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164 Creativity

radio traffic; the high-frequency, long-range direction finding that allowed the
Allies to locate German submarines in the North Atlantic on the basis of their
radio transmissions; the development of the Norden bombsight that allowed
the Allied bomber fleets to hit their targets from high enough an altitude that
they were almost out of range from the anti-aircraft batteries on the ground;
the insight that a nuclear chain reaction could be made into an atomic bomb;
and so on. The consequences of these inventions depended on the authoritarian
structure of the military. It did not matter that the majority of pilots who flew
in the Battle of Britain did not understand how radar works, nor was the battle
won because a majority of Britain’s population shared the belief that enemy
airplanes could be detected at a distance with the help of radio waves. The war
effort provided a machinery by which creative achievements in science and
technology were translated into collective action. Commanders issued orders
and men and machines moved.
In other types of historical systems, novelties scale up via other types
of processes. For example, a revolutionary change in a scientific discipline
requires widespread adoption of a new theory by many individual research-
ers. The scaling mechanism that connects the individual insight with a scien-
tific revolution is in this case more like diffusion than top-down execution.
When the Russian chemist D. I. Mendeleyiev produced the first version of the
periodic table of the chemical elements, other chemists recognized its impor-
tance and the new theory spread. (The innocent-looking word “spread“
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glosses over the complexities of the evaluation of evidence, peer review pub-
lication and the training of graduate students.) Popular fads and fashions also
diffuse in a bottom-up manner. Analysts like Susan Blackmore, Aaron Lynch
and others have suggested that small pieces of popular culture, so-called
memes, are analogous to genes and diffuse via Darwinian processes of varia-
tion and repli cation. In markets, the equilibrium mechanisms of micro-eco-
nomics predict that a new product or mode of production will spread through
competition. The many producers and consumers in the market might have
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very different internal structure depending on the market and the individ-
ual agent’s role, but they self-organize into an equilibrium state by interact-
ing according to simple rules of maximizing benefit, or so micro-economics
claims. For present purposes, the important point is that the mechanism by
which insights diffuse vary from one type of historical system to another.
But the complexity of the mechanisms that maintain historical systems
obscure how the production of a single-point breakthrough can affect the
entire historical system in which it appears and cause an increase in its rate
of change. It cannot matter for the outcome of the Battle of Britain how