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by
Safi Bahcall
Quantum mechanics, which held the answer, was twenty years away. Vail’s goal required technologies that did not yet exist, based on science that was not yet known.
the need for separating and sheltering radical ideas—the need for a department of loonshots run by loons, free to explore the bizarre.
the breakthroughs that change our world are born from the marriage of genius and serendipity. The magic of Bush and Vail was in engineering the forces of genius and serendipity to work for them rather than against them. Luck is the residue of design.
Leaders of powerful franchises across every industry routinely dismiss early-stage projects by picking at their warts (the
The major pharma companies passed on the idea for treating cancer by blocking tumor blood supply: the blood vessels known to surround tumors were dismissed as irrelevant inflammation.
metrosexual British spy who saves t...
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The goal of phase separation is to create a loonshot nursery.
Loose goals and dream sessions might help artists. But they will harm the coherence of an army.
During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.”
When Jobs returned twelve years later, he had learned to love his artists (Jony Ive) and soldiers (Tim Cook) equally.
glorified the rapid development of the first such “magic bullet” drug: Gleevec, one of the greatest breakthroughs in the history of treating cancer. Gleevec did in fact complete its clinical program astonishingly fast, still a record:
Druker fought for years to convince the company that he eventually worked with to move the project forward.
Jobs tried to sell Pixar, but he couldn’t find a buyer at acceptable terms. Later he described that time as being in “ankle-deep shit.” He stayed home rather than go to work.
“Some days you’re the dog. Some days you’re the fire hydrant.”
emergent properties.
Emergent properties are collective behaviors: dynamics of the whole that don’t depend on the details of the parts,
With a small shift in temperature, liquids suddenly change into solids. That
It was Branch Rickey who originated the saying cited in part one: “Luck is the residue of design.”
