Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall

well before Newton’s Principia, it was Johannes Kepler who first suggested the idea of a force from the sun driving the motion of the planets, Robert Hooke who first suggested a principle of universal gravity, Christiaan Huygens who showed that circular motion generates a centrifugal force, many who used Huygens’s law to derive the now-familiar form of gravity, Giovanni Borelli who explained the elliptical motion of Jupiter’s moons using gravitational forces, John Wallis and others who created the differential mathematics Newton used, and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus in the form we use today.

That story is harder to tell than the apple falling on Newton’s head.

Newton was a great synthesizer, just as Jobs was a great synthesizer.

uses of marijuana (“the Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing that he seeth … yet is he very merry”).

Jim Clark, who would go on to create Silicon Graphics; Nolan Bushnell, who would start Atari; John Warnock, who would create Adobe; and Alan Kay, who would help create the first graphics-enabled personal computer, the Alto, at Xerox.