Jason Crawford

So if there are valuable things to do that are just barely possible, but difficult, and some small set of people who have training and can understand how to tinker in a certain area can go maybe do the hard, valuable thing, they're going to go do it.

And I think we see this in many cases.

We see it in the transistor, which we'll talk about in a sec.

See it in light bulb.

You know, you see it in vaccines, et cetera.

But I'm going to go a little further.

I think it's not just an economic reason that engineering gets ahead of science.

I think there's a deeper reason.

I suspect that tinkering has to happen outside the bounds of science.

To explain why, let me do another case study.

This time, the transistor.

So this is a picture of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley at Bell Labs, who shared the Nobel Prize for the invention of the transistor.

And the way that it happened is pretty remarkable.

So Bell Labs creates a semiconductor research group in late 30s or maybe around 1940.

The basics of semiconductor physics had sort of been worked out at that time.

That happened in the 1920s or 30s or so.

And it was clear to a number of people who were close to this that there was potential here.

There was a fertile field.

They were on the verge of something.

Ooh, we could do something great with this semiconductor stuff.