No wonder that the lightbulb is still the visual cliché for “new idea”—literally, the icon for invention. Yet even iconic status underrates it. Nordhaus’s research suggests that however much we venerate it, perhaps we do not venerate it enough. The price of light alone tells that story: it has fallen by a factor of 500,000, far faster than official statistics suggest, and so fast that our intuition cannot really grasp the miracle of it all.
