The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

In other words, you find something you are not looking for and it changes the world, while wondering after its discovery why it “took so long” to arrive at something so obvious. No journalist was present when the wheel was invented, but I am ready to bet that people did not just embark on the project of inventing the wheel (that main engine of growth) and then complete it according to a timetable. Likewise with most inventions.

Sir Francis Bacon commented that the most important advances are the least predictable ones, those “lying out of the path of the imagination.” Bacon was not the last intellectual to point this out. The idea keeps popping up, yet then rapidly dying out. Almost half a century ago, the bestselling novelist Arthur Koestler wrote an entire book about it, aptly called The Sleepwalkers. It describes discoverers as sleepwalkers stumbling upon results and not realizing what they have in their hands. We think that the import of Copernicus’s discoveries concerning planetary motions was obvious to him and to others in his day; he had been dead seventy-five years before the authorities started getting offended. Likewise we think that Galileo was a victim in the name of science; in fact, the church didn’t take him too seriously. It seems, rather, that Galileo caused the uproar himself by ruffling a few feathers. At the end of the year in which Darwin and Wallace presented their papers on evolution by natural selection that changed the way we view the world, the president of the Linnean society, where the papers were presented, announced that the society saw “no striking discovery,” nothing in particular that could revolutionize science.

We forget about unpredictability when it is our turn to predict. This is why people can read this chapter and similar accounts, agree entirely with them, yet fail to heed their arguments when thinking about the future.

Take this dramatic example of a serendipitous discovery. Alexander Fleming was cleaning up his laboratory when he found that penicillium mold had contaminated one of his old experiments. He thus happened upon the antibacterial properties of penicillin, the reason many of us are alive today (including, as I said in Chapter 8, myself, for typhoid fever is often fatal when untreated). True, Fleming was looking for “something,” but the actual discovery was simply serendipitous. Furthermore, while in hindsight the discovery appears momentous, it took a very long time for health officials to realize the importance of what they had on their hands. Even Fleming lost faith in the idea before it was subsequently revived.

In 1965 two radio astronomists at Bell Labs in New Jersey who were mounting a large antenna were bothered by a background noise, a hiss, like the static that you hear when you have bad reception. The noise could not be eradicated—even after they cleaned the bird excrement out of the dish, since they were convinced that bird poop was behind the noise. It took a while for them to figure out that what they were hearing was the trace of the birth of the universe, the cosmic background microwave radiation. This discovery revived the big bang theory, a languishing idea that was posited by earlier researchers. I found the following comments on Bell Labs’ website commenting on how this “discovery” was one of the century’s greatest advances:

Dan Stanzione, then Bell Labs president and Lucent’s chief operating officer when Penzias [one of the radio astronomers involved in the discovery] retired, said Penzias “embodies the creativity and technical excellence that are the hallmarks of Bell Labs.” He called him a Renaissance figure who “extended our fragile understanding of creation, and advanced the frontiers of science in many important areas.”

Renaissance shmenaissance. The two fellows were looking for bird poop! Not only were they not looking for anything remotely like the evidence of the big bang but, as usual in these cases, they did not immediately see the importance of their find. Sadly, the physicist Ralph Alpher, the person who initially conceived of the idea, in a paper coauthored with heavyweights George Gamow and Hans Bethe, was surprised to read about the discovery in The New York Times. In fact, in the languishing papers positing the birth of the universe, scientists were doubtful whether such radiation could ever be measured. As happens so often in discovery, those looking for evidence did not find it; those not looking for it found it and were hailed as discoverers.