Pascal's tennis game

THE COMPUTATIONAL METHOD at the heart of Pascal's  work was actually discovered by a Chinese  mathematician named Jia Xian around 1050, published  by another Chinese mathematician, Zhu Shijie, in  1303, discussed in a work by Cardano in 1570, and  plugged into the greater whole of probability theory by  Pascal, who ended up getting most of the credit. But  the prior work didn't bother Pascal. "Let no one say I  have said nothing new," Pascal argued in his  autobiography. "The arrangement of the subject is  new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same  ball, but one of us places it better."

That is from The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow, an excellent book and an easy read.  This passage should remind of us two things:

1) Sometimes astonishing insights can lie around for hundreds of years (in this case six centuries!) before they are widely recognized and applied.

2) Real innovation often comes about through the novel combination of existing ideas or approaches.  We tend to dismiss the power of existing ideas as "old hat" or "already known."  Instead, we believe that addressing our challenges or problems requires entirely new insights (preferably by lonely geniuses).  That is a big mistake:  combining, tweaking, and applying existing ideas or approaches is what causes most real breakthroughs.

[GlobalGiving]

Comments

[LeftRight]

ALL of science is built on the shoulders of those who have come before! Granted, we have someone like Einstein who came up with something that appears to be completely new, but even in HIS case we see that had it not been for Newton, Einstein wouldn't have had anything to work from!

[Lon]

Actually the better analogy would be to Lorenz and Poincare (and Maxwell). Einstein is never making the leap to relativity from Newton alone.

[LeftRight]

I didn't say that he was standing ONLY on the shoulders of Newton, I said that without Newton's theories regarding Gravity and motion, we wouldn't have relativity today.