I was thinking a lot about the saying ‘standing on the shoulders of giants.’ This may seem like a really strange thing to be thinking about, and to that I would respond, yeah, I think about odd stuff sometimes.

Standing on the shoulders of giants basically means that all the efforts that are put into research, new products, motorcycle stunts, whatever, are built upon things that have been done in the past. No one would be doing a double back flip in the Olympic floor event if someone wouldn’t have done a single back flip to start out.

So we all build on the things that are. Cars get faster, stronger, more fuel efficient. It’s all about what direction you want to take things. A scientist may look at the human genome project and decide that manipulating genes could make athletes stronger, while another scientist sees that same line of reasoning helping people with ALS.

If you look at the ‘giants’ in the self-help business, they will be quick to reference their influences, whether they are Mother Theresa or Napoleon Hill, and if you look at their work, you can see where they took the original material and changed it to give it their own flavor and personal slant. That slant may or may not be an improvement. It really depends on your perspective.

What it comes down to is you can take other people’s ideas and experiences and use them to shorten your path to success. If you fall in with the right bunch you can leverage their experience and ideas with a mastermind group and really accelerate the process exponentially. That is one line of reasoning with this and it had proved to be very successful over time.

Henry Ford didn’t come up with the automobile or mass production, but he was the one who united those concepts and the rest, as they say, is history.

Not to belabor the point, but it’s kinda like the pyramids. As a large solid foundation is laid, you can build on that to reach for the sky.

The shoulders of giants can be illustrated in the basis of written language. The start of that was probably symbols to represent numbers; one scratch is one, ten scratches, ten – sort of like the old timey movies where a prisoner is counting the days until his release. Ancient languages emerged which evolved into what we have today.

But what happens when ‘facts’ are established and built on over centuries, when the facts are misconceptions? Eventually the whole structure falls to pieces. When Galileo announced that the sun was the center of the solar system, he ended up spending his life in prison for being a heretic. He was not a favored child of the Inquisition, to say the least. Time exonerated Galileo, as it will someday clear Darwin.
It’s the smallest bits of evidence that built a case. Observations. But observations obviously can be wrong, so as R.E.M. says “standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold.”
When so much happens from that practice, why deny the obvious benefits? Because you can end up in a rut.

Modern scientists, engineers and theorists all can fall into this trap very easily. It is the safe route to take and going outside the norm can be cause for imprisonment (like Galileo) or ostracism, like UFOlogists. (I’m not saying that UFO’s or Bigfoot is real, just that even having an interest in them leads to other work being taken less seriously.)

So there we are, possibly in a rut. Are there people who are exploring alternative sciences? Yes. But generally they aren’t going to get the funding that people who are more main stream are going to get. Interestingly enough most of the breakthroughs in modern history have come from smaller labs, independent researchers and even basement hobbyists.

So what is my conclusion here? It’s a mixed bag. In most instances standing on the shoulders of giants is going to make you bigger, badder, more efficient and give you better results quicker. The flip side of that coin is that you aren’t going to have divergent investigation that may be paradigm breaking. Bottom line, if you’re going to stand on those shoulders, make sure they are the right shoulders.

(Um, scratch box equals starting from scratch thinking outside a black box.)