Paradigm Shifts

In the history of information theory, and science in general, one of the most influential research papers of the twentieth century is Claude Shannon’s “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”

Over the course of a few short years, a technological revolution shook the world. New businesses rose and fell, fortunes were made and lost, the practice of reporting the news was reinvented, and the relationship between leaders and the public was thoroughly transformed, for better and for worse. The years were 1912 to 1927 and the technological re

The formal purpose of the new solid-state group was not so much to build something as to understand it. Officially, Shockley’s men were after a basic knowledge of their new materials; only in the back of their minds did a few believe they would soon find something useful for the Bell System.

And yet Kelly would say at one point, “With all the needed emphasis on leadership, organization and teamwork, the individual has remained supreme—of paramount importance. It is in the mind of a single person that creative ideas and concepts are born.”40 There was an essential truth to this, too—John Bardeen suddenly suggesting to the solid-state gr

This simple proposal—the standardization of that most modest of industrial components—inspired the development of interchangeable parts.14 “He helped spark the second Industrial Revolution,” says Tom Knight, the MIT synthetic biologist. “You can’t overstate the importance of standardization to the creative process. An inventor wants to invent, not