put 1kg into space.