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At first, we might think that both could be completed by any individual, but it turns out that we actually need many active participants involved in both parts of the process. As we look really closely, the two key parts of the innovation process—the idea and the implementation—can be seen within a great diversity of industries and disciplines. This is essentially the idea in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 best-selling book, Outliers: The story of Success. Extraordinary achievement is as much about talent and good ideas as it is about the available opportunity.
The architects come up with blueprints for a new structure, essentially the catalytic idea stimulated by a need, and then with funding and other support, the construction and implementation team physically builds the structure to make it happen.
School administrators and the board of education come up with the new curriculum, while the teachers (and very often their students) are the ones to implement it in the classroom.
Theoretical physicists hypothesize new ideas and insights while the experimental physicists typically are the ones to test the theories and look for critical data to prove whether the theories and findings are accurate. This could be said for nearly all fields of science, health, technology and so on. However, one of the largest disparities between the two key parts of the innovation process can be found in the field of physics.
The discovery of the elementary particle we know as quarks is a really good example of this notion. The idea of the quark was originally proposed by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964, leading many people to attribute the idea uniquely to them. However, the experimentalists that further advanced the development of the quark model— often not mentioned along with Gell-Mann and Zweig. These individuals included Henry Way Kendall, and also Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor for their pioneering investigations involving deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons. Their efforts led to all three winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1990. Up until their 1990 investigation the reality of quarks was said to be a purely mathematical phenomenon by many individuals in the field. Without the contributions of Kendall, Friedman and Taylor the quark model would have remained a theory and physicists would still be attempting to confirm the physical reality of quarks.
This illustrates the concept of a network of minds enabling the development of the next innovation and the array of support mechanisms and collaborations to implement the innovation thoroughly because we have the network of minds enabling the development(Gell-Mann and Zweig) and the array of support implementing the innovation(Kendall, Friedman, and Taylor), which without either component, it would be hard to determine if any progress in this research would prevail. This trend can be seen in a plethora of different scientific breakthroughs like Paul Dirac who theorized the reality of the positron in 1928, while Seth Neddermeyer and Carl David Anderson were the ones who proved its existence in 1930.
In more recent years, we witnessed the two components of the innovation process come together at the European Organization for Nuclear Research(CERN), proved the existence of the Higgs particle via the Large Hadron Collider. Mark Levinson’s and David Kaplan’s 2013 documentary, Particle Fever, focuses on the collaboration of the network of minds enabling development of the next innovation and the array of support mechanisms to implement the innovation and the incredible things they can achieve when they put their differences aside.
The Documentary, Particle Fever, follows the process of the launch of the Large Hadron Collider and the means to discover the Higgs Particle. The film focuses on a group of theoretical physicists providing conceptual framework, as well as a group of experimental physicists implanting the conceptual framework at CERN. The film highlights the difference in processes between theorists and experimentalists, how at times their disagreements can cause them to butt heads and at other times their reliance on one another to achieve shared goals. 10,000 people of over 100 nationalities.
After a recent viewing of Particle Fever, my own awareness of the disparity between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists was greatly expanded. However, I was also left with a great feeling of comfort or satisfaction knowing the marvelous things they can achieve when they come together and collaborate. To put the disparity between theoretical and experimental physicists into perspective, I will quote experimental physicist Monica Dunford in a 2014 Google Talk in which the seven key participants of the film talk through the key ideas behind development of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, in which she then mentions a colleague in grad school who was a theoretical physicist that wanted to switch to experimental so they could “bang around with hammers all day” because that is what they thought the job was. Dunford replies with “I don’t think I’ve ever used a hammer once in my career” and she says “Is that really what theorists think about us, that we are just some cave people”. This just proves that in physics, experimentalists and theorists don’t always see eye-to-eye and can often butt heads. This can observed all throughout the film, the theoretical physicists and experimental physicists frequently do not see eye-to-eye.
Although they have their differences and at times support different theories, like the multiverse theory predicting the mass of the Higgs particle to be around 140 giga-electronvolts and the supersymmetry there predicting the particle will have a mass of around 115 giga-electronvolts. Both groups put their differences aside to further our understanding of particle physics and the origin of our universe. At the end of the film the team at CERN announces the confirmed existence of a particle they believe to be the Higgs particle that has a mass of around 125 giga-electronvolts. They go on to discuss how the mass of the particle was almost directly in between the mass of the two supported theories and that none of it would have been possible if they had not considered both theories while conducting their experiments and only relied on one of them. This discovery led to many significant theories in particle physics being confirmed such as symmetry breaking and how atoms first gained their mass after the Big Bang, putting us one step closer to understanding the origin of the universe.
Neither group can exist without the other. This can be seen even in recent years in the field of biology involving the protein folding problem that scientists have been trying to solve for over 50 years.
The problem was introduced in 1972 when Christian B. Anfinsen theorized that a protein’s amino acid sequence will determine the structure of the protein. The function of the protein is based on how it folds and the structure it takes, the problem was that we could not predict how a protein would fold and what structure it would take.
Scientists in the field struggled with this theory until AlphaFold was introduced in 2018. AlphaFold is an A.I. program created by Alphabet’s/Google’s DeepMind which predicts the structure of proteins with great accuracy. With AlphaFold being used to predict the structure of proteins several advances in medicine and vaccines were able to be contrived.
One of the most significant being an issue that affected nearly the whole planet, the SARS-CoV-2 virus (COVID-19). Using alpha fold, the community was able to predict the structure of two of the main COVID-19 proteins, ORF3a and ORF8. By discovering the structure of the two proteins the community was able to share the findings and increase the rate at which a vaccine could be made available.
Without, the theorists and experimentalists coming together to solve this protein folding problem that existed for over 50 years, it may have been a much larger amount of time before the public had access to the vaccine. It goes to show that often theorists and experimentalists consider themselves extremely different from one another, no progress could be made without either party’s contribution.
There is neither a law of physics nor economics that prevents us from quadrupling the productive use of energy and other resources. Rather, it is much more an issue of imagination and our political will to get it done.
– John A. “Skip” Laitner