And you probably also learned that we didn’t always believe that.

You might have learned about Ptolemy, who believed that the celestial bodies revolved around the Earth. It seems impossible to believe now, but that was the established wisdom for thousands of years. People were executed for disputing this scientific “fact”.

When Copernicus came up with his idea of the Earth revolving around the Sun, it didn’t make sense. The scientists of the day disputed his claims and showed through “science” that he was ‘wrong’, by demonstrating that his theories couldn’t explain what was happening any better than the established wisdom. In fact, Copernicus’ model offered worse predictions than Ptolemy’s model.

But with contributions from Galileo and Kepler united under Newton, our world experienced a paradigm shift (in the original/ Thomas Kuhn sense of the term). And suddenly our textbooks were rewritten. And so “The Sun revolves around the Earth. The Sun has always revolved around the Earth.” became, “The Earth revolves around the Sun. The Earth has always revolved around the Sun.”

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we of course know that we know the truth.

And yet, do we? Perhaps one abusing ‘Relativity’ might posit that it all depends upon where you are stationed – that from the perspective of the Earth, the Sun does revolve around it and vice versa. And maybe they are both wrong.

Such is the nature of “science”: The perpetual quest to prove oneself wrong.

The special challenge falls on those individuals who lead periods of revolution. Scientific, cultural, social, linguistic. Whether they are the revolutionary leaders of climate change or economics or politics or even intelligence.

You see it in someone like Howard Gardner in positing Multiple Intelligences back in 1983. Or Edward de Bono’s “Lateral Thinking”. Or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. From ‘ridiculous’ to ’self-evident’ in but a short few years.

If we are going to support and facilitate the development of more of these game-changing Great Minds – people with “capital C” Creativity – what sort of systems, policies, procedures, experiences and opportunities might we want to create?

In the past two weeks, I watched my four-month-old son learn to blow raspberries. Inspired by reading that this would be good for his language development (seriously!), and knowing that his mother can’t blow raspberries, I made the sacrifice and regularly blew raspberries at him. He was surprised at the start, then he started laughing. Then he started trying it out for himself. It took a while, and he ‘fell over’ a bunch of times. Even now, his raspberries are particularly sloppy. But he watched me and he did it – today, he can reliably exit a room and blow me a raspberry!

Interesting skills are usually the most difficult to transfer. We can learn Newton’s Laws, but it’s another story entirely to learn to think as Newton thought. Those tacit and almost invisible skills that sometimes leave behind traces of brilliance are the ones where we lack the language to teach the skills. Often we lack the explicit knowledge as to what is being done at all. Yet an infant can learn without language. They just look out at the world with eyes wide open and a willingness to explore, experiment and experience.

Ultimately, most of what we learn is false. It’s our best guess, but at best it’s almost certainly wrong or flawed. We want to get to those moments of joy and pure experience when we can create genius.

I wonder what would happen if  we would just choose to put our desire to control to the side, and accept the ambiguity, the obstacles and the knowledge that even our best work will probably be wrong. And just keep blowing raspberries.

The other night, I was playing pool and sunk a ball that I didn’t expect to sink – in fact, it was so surprising that I asked myself, “How did I do that?!”

But it’s even more obvious when I look at a website that I like. Sometimes, I’ve been known to look at the source code to try to figure out how they did that.

And the cool thing is that when you ask that question, you get smarter.

Maybe you’ll actually figure out an answer, maybe not. I still have no idea how I sunk that ball in the corner pocket at the other end. But the experience of being exposed to uncertainty – The Power of Ambiguity – helps you get smarter.

A recent study published in Psychological Science had people look at the surreal work of author Kafka and film director David Lynch, and found that afterwards, people were better at seeing subtle patterns. Read more about this in Science Daily or the NYTimes.

This is another great reason to visit the art gallery. Another good reason to watch art house movies. And a great excuse for me to continue staring at the complex building sites around here.

Experience the surreal. Have a look around. And when you see something strange, or someone does something unexpected, be grateful – it’s an opportunity to make you smarter.

And thanks Kellie for tipping me off to this

You have to wonder what drives this kid… but you can be sure that it’s not the money!
Great work, DVD Jon!!! For the full story, have a look here…

Daniel Smith

“Risks, I like to say, always pay off. You learn what to do or what not to do.” Jonas Salk

As I was reflecting on the state of science in the modern world, I was called to remember these words. Bearing in mind that Salk went directly against the conventional wisdom of the age in order to produce his great achievement, I am prompted to ask what might inspire him. Such resilience and determination; one might question how he managed to do what everybody around him had told him was impossible and even wrong. Perhaps it is an example of how only unreasonable people are the only ones who change the world…
Really, he wasn’t that creative. He saw something that was working in one domain and simply applied it by analogy to another domain. What distinguishes him to me was that he saw possibility where others didn’t, and he had the tenacity to make that vision real.

Let us be grateful that most kids today don’t even know what polio is…

Daniel Smith

After all, it’s the learning that we need, not the sheet of paper!

As I thought about the ‘key learnings’ concept more generally, I heard yesterday that a Creation Science Museum had been established in the USA. While I have great respect for religious beliefs, I really have a hard time accepting that blindly accepting an arbitrary and unnecessarily complex explanation for the world is really ‘holy’.  It was reassuring to come across The Canon, a book that expresses basic science that we should all know. (Dworkin might go too far for my liking, I think he’s misled rather than deluded.)

If we’re going to compete in the real world, we need to know something about it!

There’s a lot of information that intelligent and informed members of the modern world need. Our schools are trying to disseminate some of that information, but with the acceleration in knowledge creation, we need to keep learning… fast! I guess it’s another reason to visit The Genius Project’s Zone.

Daniel Smith

My Motorola A1000 isn’t a great system. It’s small enough, is 3G, and has space for a TransFlash (now microSD) memory card for a gigabyte or two of memory. It uses the clunky Symbian operating system. And it’s not quite as sexy-looking as the iPhone. But it’s mostly the same. The W950 has 4Gb of ram (same as the iPhone) if you’re really after a walkman with phone functionality. The large touch-screen is probably a little better than my A1000 (or the A920 that I had before), but it’s still just a big touchscreen with the same resolution (320×480) as the Tungsten T3 that I bought years ago. Sure, it has WiFi and Bluetooth… but there’s nothing revolutionary there.

Maybe the design teams at Dopod might just need to tweak a few things, and we’ll have a great challenger on style, and I’m sure at a fraction of the price.

But to give Apple their due, they’ve done something that I really admire. They’ve focused. They haven’t produced a whole swag of versions, just two (only different in memory quantity). And while they haven’t done anything too revolutionary, they’re taken everything that’s available and (from first glance) put it together in a single, simple, satisifying parcel. Great work to the fast follower!

Daniel Smith

The kid (he’s a year younger than me!) seems to be pretty amazingly brilliant, and I started to wonder why. Maybe his father being a researcher for 3M could help, as could his mother being a research A/Prof Biochemist. When explaining Jawed’s interest in science and technology, I really got some insight into the mindset of this family: ‘To develop new things and be aware of new things, this is our life.’

He even chose his first college because it was the college that Netscape’s founder attended!

Creative genius is an amazing thing…

Daniel Smith

Prof Andrews pointed out that we’re likely to run into a severe skills shortage for scientists in the years ahead. Even now we’re trying to import talent from China and India, but as those economies develop there will be ever fewer of their best and brightest wanting to leave home. And to cultivate more scientists, we need not only to have more primary school teachers actually feel confident teaching maths and science, more students taking maths and science to senior, and more science graduates, we need more people feeling passionate about the scientific mindset. A brief profile appears on the Brisbane Institute page and in State Development.

Interestingly enough (at least for me), being a scientist has far more in common with being an artist than being in business. It is largely a mindset with enabling mental operations… here are a few differences that a study of Polymathy and Creativity found.

• Artists and Scientists have diverse intellectual interests, while Business-types are intellectually narrow
• Artists and Scientists have elaborate fantasies, while Business-types are more grounded and reality focused
• Artists and Scientists are sensorily responsive and motivated to express their experiences, while Business-types tend to be disinterested in sensuality

Compared with Artists, Scientists were more willing to work in structured environments and less introspective about sex (why the ‘artist’ persona can be so seductive?). However, when compared across 50 personality dimensions, it was found that there were only two where Artists and Scientists differed, and 15 where Artists and Scientists differed (statistically significantly) from Business-types.

Another interesting implication from the study was that arts education is necessary for scientific innovation…

(It is ironic that soon after Prof. Andrews’ presentation, Queensland Schools’ Scientific Assistants were on strike because the Education Department regards them as interchangable with administration officers. These are the very people who setup the experiments to teach our young people the value and excitement of science! Additionally, there is no role for Technology assistants within these schools – at my old high school, the guys in charge of the computers are paid for by the P&C rather than by the Department. I would have thought that being serious about having a ‘Smart State’ would demand that serious attention be given to the lead indicators and contributing factors, rather than just lamenting that things aren’t better. But maybe it’s just me…)

Finally, I was able to watch a debate at Customs House (hosted by The Brisbane Institute), regarding the privatisation of public education.  I greatly enjoyed this, although I thought that the arguments against could have offered something more than laughing at the suggestion and saying “we just couldn’t”. Perhaps the more advanced arguments raised in other parts of the world could be instructive, such as those presented at FastCompany here. To me, the challenge lies in defining the educational outcomes that would be the key performance indicators used for assessing performance of the providers – though this is a problem today as much as it would be then…

Daniel Smith

Also: Thanks to West for finding a few photos of me… almost the same shots here and here with John Kapeleris at the presentation from the Chief Scientist, Peter Andrews, a few weeks ago, here barely visible during Adrian di Marco’s presentation last May, and here over drinks with that same West afterwards. It’s great to have seen YNOT continue to kick goals – great work, guys!