Page 70 - Deep Learning

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The Production of Novelty

Indeed, it is obvious that invention or discovery … takes place by combining ideas.
Jacques Hadamard 1

Western culture recognizes three fields of activity as particularly devoted to
the exercise of originality. artists aim to create original works, scientists seek
to discover previously unknown phenomena and technologists strive to invent
new devices and techniques. The three verbs create, discover and invent jointly
triangulate the application of mind to the production of novelty.
Novelties are diverse in character and consequence. in 1935, when war in
europe seemed unavoidable, arnold F. Wilkins, a junior scientific officer of
the British National Physical Laboratory, was asked by his superior, super-
intendent robert Watson Watt, to calculate whether radio waves could be
emitted with enough force and precision to boil the blood of the pilot of an
approaching enemy aircraft. Watson Watt had in turn been asked this ques-
tion by a member of the Committee for the Scientific Study of air Defence.
When Wilkins’s calculations showed that this death ray concept was not
workable, his superior asked how radio technology could be used to defend
Britain instead. in a momentous act of inspiration, Wilkins proposed that
perhaps we can detect enemy air planes at a distance by bouncing radio waves
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off them. Calculations showed that a detection device, unlike the death ray,
could work. Five years later, when the bombers of the German Luftwaffe
attacked, a string of radar stations along Britain’s east coast gave the British
royal air Force (raF) advance warning of their approach. Without this
advantage, the raF might not have been able to fight off the Luftwaffe and
Germany might have invaded Britain, in which case World War ii would
have unfolded differently. Seldom have so many benefited so greatly from so
simple an idea.

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