[A] man can no more be completely original […] than a tree can grow out of air.George Bernard Shaw
There’s a theory in science called “multiple discovery” which postulates that most important scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors.
You can find many examples of this phenomena throughout history. For instance, Sir Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Pierre de Fermat all formed the basis for calculus independently in the 17th-century. Similarly, while Charles Darwin honed his theory of natural selection aboard the Beagle in South America, Alfred Russel Wallace documented his own evidence for evolution half a world away in the Malay Archipelago.
If two or more people independently arrive at the same innovative breakthrough, we might conclude that there is no such thing as pure, uninspired, original ideas. Or at least we should concede that they are exceedingly rare.
Rather, novel creativity is better understood as the result of combining and building upon ideas that came before us. In other words, there’s a well of collective consciousness that we all freely draw from.
In response to a letter of praise from a fellow scientist, Sir Isaac Newton famously responded, “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” A metaphor meaning that if he had been able to discover more about the universe than others, then it was because he was working in the light of discoveries made by fellow scientists, either in his own time or earlier.
Access to that creativity well is easier than ever thanks to the internet. There’s no better time in history to be a creator. The door is open to anybody with a wifi signal and a web browser to identify promising, yet overlooked ideas, and transform them into something more useful or relevant.
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