chapter, was allegedly inadvertent. But so were many other discoveries as
well. Many more than we think.
The classical model of discovery is as follows: you search for what you
know (say, a new way to reach India) and find something you didn't know
was there (America).
If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone
sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think
again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity. The
term serendipity was coined in a letter by the writer Hugh Walpole, who
derived it from a fairy tale, "The Three Princes of Serendip." These
HOW TO LOOK FOR B I R D POOP 1 67
princes "were always making discoveries by accident or sagacity, of things
which they were not in quest of."
In other words, you find something you are not looking for and it
changes the world, while wondering after its discovery why it "took so
long" to arrive at something so obvious. No journalist was present when
the wheel was invented, but I am ready to bet that people did not just embark
on the project of inventing the wheel (that main engine of growth)
and then complete it according to a timetable. Likewise with most inventions.
Sir Francis Bacon commented that the most important advances are
the least predictable ones, those "lying out of the path of the imagination."
Bacon was not the last intellectual to point this out. The idea keeps
popping up, yet then rapidly dying out. Almost half a century ago, the
bestselling novelist Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book about it, aptly
called The Sleepwalkers. It describes discoverers as sleepwalkers stumbling
upon results and not realizing what they have in their hands. We
think that the import of Copernicus's discoveries concerning planetary
motions was obvious to him and to others in his day; he had been dead
seventy-five years before the authorities started getting offended. Likewise
we think that Galileo was a victim in the name of science; in fact, the
church didn't take him too seriously. It seems, rather, that Galileo caused
the uproar himself by ruffling a few feathers. At the end of the year in
which Darwin and Wallace presented their papers on evolution by natural
selection that changed the way we view the world, the president of the
Linnean society, where the papers were presented, announced that the society
saw "no striking discovery," nothing in particular that could revolutionize
science.
We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict. This is
why people can read this chapter and similar accounts, agree entirely with
them, yet fail to heed their arguments when thinking about the future.
Take this dramatic example of a serendipitous discovery. Alexander
Fleming was cleaning up his laboratory when he found that pénicillium
mold had contaminated one of his old experiments. He thus happened
upon the antibacterial properties of penicillin, the reason many of us are
alive today (including, as I said in Chapter 8, myself, for typhoid fever is
often fatal when untreated). True, Fleming was looking for "something,"
but the actual discovery was simply serendipitous. Furthermore, while in
hindsight the discovery appears momentous, it took a very long time for
1 6 8 WE J U S T C A N ' T P R E D I CT
health officiais to realize the importance of what they had on their hands.
Even Fleming lost faith in the idea before it was subsequently revived.
In 1965 two radio astronomists at Bell Labs in New Jersey who were
mounting a large antenna were bothered by a background noise, a hiss,
like the static that you hear when you have bad reception. The noise could
not be eradicated—even after they cleaned the bird excrement out of the
dish, since they were convinced that bird poop was behind the noise. It
took a while for them to figure out that what they were hearing was the
trace of the birth of the universe, the cosmic background microwave radiation.
This discovery revived the big bang theory, a languishing idea that
was posited by earlier researchers. I found the following comments on Bell
Labs' website commenting on how this "discovery" was one of the century's
greatest advances:
Dan Stanzione, then Bell Labs president and Lucent's chief operating
officer when Penzias [one of the radio astronomers involved in the discovery]
retired, said Penzias "embodies the creativity and technical
excellence that are the hallmarks of Bell Labs." He called him a Renaissance
figure who "extended our fragile understanding of creation,
and advanced the frontiers of science in many important areas."
Renaissance shmenaissance. The two fellows were looking for bird
poop! Not only were they not looking for anything remotely like the evidence
of the big bang but, as usual in these cases, they did not immediately
see the importance of their find. Sadly, the physicist Ralph Alpher, the person
who initially conceived of the idea, in a paper coauthored with heavyweights
George Gamow and Hans Bethe, was surprised to read about the
discovery in The New York Times. In fact, in the languishing papers positing
the birth of the universe, scientists were doubtful whether such radiation
could ever be measured. As happens so often in discovery, those
looking for evidence did not find it; those not looking for it found it and
were hailed as discoverers.
We have a paradox. Not only have forecasters generally failed dismally
to foresee the drastic changes brought about by unpredictable discoveries,
but incremental change has turned out to be generally slower than forecasters
expected. When a new technology emerges, we either grossly underestimate
or severely overestimate its importance. Thomas Watson, the
founder of IBM, once predicted that there would be no need for more than
just a handful of computers.
HOW TO LOOK F O R B I R D POOP 1 6 9
That the reader of this book is probably reading these lines not on a
screen but in the pages of that anachronistic device, the book, would seem
quite an aberration to certain pundits of the "digital revolution." That
you are reading them in archaic, messy, and inconsistent English, French,
or Swahili, instead of in Esperanto, defies the predictions of half a century
ago that the world would soon be communicating in a logical, unambiguous,
and Platonically designed lingua franca. Likewise, we are not spending
long weekends in space stations as was universally predicted three
decades ago. In an example of corporate arrogance, after the first moon
landing the now-defunct airline Pan Am took advance bookings for
round-trips between earth and the moon. Nice prediction, except that the
company failed to forsee that it would be out of business not long after.
A Solution Waiting for a Problem
Engineers tend to develop tools for the pleasure of developing tools, not to
induce nature to yield its secrets. It so happens that some of these tools
bring us more knowledge; because of the silent evidence effect, we forget
to consider tools that accomplished nothing but keeping engineers off the
streets. Tools lead to unexpected discoveries, which themselves lead to
other unexpected discoveries. But rarely do our tools seem to work as intended;
it is only the engineer's gusto and love for the building of toys and
machines that contribute to the augmentation of our knowledge. Knowledge
does not progress from tools designed to verify or help theories, but
rather the opposite. The computer was not built to allow us to develop
new, visual, geometric mathematics, but for some other purpose. It happened
to allow us to discover mathematical objects that few cared to look
for. Nor was the computer invented to let you chat with your friends in
Siberia, but it has caused some long-distance relationships to bloom. As an
essayist, I can attest that the Internet has helped me to spread my ideas by
bypassing journalists. But this was not the stated purpose of its military
designer.
The laser is a prime illustration of a tool made for a given purpose (actually
no real purpose) that then found applications that were not even
dreamed of at the time. It was a typical "solution looking for a problem."
Among the early applications was the surgical stitching of detached retinas.
Half a century later, The Economist asked Charles Townes, the alleged
inventor of the laser, if he had had retinas on his mind. He had not.
He was satisfying his desire to split light beams, and that was that. In fact,
1 7 0 WE J U S T C A N ' T P R E D I CT
Townes's colleagues teased him quite a bit about the irrelevance of his discovery.
Yet just consider the effects of the laser in the world around
you: compact disks, eyesight corrections, microsurgery, data storage and
retrieval—all unforeseen applications of the technology.*
We build toys. Some of those toys change the world.
Keep Searching
In the summer of 2005 I was the guest of a biotech company in California
that had found inordinate success. I was greeted with T-shirts and pins
showing a bell-curve buster and the announcement of the formation of the
Fat Tails Club ("fat tails" is a technical term for Black Swans). This was
my first encounter with a firm that lived off Black Swans of the positive
kind. I was told that a scientist managed the company and that he had the
instinct, as a scientist, to just let scientists look wherever their instinct took
them. Commercialization came later. My hosts, scientists at heart, understood
that research involves a large element of serendipity, which can pay
off big as long as one knows how serendipitous the business can be and
structures it around that fact. Viagra, which changed the mental outlook
and social mores of retired men, was meant to be a hypertension drug. Another
hypertension drug led to a hair-growth medication. My friend Bruce
Goldberg, who understands randomness, calls these unintended side applications
"corners." While many worry about unintended consequences,
technology adventurers thrive on them.
The biotech company seemed to follow implicitly, though not explicitly,
Louis Pasteur's adage about creating luck by sheer exposure. "Luck
favors the prepared," Pasteur said, and, like all great discoverers, he knew
something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure
is to keep researching. Collect opportunities—on that, later.
To predict the spread of a technology implies predicting a large element
of fads and social contagion, which lie outside the objective utility of
the technology itself (assuming there is such an animal as objective utility).
How many wonderfully useful ideas have ended up in the cemetery, such
as the Segway, an electric scooter that, it was prophesized, would change
* Most of the debate between creationists and evolutionary theorists (of which I do
not partake) lies in the following: creationists believe that the world comes from
some form of design while evolutionary theorists see the world as a result of random
changes by an aimless process. But it is hard to look at a computer or a car
and consider them the result of aimless process. Yet they are.
HOW TO LOOK FOR B I R D POOP 1 71
the morphology of cities, and many others. As I was mentally writing
these lines I saw a Time magazine cover at an airport stand announcing
the "meaningful inventions" of the year. These inventions seemed to be
meaningful as of the issue date, or perhaps for a couple of weeks after.
Journalists can teach us how to not learn.
HOW TO PREDICT YOUR PREDICTIONS!
This brings us to Sir Doktor Professor Karl Raimund Popper's attack on
historicism. As I said in Chapter 5, this was his most significant insight,
but it remains his least known. People who do not really know his work
tend to focus on Popperian falsification, which addresses the verification
or nonverification of claims. This focus obscures his central idea: he made
skepticism a method, he made of a skeptic someone constructive.
Just as Karl Marx wrote, in great irritation, a diatribe called The Misery
of Philosophy in response to Proudhon's The Philosophy of Misery,
Popper, irritated by some of the philosophers of his time who believed in
the scientific understanding of history, wrote, as a pun, The Misery of Historicism
(which has been translated as The Poverty of Historicism).*
Popper's insight concerns the limitations in forecasting historical
events and the need to downgrade "soft" areas such as history and social
science to a level slightly above aesthetics and entertainment, like butterfly
or coin collecting. (Popper, having received a classical Viennese education,
didn't go quite that far; I do. I am from Amioun.) What we call here
soft historical sciences are narrative dependent studies.
Popper's central argument is that in order to predict historical events
you need to predict technological innovation, itself fundamentally unpredictable.
"Fundamentally" unpredictable? I will explain what he means using a
modern framework. Consider the following property of knowledge: If you
expect that you will know tomorrow with certainty that your boyfriend
has been cheating on you all this time, then you know today with certainty
that your boyfriend is cheating on you and will take action today, say, by
grabbing a pair of scissors and angrily cutting all his Ferragamo ties in
half. You won't tell yourself, This is what I will figure out tomorrow, but
* Recall from Chapter 4 how Algazel and Averro?s traded insults through book titles.
Perhaps one day I will be lucky enough to read an attack on this book in a
diatribe called The White Swan.
1 7 2 WE J U S T C A N ' T P R E D I CT
today is different so I will ignore the information and have a pleasant dinner.
This point can be generalized to all forms of knowledge. There is actually
a law in statistics called the law of iterated expectations, which I
outline here in its strong form: if I expect to expect something at some date
in the future, then I already expect that something at present.
