Physics and Innovation

Throughout his hour-long presentation, Greene prompted laughter as he asked the audience to recite equations “you all remember” along with him, such as Newton’s on gravity or Einstein’s general theory of relativity as he told funny stories that lightened the talk about Big Bangs and black holes.

In his introduction, he told a story about what we are capable of before we learn to comply with received wisdom. A little kid in a classroom was drawing something during art class, he said, and the teacher asks the child “What are you drawing?” The child responds “God’s face,” to which the teacher responds in an adult way, “But nobody knows what God looks like!” The child’s simple response: “They will in a minute!”

So what are the qualities necessary to innovate? Greene argued that more than genius is necessary to innovate, and in fact, even the findings of admitted geniuses like, say, Albert Einstein, always are subject to correction. That’s what happened when physicists starting in the 1930s discovered quantum mechanics, which challenged Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and which eventually morphed into string theory in the 1980s (and yes, I’m simplifying here), which harmonized general relativity and quantum mechanics. As Greene wrote in an article for Smithsonian magazine, the history of science has “convinced us to not dismiss ideas merely because they run counter to expectation,” and that “science is constantly self-correcting.”