this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2026
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I don't think that's the case at all. Recombining existing things is interpolation, creating new stuff that is both novel and also interesting or valuable, is a completely different task
While there's some of both, I dislike the 'great white man' narrative of breakthroughs in science. There have been legitimate breakthroughs, but most (maybe all) of them were inevitable from recombination and mild improvements.
Definitely agree that the inventors are often given too much focus rather than a gradual evolution of ideas and discoveries over time that a much wider number of people made significant contributions to.
There are big leaps in understanding at times that do deserve to be recognised, Newton, Euler and Einstein definitely fit with this.
There is a really good series about the evolution of science and technology from the 1980s called Connections, from the BBC. Brilliant show and well worth a watch, it shows how technology evolves through chance and circumstances in so many cases rather than someone seeing a problem to be solved and thinking of a clever solution
Ty for the show recommendation!
I am pretty familiar with much of the (mathematics) story for Newton and Euler; while they did accelerate things, famously much of calculus from Newton would have emerged from others within a decade or two. And it's not uncommon to be working anywhere in mathematics and stumble upon a 'new to me' result which is, inevitably, really due to Euler. This isn't to say they did bad work, just that the large part of their work was available by paths with few 'breakthroughs'.
All new things are just existing things put together or modified very slightly.
People talk about iphones being this moment of ingenuous creation, but we already had phones, mobile phones, webcams, texting, predictive text, applications, touch screens, mobile web browsers, mobile games, video calling, etc. Even the concept was fairly well-trod in fiction. There was literally new about the first smartphone.
A hafted spear is an incredible innovation, but we already had fully wooden spears, sharp rocks, string and adhesive resins before we put them together. Like a smart phone, that tool opens up new options and lifeways that weren't viable before, though not a single input is new.
What did we have before the wooden spear that the wooden spear was a derivative of?
Digging stick