In rec.aviation.student Le Chaud Lapin wrote:
On Jun 16, 11:27?am, wrote:
? ? ? ? ? The guys who invented the transistor (Brattain and all)
understood electricity and were engineers who could design and build
electronic devices. That's the equivalent of knowing how to fly and
how to build aircraft. They were not new to electronics, they didn't
stumble across semiconductors by accident. Solid-state selenium diodes
(not to mention crystal diodes) had already been in use by then for
some time, and so they built on the knowledge of other folks.

There are certain pieces of knowledge that are applicable and certain
pieces that are that. That's all I am saying. I know people who
studied aero/astro for years and had never designed and airplane, but
could if they had to.

I'm sure they could design a *bad* airplane. Designing a good one takes
experience, not just theoretical knowledge.

With regard to transistors, I have only been a
a clean room, and I have never operated say, a chemical-vapor
deposition (CVD) machine, but I know how it works.

That's miles away from being able to actually invent them from scratch.

The question is essentially:

"What knowledge of old is useful to create the new?"

A key word in this question is "new", which could be interpreted as
"new new" or "incrementally new". Incrementally new is best served by
examining state-of-art and making incremental improvement. New new is
best served by rethinking from a more fundamental perspective. I
contend that, in any field, there is a large percentage of researchers
who do not bother thinking about "new new", because they regard it as
a fruitless endeavor or too risky. But sooner or later, "new new"
reveals itself, and the cylce repeats.

I contend that "new new" simply does not exist. *All* advances are
incremental. To the extent that any advance appears to be revolutionary,
it is only because its predecessors are not widely known.

A great example of this is the transistor. To the general public, it looks
like this great sudden flash of innovation. Looking at the actual history
of the field, it was the culmination of years of incremental advances.

If you think I'm wrong, I'd love to see some counterexamples. Especially
if you can give counterexamples which not only were not incremental, but
which were invented by someone who was not already an expert in the field.

--
Mike Ash
Radio Free Earth
Broadcasting from our climate-controlled studios deep inside the Moon