Like Prospectors, Scientists Rush to Stake Their Claims

So, whose big idea is it anyhow?

Big ideas are the stuff of fame and sometimes fortune for writers, Hollywood producers, corporations and, frequently, scientists. And when big ideas are the coin of the realm, staking out claims can be a pivotal, and highly contentious, issue.

As prospectors know, the gold goes to those who get there first. The second person to make a scientific discovery doesn’t win the Nobel Prize.

Alas, establishing ownership of ideas is not an easy issue, as Steven Spielberg knows all too well. Recently, he was accused of stealing the idea for his film “Amistad,” based on an 1839 revolt aboard a Spanish slave ship, from author Barbara Chase-Riboud. Spielberg countered that Chase-Riboud had lifted portions of her 1989 novel, “Echo of Lions,” from a work titled “Black Mutiny.”

It all sounds eerily familiar.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace fought bitterly over who first came up with the idea of evolution. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz battled over the origin of calculus, so much so that the British royal family tried to intervene.

As historian Daniel Boorstin observed: “Eighteenth century Europe saw a vaudeville series of such bouts. Who had first demonstrated that water was not an element but a compound? Was it Cavendish, Watt or Lavoisier? Who was first to discover the vaccination against smallpox? Was it really Jenner--or Pearson or Rabout?”

Part of the problem is that ideas do not spring, full blown, like Minerva from the head of Zeus. They tend to evolve, slowly--nurtured by extensive roots hidden deep underground. Suddenly, when the climate is right, up they sprout.

The question is: Who gets the credit? The one who produces the initial seed? The one who carries it to fertile ground? The one who raises it from seedling to mature plant? Or the person who happens along and notices what everyone else has ignored?

The ground was certainly fertile for thinking about energy transformation in the 19th century, when, within a 10-year span, 12 different people came up with the idea of the conservation of energy. Working in a vastly

higher energy scale, two groups of physicists discovered the same subatomic particle in 1974, and they still call it by different names--J or psi.

On the other hand, Aristarchus proved that the Earth was round 2,000 years before Columbus. But the world wasn’t ready, and the idea didn’t stick.

Of course, ideas by themselves are cheap. Every scientist (and science writer) gets scores of letters from people claiming to have solved the riddles of space, time and gravity. Lots of poets wrote odes to trees, and any musical group could have written a song with the simple message: “I want to hold your hand.” It’s what you do with an idea, however, that counts.

I was struck by the familiarity of ideas recently while listening to “The Odyssey” in my car, passing the time on the Santa Monica Freeway. The ancient world overflowed with the same spectrum of human emotions that fuels today’s daytime soaps. And when it comes to splattered blood and spilled brains, today’s filmmakers can’t hold a candle to Homer.

Compelling ideas have staying power. They tend to resurface in newly fashioned--sometimes radically different--forms.

The real test is in the follow-through. One of the reasons Einstein gets so roundly labeled “genius” by his colleagues is that he carried his ideas to conclusions. He worked out the details that made the wildest ideas testable.

In these days of instantaneous electronic communications, scientists sometimes feel pressured to publicize ideas before they’re ready--because they’re afraid someone else will beat them to it, establishing priority. Then, however, they may get blamed for jumping the gun--especially if the conclusions turn out to be wrong.

On the other hand, there’s little satisfaction in seeing a competitor take the limelight while you’re carefully going over your figures, or working out a better method, or poking at your own work to see where there might be holes or soft spots.

Complicating the credit issue further, the person who solves the problem may not be the one who has the most productive idea. It may be the person who states the problem in the first place.

As a physicist friend used to say: A smart scientist is one who looks at a problem and gets an idea for an answer. But a brilliant scientist sees a problem and gets an idea for a question.