Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the cost come down again. From the physics analogy, we call this “tunnel-
ing through the cost barrier.” You end up with big savings that cost less
than small savings. Let me give some examples of how that works.
In the 1960s I worked for Edwin Land, the inventor of the instant cam-
era, who I once heard say that invention is simply a sudden cessation of stu-
pidity. (Someone else recently called it a “spasm of lucidity.”) Land also said
that people who seem to have had a new idea have often simply stopped
having an old idea, which is quite true, and not easy to do. We are slowly
getting better at it. Consider figure 3, which comes from the great engineer
Paul MacCready, chairman of AeroVironment in Monrovia, California.
Many of you have probably seen textbooks on creative thinking, in
which you are given this problem of finding the solution that connects
these nine dots with only four lines without lifting your pen from the
paper.You are supposed to think “Let's see, one, two, three, four, oops, five,
that doesn't work. One, two, that doesn't work.” Eventually you are sup-
posed to think out of the box. One day, Professor Edward DeBono, the
British guru of cognition, reportedly came into his class quite irked because
one of his students had just solved the problem in three lines. If it makes
you feel better, I didn't see this at first, either, but of course, these are not
mathematical dots with zero diameter, and therefore, as long as your paper
is wide enough, you can always draw the lines in that way.
Then the students started feeling a bit liberated, and they started solving
the problem in one line. It turns out there are a lot of ways to do that. For
example, there is the Origami method, and there is the geographic method,
and there is the one where you get out the scissors. Or, there is the statis-
tical method, in which you just crumple up the paper, and if you stab it
enough times with a pencil, eventually it will go through all nine dots at
once.The one I like best came from a 10-year-old girl who took a big wide
thing, like a paint brush, and went “slush” through all nine dots and said
FIGURE 3
