Published on: 2024-06-17
Written by Nathan
If you follow the news, you might think that new technologies come in bursts, when entrepreneurs or scientist have some sort of breakthrough one day. This could not be further from the truth. Look a little bit closer and you will find that all “breakthroughs” are the product years to decades of hard fucking work on a problem. Discovery is an slow process even for the smartest minds. The only way to truly make progress is to take small steps towards a big problem. Maybe that day does come where your big problem is solved, but it would have been impossible to get there without first solving the seemingly endless supply of small problems along the way. In the ongoing pursuit of fusion energy, there are unbelievable microscopic problems that need to be solved. It turns out, if you want to have a spherical implosion to generate the extraordinary pressures required to fuse atoms together, you need to make a very round object. The smallest imperfection is detrimental to the efficiency of the implosion. Skipping some details here - we figured out how to make a very smooth, hollow diamond sphere. Ok but now we need to put our tritium into the sphere - which means we need a hole in it. Which means it is no longer spherical. How small can we make a hole and how can we then get Tritium into it?
Shuji Nakamura, who invented the blue LED spent decades trying and failing to make his LED. He tried and failed many times but learned from the mistakes and pressed on relentlessly. The day he presents his blue LED is of course the “breakthrough” but to me that undermines the dedication this great scientist put into his work. There wasn’t a breakthrough. There was a continuous effort to solve a problem over the course of many years. Maybe the thing that ends up being the breakthrough is not even the problem you were initially trying to solve. Joseph Fourier just wanted to figure out how heat diffused so he thought up a method to do that in the 1800s. Joseph Fourier could not have imagine the impact this would have on the world. Fourier series analysis is now used in nearly every piece of technology you own.
Maybe I am being way too fucking semantic. I get the impression that many people see new technologies as a vision some random person had or a literal dream that someone had. That is not to say that people don’t find the solutions in their dreams, but the type of people that do that have already been thinking about the problem for a long, long time.