Fifty-two minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the Grand Café here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England, in 1650. That's its great claim to fame. And I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the Starbucks tour of historic England --
在幾分鐘之前,我照了這張相片 距離這裡有十個街區。 這是牛津的「偉人咖啡館」。 我為它照相的原因是那裡原本 是全英格蘭第一家咖啡館, 開幕於 1650 年。 這造就了它的廣大名氣。 而我要說它的故事, 不是因為要帶你們進行一場老英格蘭的 星巴克之旅,
(Laughter)
而是因為
but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment.
英國的咖啡館是 知識發展的重要關鍵, 過去五百年間,偉大知識在此茁壯, 今日我們稱此為「啟蒙時代」。
And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment in part because of what people were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day in and day out, from dawn until dusk, was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin, particularly around 1650, and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice, because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively, until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day.
而咖啡館就在啟蒙運動萌芽期間 扮演一個非常重要的角色, 有部份是因為人們都會聚集在這裡用餐飲。 因為在咖啡與茶 普遍英國文化之前, 人們 —— 不論精英還是平民 —— 從早晨到黃昏,從日出到日落, 都是喝酒的。 酒精是屬於白天的飲品。 你會以一點啤酒配早餐,紅酒配午餐, 而少量琴酒 —— 特別在 1650 年代, 將此混合一點啤酒及紅酒 是一天結束時的飲品。 在那個時候算是個健康的選擇,沒錯, 因為當時的水質太差而不適飲用。 因此實際上,在咖啡館興起之前, 幾乎所有人一整天都在酒醉的狀態裡。
(Laughter)
And you can imagine what that would be like in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day --
而你能想像那是什麼樣子,對,在你的生活中 —— 我知道你們有些人真的就是這樣 ——
(Laughter)
如果你整天在咖啡館暢飲,
and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life. You would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more alert. So it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee.
你的日子會一直在沉靜和興奮之間轉換, 你就會有好靈感。 你的思考會更為清晰警覺。 所以完全不意外地,思想的大綻放是基於 茶和咖啡飲品開始盛行於英格蘭。
But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where people would get together, from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense; ideas would get together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story.
而讓咖啡館佔有重要地位的要素還有 建築的空間。 咖啡館是個讓不同背景的人們 聚集在一起的空間, 大家會分享不同領域的知識。 這是一個空間,就像 Matt Ridley 說的那樣,思想交配的地方。 某方面來說,咖啡館就是思想的洞房。 各方的思想會在此交合。 而這時期的創新達到一個驚人的數量, 正因為人們的生活有一家咖啡館。
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity? And what I've done is, I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse, I've looked at media environments like the World Wide Web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rain forests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation. And what I've been looking for is shared patterns, signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and apply to our own lives or our own organizations or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few.
最近五年,我不斷思索關於咖啡館 的種種事聞, 因為我一直在探討 這樣一個問題: 偉大思想是怎麼誕生的。 什麼樣的環境 能引發革新及創造力 至非凡的境界? 這樣的環境會有什麼要素 —— 簡言之,什麼是有創造力的空間? 而我的作法是 觀察像咖啡館那樣的環境; 有引發爆炸性革新的媒體環境, 像全球資訊網。 我回到城市最初發展史; 我還去了生物的環境, 如珊瑚礁及熱帶雨林, 它們在生物學的創新表現也相當不凡。 我一直尋找的是他們共同的模式, 這些環境重複顯現的, 標誌性的特徵。 是否有一種我們可以借鑒的模式 讓我們採用來改善人類全體的生活, 或是組織, 或是讓我們的環境更加創意及新穎? 我覺得我已經發現了幾個。
But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is, you have to do away with the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the "flash" of insight, the "stroke" of insight, we have "epiphanies," we have eureka moments, we have the "light bulb" moments, right? All of these concepts, as rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing. It's something that happens often in a wonderful, illuminating moment.
但你必須釐清這種創新模式, 而且,如果要真正瞭解這些原則, 你得避免循著傳統模式走, 包括我們習慣的隱喻以及語言, 傳統模式一直限制著 我們現今對於「創意」的概念。 我們有非常多的詞彙 來形容瞬間的靈感。 例如「靈光一閃」、 「當頭棒喝」, 有「頓悟」,也有 "Eureka!" (大發現), 我們還會以發亮的燈泡形容靈感,對吧? 這些概念, 戴著華麗修辭形式, 都表達出一個基本設想, 一個思想,是獨立的事物, 這種事總是會在 神奇的啟蒙時刻來臨。
But, in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea -- a new idea -- is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: How do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of a human brain.
但實際上,我會主張,而且是你應該先知道的 —— 一個思想就是一個網路, 在最基本的概念上是如此。 我的意思是,靈感是你大腦內發生的事。 一個新思想就是神經元建立的新網路, 你大腦內的神經元會互相同步反應。 這是一個前所未有的新結構。 而關鍵的問題是:如何讓你的大腦進入 更容易形成新網路的環境? 而事實證明,這種對外網路的模式 模仿很多
So the metaphor I'd like to use,
人類心智的網路模式。
I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent -- a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero has an organization called Design That Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple -- we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So the technology is there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a midsized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. So you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and it ends up being useless.
所以我想以此來比喻 它是來自 一個偉大想法的故事,相當現代 —— 比 1650 年代來講現代很多。 有個超棒的夥伴叫 Timothy Prestero, 有家公司,或是說組織,叫做 "Design that Matters" (切實的設計)。 他們決定解決一個迫切的問題, 像是開發中國家面對的糟糕問題: 嬰兒死亡率。 其中一件令人沮喪的事,我們知道 透過現代的嬰兒保育器 在任何情況下, 基本上只要為早產兒做好保暖措施 —— 這很簡單 —— 我們就能在相同環境下,減少一半的嬰兒死亡率。 所以,就是這個技術, 這個技術是已開發國家的標準設施。 問題是,如果你買個四萬美元的保育器, 把它送到非洲 的一個中等規模的村落, 它會良好運作一至兩年 然後會故障、失修, 再也不堪使用。 因為缺乏整個系統的備件, 也沒有在地的專家 來維修這四萬美元的設備。 所以最後會有這個問題:援助基金用來 資助這些先進電子產品到開發中國家, 到頭來完全派不上用場。
So what Prestero and his team decided to do was to look around and see: What are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? And what they noticed was, they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota 4Runner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?" And this is what they came up with. It's called the NeoNurture device. From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm, it runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now that's a great idea, but I'd like to say that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand-new incubator, state-of-the-art technology. But more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby.
所以 Prestero 以及他的團隊決定這麼做, 他們觀察周圍環境:在這些開發中國家 有什麼豐富的資源? 他們發現這些地方沒有什麼錄影機, 也沒有微波爐, 但那裡的汽車,似乎運作得還不錯。 豐田 "Forerunner" SUV 車 在這些地方很普遍。 當地的人們看來是有一定水準的汽車保養知識。 所以他們開始構想, 「我們能做出一種完全 由汽車零件所組成的保育器嗎?」 而這是他們最後的成品。 這叫「新型保育設備」。 外表看來像是你會在 歐美的現代醫院看到的設備。 而裡面全都是汽車零件。 它有風扇、保暖用的頂燈, 還有開門警示鈴。 它的動力是汽車蓄電池。 因此你只需要豐田的備件 就能夠修理它的頂燈 以及保養整個機器。 對,這是個很棒的點子。但我要說,事實上, 這個點子本身也是一個很好的比方。 我們喜歡有突破性的想法,你知道, 就像四萬美元的全新款保育器, 全國最先進的技術, 但更多的想法則是從周圍的事物 擷取一小部份後,拼湊起來的。 我們汲取他人的思想,
We take ideas from other people, people we've learned from, people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens. And that means we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right? I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there, thinking a deep thought, the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions, people from different backgrounds. So if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that, strangely enough, look a bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, it's part of my message here.
從我們的老師,或是在咖啡店交談的朋友們, 而我們將這些小零件融合出一個新形式,創造新的事物。 這就是創新的由來。 這代表我們必須改變對「創新」的既定概念 以及深思創新的本質,沒錯。 現在我們有一個例子。 另一個是牛頓,以及在劍橋那棵蘋果樹。 這是位於牛津的牛頓像。 你知道,你坐在那裡進行沉思, 然後一顆蘋果從樹上掉下來,你就發現地心引力了。 事實上,這歷史性的創新發源地 會看起來像這樣,沒錯。 這是威廉·賀加斯的名畫,主題是酒館內的政治應酬, 但這表現了當時咖啡館的樣貌。 這是一種混雜的環境, 讓各方想法聚集一堂, 在此聚集的人們會有 新穎、有趣、不可預測的交流 —— 來自不同背景。 所以,如果我們試著建立具有創意的組織, 我們需要多一點像這酒館一樣的空間,很怪沒錯。 你們的辦公室也該是這樣, 這是我想表達的意思之一。
And one of the problems with this is that, when you research this field, people are notoriously unreliable when they actually self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job: when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to colleagues at the watercooler ... And he recorded all these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image -- you know, they're poring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample, and -- "Eureka!" -- they've got the idea.
而對於此,其中一個問題是 人們實際上 —— 當你研究這個領域就會發現 —— 人是非常不可靠的, 當他們自己表述 在哪裡產生好點子, 或是他們偉大思想的故事時,尤其是如此。 而在幾年前,一個很優秀的研究者 Kevin Dunbar, 決定出去走走, 他決定用老大哥(小說《1984》中的獨裁人物)的方法 來找出最好的思想是如何誕生的。 他走訪世界各地的科學實驗室, 並且錄影實驗室成員 的工作細節。 所以,當實驗室成員使用顯微鏡時, 或是和同事談論水冷卻器時,以至於全部的工作, 他都錄下了對話, 並試著找出最重要的想法 發生的那一刻。 當我們想像實驗室科學家的傳統形象時, 我們就會想到,科學家守著顯微鏡, 並觀察組織樣本內的細節。 然後,「喔,我發現了!」靈光一現。
What happened, actually, when Dunbar looked at the tape, is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. And something about that environment -- and I've started calling it the "liquid network," where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other -- that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation.
實際上,Dunbar 在錄影帶中發現的 是這樣,幾乎所有重大突破的靈感 並不是在實驗室中、顯微鏡前誕生的。 靈感都是誕生在 實驗室每週的會議中, 當大家聚在一起,並分享他們最新的資料以及發現時, 時常也會有人報告他們的錯誤、 故障,他們發現的狀況。 還有一些和環境有關的事, 而我稱它為「液態網路」, 聚集各方思想的網路, 各色的背景,各色的志趣, 互相衝撞,互相對映 —— 這種環境,事實上 就是引發創新的最佳環境。
The other problem that people have is, they like to condense their stories of innovation down to shorter time frames. So they want to tell the story of the eureka moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there, and I had it all, suddenly, clear in my head." But, in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the "slow hunch." We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but, in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but can't quite solve.
另外一個問題是,人們傾向於 將他們的創新故事濃縮到 較短的時間範圍。 所以他們要說明自己的發現時, 他們會想說「我只是在站在那裡, 然後我就瞭解了。」 但實際上,如果你回朔過往的紀錄, 會發現,許多重要的思想 都是潛藏很久之後才誕生的。 我稱之為「慢預感」。 我們已經知道最近有很多 關於預感和直覺 在眨眼間突然清晰的例子。 但實際上,大多偉大思想 都輾轉在人們的心智中, 有時會長達數十年。 當有趣的問題產生時,人們會有感覺, 但他們沒有多少探索這個有趣問題的方法。 他們花所有的時間解決現有的問題, 但還有一個揮之不去的東西 他們對此非常感興趣,但不知道如何解決。
Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic eureka moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head, and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. Darwin kept these copious notebooks, where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has his epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable to fully think it yet. And that is, actually, how great ideas often happen -- they fade into view over long periods of time.
達爾文是一個好範例。 達爾文在自傳中 述說他發現天擇論 的故事, 說得就像標準的「靈光一現」一般。 他開始研究於 1838 年十月, 那時他在閱讀馬爾薩斯的人口學原理。 突然地, 天擇論的簡單公式閃現在他的腦海裡, 然後他說,「啊,終究我發現一個實用的理論了」。 這是他在自傳中的描述。 大約十年至二十年前, 一個優秀學者,Howard Gruber 回溯達爾文在那時期寫下的筆記。 達爾文生前保留這些豐富的筆記, 上面寫有他腦海裡出現的每一個細微想法以及靈感。 Gruber 發現的是 達爾文已經將天擇論 醞釀很長很長很長的一段時日, 遠在他描述的時刻: 1838 年十月閱讀馬爾薩斯之前。 你可以從這些管道閱讀它, 而你認為這確實是從達爾文的筆記本上來的, 早在他自稱「受啟發」一段時日。 而你會認識到達爾文在某種觀點上看, 很有想法,很有概念, 但不太會求甚解。 而偉大思想時常是這樣發生: 它們早就存在,只是蘊藏很長一段時日而已。
Now the challenge for all of us is: How do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this long half-life? It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020."
現在我們的挑戰是: 如何創造這樣的環境 讓我們的思想有個「半衰期」,對吧? 你應該很難對上司這樣說: 「我有個很棒的點子改善我們的組織, 在 2020 年就會實用。
(Laughter)
可以給我一些時間用在這個點子上嗎?」
"Could you just give me some time to do that?"
現在有些公司,像 Google,
Now a couple of companies like Google have innovation time off, 20 percent time. In a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property -- you know, building barricades, having secretive R and D labs, patenting everything that we have so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them.
他們有一個創舉:20% 的休息時間, 某種方面來說是組織內的靈感栽培機制。 但還有一個關鍵。 如何讓自身的靈感 和其他人的靈感連結;結果會更加不同。 如果你有半個想法,也許另一個人有另一半的想法。 而如果身處的環境對了, 它們會融合成比兩半還要多的東西。 所以,某方面來說, 我們時常談及 保護著作權的價值, 像是制定權限、 設立秘密的研究開發部門、申請專利, 使這些思想保持價值, 而人們就會有發揮靈感的誘因, 文化的創新能力會更強。 但我認為這裡有個必須 付出時間解決的事, 在重視創意的基礎上連結思想, 而不僅是保護它們。
And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values. It's just a wonderful tale of innovation, and how it happens in unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched. And we're in Laurel, Maryland, at the Applied Physics Lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. It's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And, of course, this is nerd heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there, thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." And two of them, two twentysomething researchers at the APL, are there at the cafeteria table, having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. They start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." So they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea."
而我要告訴你這個故事, 我認為它非常重要, 是個很好的創新事蹟, 以及創新如何在不同的情況下發生的描述。 那時是 1957 年十月, 史普尼克一號剛升空, 而這故事的地點在馬里蘭州月桂鎮, 約翰·霍普金斯大學的 應用物理實驗室。 而那時是週一早上, 一早的新聞就是這個人造衛星 正在環繞地球運行的消息。 當然,這裡是宅男天堂,對吧? 這裡全都是些物理御宅族,朝思物理暮想物理, 「噢天哪!太驚人了,我不敢相信這種事已經實現了!」 然後這團隊其中的兩人, 實驗室兩位二十多歲的研究員 在餐廳吃飯時 和同事們一起邊用早餐邊閒聊。 而大家都叫這兩位小伙子 Guier 和 Weiffenbach。 他們開始聊天,其中一人說, 「嘿,有誰試過要聽那玩意的聲音嗎? 你們都知道的,人造衛星在外太空中 會放出明顯的無線電訊號。 我們能透過調整頻率聽見它的聲音。」 因此,他們問身邊的同事中的其中兩位, 和大家想得一樣,「不,我沒試過。 這是個有趣的點子。」
And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antenna set up with an amplifier in his office. So Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start noodling around -- "hacking," as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track; it was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid people would think it was a hoax, basically, so they made it really easy to find.
而有意思的是,Weiffenbach 是個 微波通訊的專家。 而他有一個小天線組 以及擴音器,放在他的研究室裡。 然後 Guier 和 Weiffenbach 就回到那個研究室, 然後他們開始不斷調試 —— 在當今我們大概會稱之「駭」。 過了兩個小時,他們終於收到訊號, 因為蘇聯製的史普尼克一號 非常容易追蹤。 它的訊號大約是在 20 兆赫,真的很容易接收到, 因為基本上,蘇聯擔心大家會覺得衛星升空是場騙局。 所以他們就讓這衛星容易追蹤。
So these guys are sitting there, listening to this signal, and people start coming into the office and saying, "That's pretty cool. Can I hear?" And before long, they think, "Jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States listening to this. We should record it." So they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they start writing down the date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And then they start thinking, "Well, gosh, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect." And they played around with it a little bit more and talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other specialties. And they said, "You know, we could actually look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antenna and the points at which it's furthest away. That's pretty cool."
所以這兩位小伙坐在那裡聽衛星訊號, 而人們開始來到研究室,說: 「哇,這好酷。我能聽聽嗎?哇,太讚了。」 不久之後,他們想「哇塞,這可是歷史性的一刻。 我們也許是全美國最先聽到這訊號的人。 應該要把它錄下來。」 於是他們帶來一個大、笨重的類比磁帶錄音機, 並開始錄下這些嗶嗶聲。 然後他們開始在錄有訊號聲的磁帶上 標上日期及時間標籤。 然後他們開始思考,「噢老天,我們注意到 這裡有點微小的頻率變化。 我們也許可以計算出 這顆衛星的運行速度, 如果我們在這列出簡單的公式 套用都卜勒效應。 然後他們就開始著手, 並和有著其他專業的 一對同事交談。 他們說「哎呀,你知道, 我們認為可以實際觀察都卜勒效應的斜率 去算出這個衛星 最接近我們天線的時刻, 以及最遠離我們的時刻。 這一定會很讚。」
Eventually, they get permission -- this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description -- they get permission to use the new UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. And they run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning.
最終,他們獲得許可 —— 這是一個小型支計畫,不是他們真正的工作。 他們能配備一台全新的 UNIVAC 電腦, 和這團隊剛在實驗室分配到的房間差不多大。 他們運行一些算式,在三到四周後運行完畢。 結果,他們已繪製出這個人造衛星 環繞地球的精確軌跡。 聽著這小信號, 他們靈光一現,想到應該在這個早晨做什麼 以至於忘了午餐。
A couple weeks later, their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back and thought about it and came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that's great, because, see, I have these new nuclear submarines"
幾個星期後他們的上司,Frank McClure, 把他們叫進來說, 「嘿,小伙子,我得問你們 現在在做的計畫。 你們從地面上已知的位置 算出人造衛星繞地軌道上的 未知位置。 你們可以從相反方向操作嗎? 如果已經知道人造衛星的位置, 能否計算出地面上的未知地點?」 然後他們想了一下,然後說, 「嗯,我想這行得通。讓我們開始運算吧。」 所以他們回頭思考這個問題。 之後,他們回來答覆道,「實際上,這樣做更簡單。」 McClure 說,「喔,很棒。 因為,你們看,我正在構建一種
(Laughter)
新型核潛艇。
"that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?"
而如果潛艇在太平洋中間的未知位置, 很難讓導彈 正確地指向莫斯科。 因此我們在想,可以發射一批衛星 來追蹤我們的潛艇, 就能算出它們在大洋中的位置。 你們可以在這方面著手嗎?」 這就是全球定位系統 (GPS) 的由來。
And that's how GPS was born. Thirty years later, Ronald Reagan, actually, opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could build upon, and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. And now, I guarantee you, certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last --
三十年後, 羅納德·雷根總統開放這個技術, 任何人都可以作 GPS 的建設 以及沿用,在這開放平台上 建立用以創意與革新 的新技術, 最後再讓新技術開放 給所有人自由運用。 時間拉到現今,我保證 這裡有一半的人 口袋裡都有個設施 正在連接著太空中的人造衛星。 然後我跟你們賭 你們一定有人用過定位系統 來尋找鄰近的一家咖啡館 ——
(Laughter)
(大笑)
in the last day or last week, right?
在昨天或是上週這樣做過,對吧?
(Applause)
(掌聲)
And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power -- the marvelous, unplanned, emergent, unpredictable power -- of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then, it turns out, they're just helping somebody find a soy latte.
所以呢,我認為, 這是一個很好的研究案例,很好的課程, 很有力量,很神奇,有一種不可預知 的元素,玄妙的力量, 就在開放創新系統之中。 當你正確地建設它,這系統將會引出一個就連 它的創造者都未有所思的新方向。 我的意思是,那些小傢伙 單純地循著靈感思考, 達成自身小小的熱情。 他們本來是美俄冷戰的武器, 最後卻變成了幫某個人 尋覓豆漿拿鐵的小東西。
(Laughter)
(大笑)
That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind.
這就是創新的誕生。 機會降臨於互相連結的思想。
Thank you very much.
感謝各位的聆聽。
(Applause)
(掌聲)