These are my first two thoughts as well (although I think the second is partly a subset of the first—many great inventors had teams of unnamed helpers, or were just the last and luckiest of a long line of forgotten inventors who didn’t quite get there, or both).
My third thought is—maybe it’s just really hard for most people to feel amazement, in a world so filled with wondrous things, when you don’t yourself know how any of it works? Like, an LED is amazing compared to an incandescent lightbulb, but if you aren’t armed with a good understanding of physics and/or chemistry, it’s all just a light bulb. Landing a rocket on a barge is incredible, but if you’re not familiar with the relevant engineering, does it seem that much more incredible than landing even part of the space shuttle on a runway? Joy in the merely real is hard without a Feynman-level understanding of “mere.”
Sometimes I have to remind myself how amazing so many things are that I encounter everyday, let alone the things I see coming in the next handful of years. For me one of the few things that consistently induces wonder is the field of metamaterials. I’ve read enough papers to know at root how they work, but still, I now live in the world where physicists can make things they call “illusion devices” that can block or alter the transmission of light through open air! There are arrangements of pillars, or trees, or rocks, or tunnels that could make a building or ship (or city?) invisible to tsunamis and earthquakes! But to most people in my life, this just gets dismissed as magical thinking along with fusion and lots of other things they assume belong to fiction or the far future (a set which usually includes a large number of things that have already been known, done, or used industrially for decades).
These are my first two thoughts as well (although I think the second is partly a subset of the first—many great inventors had teams of unnamed helpers, or were just the last and luckiest of a long line of forgotten inventors who didn’t quite get there, or both).
My third thought is—maybe it’s just really hard for most people to feel amazement, in a world so filled with wondrous things, when you don’t yourself know how any of it works? Like, an LED is amazing compared to an incandescent lightbulb, but if you aren’t armed with a good understanding of physics and/or chemistry, it’s all just a light bulb. Landing a rocket on a barge is incredible, but if you’re not familiar with the relevant engineering, does it seem that much more incredible than landing even part of the space shuttle on a runway? Joy in the merely real is hard without a Feynman-level understanding of “mere.”
Sometimes I have to remind myself how amazing so many things are that I encounter everyday, let alone the things I see coming in the next handful of years. For me one of the few things that consistently induces wonder is the field of metamaterials. I’ve read enough papers to know at root how they work, but still, I now live in the world where physicists can make things they call “illusion devices” that can block or alter the transmission of light through open air! There are arrangements of pillars, or trees, or rocks, or tunnels that could make a building or ship (or city?) invisible to tsunamis and earthquakes! But to most people in my life, this just gets dismissed as magical thinking along with fusion and lots of other things they assume belong to fiction or the far future (a set which usually includes a large number of things that have already been known, done, or used industrially for decades).