Shoulders of Giants

Sir Isaac Newton, he of the falling apple fame (and oh yeah, gravity too), is supposed to have said these famous lines as a sign of humility:

“If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Mario Livio pointed out in his book, Is God a Mathematician?, that those lines may just have been Newton’s way of saying that he owed absolutely nothing to one of his rivals, Robert Hooke, since Hooke was quite short!

Then there’s Nick Selby, an upperclassman at Georgia Tech who told incoming freshmen during a memorable welcome speech recently (it’s gone viral on YouTube):

“Our mission as students is NOT to follow in the footsteps of the astronauts, Nobel Prize Laureates, and president who graduated before us, but to EXCEED their footsteps, CRUSH the shoulders of the giants upon whom we stand!”

Continuing in the Obama vein of “Yes, we can”, Selby thundered:

“If you want to change the world, you're at Georgia Tech, you can do that! If you want to build the Iron Man suit, you're at Georgia Tech—you can do that! If you want to play theme music during your convocation speech like a badass, we're at Georgia Tech—we can do that.”

Ah, the arrogance of youth!

Then again, wasn’t Neil Gaiman right (these lines are, coincidentally, from another convocation address) when he said:

“The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.”

And it’s that can-do-anything attitude and brashness that creates possibilities, which is why Selby ended his address to the freshmen with:

“Brace yourselves for a hell of a ride on your way to becoming a hell of an engineer.”