Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In her book on the small inventions that make a huge difference, Nuts and Bolts , Roma Agrawal starts with the humble nail: “The nail enables us to connect things together. That might not sound like much, but the act of joining two things was once radical.” Complex systems could only be built when we could fasten things together. She includes the derivatives of the nail (rivet, screw, bolt) as part of her description, since all of them “enabled robust connections… at a vast range of scales”.   To make nails, one first needed to find metals, understand their properties, and figure ways to shape them. Metals can be hammered straight into other materials; and can be shaped into a sharp point. This isn’t a trivial point – most other materials snap or deform if you hammer them. But to shape metals into nails, humans had to find way to generate very high heat and then invent other tools to hold and beat them.   For a long time, nail making was hard (and skilled) work, wh...

In his book, Why We Work , Barry Schwartz makes an interesting point about discoveries: “When a scientist, or anyone else, discovers something, it doesn’t occur to us to ask whether that discovery should exist… If someone were to suggest that the Higgs boson shouldn’t exist, we’d wonder what mind-altering substance he’d ingested.” And inventions? “Inventions, in contrast, are a whole other story. Inventions characteristically have moral dimensions. We routinely ask whether they should exist. We wonder what’s good (life improving) about them, and what the drawbacks are. We debate whether their wide distribution should go forward, and if so, with what kind of regulation.” Ok, so there’s nothing new or interesting in what’s said above. Where it gets interesting is in what happens next: “Discoveries tell us things about how the world works. Inventions use those discoveries to create objects or processes that make the world work differently. The discovery of pathogens leads t...