Unlocking Alchemy (part 2) : How 0 + 0 = Infinity
E=mc^2. Our lives cannot exist without the energy from the sun. But before we humans recently learnt that nuclear fusion is possible, it would have been impossible to conceive that so much energy could be released from hydrogen atoms.
Our Universe seems to be a generator of possibilities, from 0 to 1. And within it, this leap from 0 to 1 has occurred again and again, from darkness to light, from minerals to life.
How is that possible?!
I am intrigued about how infinite value could be created by combining seemingly useless building blocks in the right way, at the right time. This is true from communication to nuclear fusion, from DNA to wealth creation. But only if the right combination of conditions are met. When that happens, value is unlocked, from 0 to infinity. Like magic.
Part 1: In defence of the seemingly useless
For many years, I was judgmental about how certain pursuits are useless. For instance, I was convinced that playing video games is obviously a total waste of time. It’s a useless activity that one should avoid. But now, it looks like I was mistaken.
It seems that certain videos games are like team sports for the mind. They can be training grounds for mental agility, strategic thinking, and community building. One could argue that students learn more transferable mental skills from games than sitting passively in a classroom. And there are certainly success stories. Robert Hohman founded Glassdoor after playing War of Warcraft for a whole year and hitting its maximum level. Stewart Butterfield founded Flickr and Slack, as a pivot from his failing gaming startups.
It may seem ironic and surprising that billion dollar startups in the world of work have roots from games. But if we trace how computers emerge in history, this is a typical trajectory. Games played a role again and again, from the music box to Atari. They captured people’s imagination, and enabled us to construct alternative possibilities. As a leading venture capitalist Chris Dixon said, the next big disruptive technology will start out looking like a toy.
Part 2: Why pursue something that smells interesting?
It’s mind boggling that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. I once asked Brian Schmidt, who won the Nobel Prize for it, how he chose what problem to work on. And he answered, ‘whatever that feels interesting’.
It’s incredible that many of the most useful technologies today came from something that’s once considered to be useless, a trivial toy at best. In astronomy, the idea that we could get an object to orbit the Earth must have seemed cool but irrelevant. But now we use satellites everyday.
The big question is how does this mechanism work? How can being intrigued by something that’s seemingly useless lead to the most useful thing in the world!? Is it just luck? Or is it a powerful strategy?
Part 3: Peacock’s tail - a portal to new possibilities?
Darwin was puzzled why the peacock’s tail exist. Its spectacular colours tend to attract predators so he wondered why something so counterproductive to survival could have evolved.
But now, most biologists believe that peacock’s tail is a costly signal for fitness that can’t be faked. It demonstrates to the peahens that the peacock has superior endowments that he can afford to be handicapped by the colours and still survive.
This explanation is by now well supported. But I’ve been wondering if doing something new is an end in itself, in addition to being a mean to an end. If the Universe has any pattern, it is the generation of novelty. For whatever reasons, more and more complex forms have continued to emerge. For example, evolving from light sensitive single cell bacteria to stargazing humans. For whatever reasons, even a human infant is fascinated by novelty. It can’t help but pay attention to it.
As a wild speculation, perhaps the peacock’s tail is a portal to new possibilities. It’s useless in one dimension, but within it contains the seeds for opening up new dimensions previously unimaginable. In other words, doing something new expands the possibility space we can interact with. It may not have any immediate pay-off, but the practice of doing so expands our versatility in dealing with future situations.
Whether it's wondering about apples falling from a tree (Newtown) or playing with plates wobbling in the air (Feynman), it turns out that sometimes, indulging strange curiosities transforms the world. Perhaps that’s why the tendency to pursue what smells interesting has evolved. It encourages us to find the combinatory passcode for unlocking possibilities. If we humans only did activities judged to be obviously useful, we might still be gathering firewoods in caves. We would never have tried the counterintuitive threads that can only be combined years later to weave a new picture.