Sci-Fi Tropes I Hate: Single Inventor

04 Jun 2011 5 Comments

by Nikkiin science Tags: , ,

Seriously, how many more times must I read (or watch) a sci-fi story in which somewhere someone says ‘imagine life if Alexander Fleming didn’t discover penicillin’  or ‘if Ben Franklin didn’t discover electricity’ or, for a real life example (as in, I got told this by a prof IRL and was too raaage to form a coherent retort so I said nothing), ‘if Xerox didn’t show Steve Jobs their GUI, we’d still be using DOS’. Or even ‘well, we can’t let this person die because they discover x and without x the world will be doomed’.

No.

Just… no.

Contrary to popular belief, a single person does not have that large of an effect on science. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that these guys aren’t brilliant and don’t deserve their credit or anything, I’m just saying that if one person discovered something, so could someone else. Maybe it’ll take a little while longer and maybe we’d be be living slightly differently because of it, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as drastic as sci-fi makes it seem.

And, no, I’m not just saying this. I totally have historical anecdotes to show that more than one person can, and will, discover or invent something.

The most universally known one idea, many inventors stories is, quite simply, the telephone. There were, what, five different people who all invented the telephone at roughly the same time as Alexander Graham Bell?  It was a lawsuit mess and we still don’t entirely know wtf went down.

And the same thing happened with calculus. Way back in the day, Newton was all grr cuz math wasn’t capable of handling his calculations so he went off and invented his own math, calculus. Eeeexcept Gottfried Leibniz kinda invented it too. And published his book on his calculus first. And, no, it wasn’t just copying each other’s notes – there were differences in their calculuses.

Then there are the times in which people do brilliant work and are ignored in their own times, such as Gregor Mendel. His contemporaries thought he was a nutter and that his pea experiments didn’t mean anything so he died with his scientific work unrecognised. Fast forward a couple of decades until all the other scientists caught up to his genius and realised that, damn, Mendel was fucking awesome and called him the father of genetics. Basically, Mendel’s discoveries were pushed back a few decades and it was like he hadn’t even existed until then – y’know, like what’d happen if Fleming hadn’t noticed the magic properties of mouldy bread. And, y’know what, the planet didn’t imploded and devolve into some lawless, heathen state.

Finally, how about the fact that ancient civilisations like the Romans did little things like, oh, invent running water and did some pretty sweet stuff with math, a lot of which was forgotten for a long time? Hell, the Greeks invented a fucking computer. Okay, so this kinda almost undermines my point, but the downfall of Greece and Rome kinda had to do more with stabbing than math. And we totally reinvented it all anyway, so the question is more like ‘how much more advanced would we be if the Romans hadn’t failed to keep all of their conquered land’.

I’m generalising, of course. I’m by no means a historian, just a girl who picks up a lot of odd facts and likes to rage at science fiction. Cuz, dammit, it’s very rare that I can read or watch sci-fi without groaning about how they fucked something up. Would things change? Probably, especially if you’re following the butterfly effect, but it wouldn’t be as immediately drastic as sci-fi makes it out to be. Things might be different, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world and I doubt that we’d all be living in concentration camps if we had no penicillin.

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  • http://www.monoclelad.com monoclelad

    not to mention that most inventions were finished at about the same time around the world by different people. The wright brothers are only the first successful flight by a short time period. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t even invent the telephone.

    We WOULD have had graphing calculators that use what we think of as normal where you don’t need to rewrite formulas into a machine format to calculate years earlier if Texas Instruments weren’t dumb. but they were and ended up having to Recreate technology they were previously handed for next to nothing.

    The whole idea that only one person invents something flys in the face of the face of the fact that ideas tend to pop up all over the world at about the same time in the minds of people who have no contant. The one we recognize is more about luck and marketing then brain power. There are some interesting paradigms to explore like what would the world look like if our grid was D/C rather than A/C. We would have hyper efficient computers and technology because we don’t have to convert A/C to D/C in all our things. but the shape of urban planning would have changed because of the limitations of transmission.

    The greeks had technology that not only do we not know how they made it, we can’t make it with all our fancy modern technology. for all the money we spend on speaker technology, we still can’t reproduce sound as well as their old amphitheaters. I don’t know where this idea that ancient cultures were dumb comes from. Before christianity brought us the dark ages humanity was pretty damn smart overall.

    I keep watching this show Secrets of the Dead because its an interesting look at historical cultures, but it has this attitude of OMG how did they do anything back before computers? How did china make all those clay warriors without proper climate controls? well they just dug a hole into a mountain and what do you know, the earth is a great form of insulation. I wish the show approached ancient cultures from the perspective that they were basically as smart as us overall, but they had different tools, and unlike modern times they didn’t care if it took a long time to build things. Because their tools are amazingly clever.

  • http://anovelconcept.net Nikki

    Yeah, pretty much all that. Also, did you read all of the blog post or did you just read the first bit and skim again? Cuz you basically said everything I said except with some different examples. Also, hilariously, I was going to put in the Tesla vs Edison thing but I totally forgot.

    What really strikes me hilarious is that the fact that many people have the same ideas independent of each other is something readily admitted in art and literature. Pretty much the first thing you get told when you say ‘awww, dammit, someone else wrote that first’ is ‘well, no idea is new so write it anyway’. And, yet, these same authors look at science and go ‘wow, no one else could have ever come up with this idea!’ and it just… agh. Makes me rage.

    Why so dumb, people, why so dumb?

    And why trash on the Greeks and the Romans so much? Also, the dark ages aren’t as horrible technology/development wise as everyone makes them out to be. Lots of agricultural type development during that time. It’s just not as exciting as aqueducts.

  • http://www.monoclelad.com monoclelad

    I read it, its just something I’m passonate about and can’t shut up about.

    There was a lot off good things in the dark ages tech wise. but when you compare it to them being having pioneered brain surgery, and were capable of erecting buildings that we still have no idea how to reproduce, we don’t even understand the scientific principles that went into building them well enough. They were scratching upon the germ theory of disease! The simple fact that in the 21st century we are still finding out things that the ancient greeks already knew, which we only discovered within my lifetime. Its a giant mind fuck to try and picture.

    The advances in farming are really interesting throughout that time period, and its the only time ever that defensive technology was stronger than offensive technology. I even love the architecture of the old churches. Not a fan of the fact that they were funded entirely on extortion, but I can’t deny their beauty. But it was still a pretty dark time for science…

  • panda

    Just look at this list of everyone who discovered penicillin! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_penicillin

    Notably was Sara Dath in 1920, who basically discovered the exact same thing but was kind of ignored by scientists because she was a lady and ladies don’t science.

  • http://anovelconcept.net Nikki

    Yeah. It’s pretty much Madame Curie vs the world back then. Alas.

    Though apparently they got women to do the math all the time. Like with missile trajectories before computers were invented.