79. Leaping To Solutions

My favorite part of the tweet was that avenues to a solution run outside the delimited domain. In other words, to find solutions one must make leaps. A possible form of criticism of proposed solutions then becomes to ask what leap was made. Proposed solutions for obesity typically involve something along the lines of diet and exercise. Recently, a leap was made by using pharmaceutical drugs like Ozempic to suppress appetite. One can argue about whether this leap was good or not. Making leaps is risky. Not all leaps are good though to truly solve a problem a leap must be made. Here are some examples of where positive leaps were made:

• Penicillin Discovery:Delimited Domain: Early 20th-century medical researchers were focused on chemical compounds to treat bacterial infections.Breakthrough: Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 from mold, a biological source, rather than a chemical one. This unexpected avenue revolutionized antibiotics.
• Quantum Mechanics:Delimited Domain: Classical physics, rooted in Newtonian mechanics, was the prevailing framework for understanding physical phenomena.Breakthrough: The discovery of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century introduced fundamentally new principles that classical physics couldn't explain, such as wave-particle duality and quantum entanglement.
• Structure of DNA:Delimited Domain: Genetics in the early 20th century focused on the concept of genes without understanding their physical structure.Breakthrough: The discovery of the double helix structure of DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953, informed by X-ray diffraction data, was a pivotal moment. This structural insight came from physics and chemistry, fields not traditionally associated with genetics.
• Internet Development:Delimited Domain: Communication technologies in the mid-20th century were focused on improving existing telephone and radio communication systems.Breakthrough: The development of the Internet, beginning with ARPANET in the 1960s, utilized packet-switching and a decentralized network structure, concepts that were outside the conventional telecommunication domain.
• Cryptography and WWII Codebreaking:Delimited Domain: Traditional military strategies and brute force were the primary methods for securing and deciphering communications.Breakthrough: Alan Turing and his team's use of mathematical algorithms and early computers to break the Enigma code during World War II introduced computational methods to cryptography, an unforeseen avenue at the time.
• Vaccination Development:Delimited Domain: Early medicine was largely focused on treating symptoms and infections rather than preventing them.Breakthrough: Edward Jenner's development of the smallpox vaccine in 1796 through the use of cowpox virus was an innovative approach that leveraged the body's immune response, a concept not widely understood or anticipated at the time.
• General Relativity:Delimited Domain: Newtonian gravity described gravity as a force acting at a distance.Breakthrough: Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1915 described gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy, a radical departure from the Newtonian perspective.
• Electricity and Magnetism:Delimited Domain: Prior to the 19th century, electricity and magnetism were thought to be separate phenomena.Breakthrough: James Clerk Maxwell's equations unified electricity and magnetism into a single theory of electromagnetism in the 1860s, leading to the development of modern electrical engineering.
• CRISPR Gene Editing:Delimited Domain: Genetic manipulation was limited to selective breeding and basic recombinant DNA technology.Breakthrough: The discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 technology in the 2010s allowed for precise, targeted modifications of the genome, a tool derived from the study of bacterial immune systems.
• Quantum Computing:Delimited Domain: Traditional computing based on classical bits and Boolean logic.Breakthrough: The development of quantum computers, which use qubits and principles of quantum mechanics, offers potential solutions to problems intractable for classical computers.

What leaps are you making?