Neil deGrasse Tyson Demystifies Breakthroughs | Breakthrough

There's a stereotype of discoveries and breakthroughs. The stereotype is: at one point you don't know something, and then there's a Eureka moment, and then you know something, and that's a breakthrough. The very word itself implies some barrier through which you pass with some force. Okay? Otherwise, it would be walk-through instead of breakthrough.

But I would claim that most discoveries are walk-throughs, not breakthroughs. You're not actually breaking things. You say, "Oh, you got that? You got that? Let me put it together, and I have a new thing." Oh, that's cool! Did you break through anything? No, no. It was like a next thing you would do with the other things that exist on your table right now.

We do occasionally have literal breakthroughs, yes, but most of what we experience in life and enjoy in life as the product of science and technology are not breakthroughs. They're just not the discoveries that came next after other discoveries enabled it. You can focus on those things that broke through, but that feeds the bias that that's how we move forward in the world.

Was it a breakthrough that someone decided to print books small so that you can carry them with you instead of only having to be in a library? Make the jackets out of paper instead of boards so that they're light? Was that a breakthrough? Just say, "That's kind of a fun idea." You know, that's a really trivial example, but it's the kind of example I'm talking about.

So much of what we take for granted, somebody actually had to think up first but didn't have to break through a damn thing to get there. Not everyone's brain is wired to think up these new applications of what is already there or to invent a new thing that does not previously exist. That's a very special subset of who walks among us as human beings, and we need them. Otherwise, we stall.

We stagnate. If a nation does not have such people, then the nation has to follow everybody else who does, and they dance to the tune played by other nations who do invest in that way. What I find fun are products that get invented, and you wonder, "No one will ever need or want to use that," and then five years later, somebody finds a use, and then you can't live without it.