My Favorite Quotes - Entry #2

 “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

Isaac Newton, Feb. 5, 1676.

          The quote above is from Isaac Newton.  I think it is important to learn what you can from the past.  Actually, the more I read what has been written in the past, the more I realize how many things have already been well-thought out by people much smarter than I am.  I can’t tell you how many times I think I have come up with a new idea or a new way of thinking, only to find that someone already thought it up decades, centuries, even millennia ago!

I don’t know if it is true that “the past repeats itself”.  I think it is just that we forgot what we learned before and have to re-learn it all over again.  There is no reason for us to repeat what has been done – if we can learn about it and learn from it, then we can build on it and go further.  That is the meaning of the quote above from Isaac Newton.  If we learn from what people have done in the past, we “stand on their shoulders” and therefore we can see farther.  The only way to make significant progress is to build on the past.

          I have found this principle to be true in my own personal and professional life.  In the late 90’s, I began embarking on a new area of research that was related to, but not directly in line, with my previous research.  Therefore I had a lot of learning to do.  Before I did anything else, I spent many many months reading the literature.  I spent many hours at the Allen Library at Case Western Reserve University, up in the dark creaky stacks (it is my favorite place on campus), searching through journal articles from the 1920’s and 30’s.  I read everything I could find, and then eventually went back and began categorizing the results to try to make sense of it all.  Eventually I began to understand what people had already discovered in the past and where they had left off.  I found that a lot of what I thought was unknown had actually been explored pretty extensively about 80 years earlier.  But I was able to understand their results even better because of the many other discoveries since that time.  I could put their work in the context of what we know now.  This allowed me to build directly on what they had discovered.  As a result of that fairly straightforward literature review, a whole new research area was jump-started for me.  It was truly “building on the shoulders of giants.” 

          One of my favorite writers, CS Lewis, talks about how we have a kind of modernity snobbery.  We think that we are smarter than those clueless ignorant people back in the Dark Ages, or the ancient Greeks, or the ancient Egyptians.  We consider them to be full of superstitions and not as smart as us.  That’s snobbery on our part.  Read what they wrote.  They were geniuses!  Learn from them.  We are not smarter than they were.  In fact, we prove ourselves to be much more foolish than any other generation if we think we can move forward without building directly on what they have done!  So…learn your history!  And for those of you who are in research like I am:  read the literature – even the ancient stuff.  Dust off those old journals, crack them open, and read.  Just because you can’t find an electronic copy of the article doesn’t mean that it isn’t important!  Read read read!