The invention of the wheel was a miraculous invention, along with the airplane,and the telephone. All the inventions that have ever been created weren’t justsomething that was already drawn out on a piece of paper for the inventors. Theyhad to think. They had to imagine the masterpiece before it was even a physicalobject.
These people weren’t just thinkers or inventors. These people”Thought Outside the Box. ” The writer Sarah Susanka, the author of “TheNot So Big House,” once said that “The ability to think creatively,responding to needs and wishes, not to preconceived ideas of what somethingshould look like, then the problem will be solved. ” [SIC] What I think shemeans by this is if you are going to make something or do something for thepeople of the world, don’t assume or pretend you know what they want.
Go out,ask them, figure it out and then when you have completed the finished product itwill be successful. Many people who try to invent something are not successfulbecause they are afraid to break the confines of the outline. What I mean bythis is that the people are so accustomed to thinking like everybody else, theyare afraid to explore the possibilities of their mind. They can’t picturesomething that already isn’t there. Often a person will see something that wasinvented and wonder why they never thought of something so simple. The answer isvery uncomplicated.
. . they didn’t break the confines of the out line. Normally, when people do a puzzle, they will have to think about the answers,sort of like a maze.
If what they first try doesn’t work then they have to tryanother direction to see if something else will work. Those people, even thoughthey don’t know it have just thought outside the box. They have decided thatrather than quitting, they are going to keep trying, and see if they can findanother way to do it. Even though the answer was right in front of them, theystill had to think and look for it. One great thinker is Werner Heisenberg. Heinvented “Matrix mechanics.
” It was the first version of quantum mechanics. He didn’t invent the concepts of matrix algebra; however, focused attention ona set of quantised probability amplitudes. The “matrix” mechanics wasfurther developed in a three-author paper by Heisenberg, Born and Jordan,published in 1926. Heisenberg published The Physical Principles of QuantumTheory in 1928. In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this work. Although he was awarded the Nobel for his matrix mechanics, he was much betterknown for his Uncertainty Principle that he discovered in 1927.
Heisenberg wasquoted in 1969 as saying the following about the Slovay Conference in Brusselsthat he attended in 1927 : “To those of us who participated in the developmentof atomic theory, the five years following the Slovay Conference in Brussels in1927 looked so wonderful that we often spoke of them as the golden of age ofatomic physics. The great obstacles that had occupied all our efforts in thepreceding years had been cleared out of the way; the gate to an entirely newfield, the quantum mechanics of the atomic shells stood wide open, and freshfruits seemed ready for the picking. ” Around the year 1925 Heisenberg wasworking on a new description of matter. His ruminations led him to assert a newprinciple that has become a “Hallmark” of quantum theory. This descriptionof matter is now known as matrix mechanics.
It is the complete mathematicaltheory of the behaviour of atoms and their constituents. It is a very difficultfield to study, but with the help of Born and Jordan, the study was a success. The matrix mechanics is a part of mathematics known as the quantum mechanics. Sothe quantum ideas work. They are developed from the concept that matter iswave-like in its behaviour. The quantum mechanics remained mysterious until1927, when Heisenberg -following conversations with Bohr and Einstein ?discovered the uncertainty principle.
Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”said that it is impossible to find out exactly where an object is and how fastit is moving at the same time. If you were to try that process then you wouldhave to stop the object to see where it is at that speed, or at that point intime. This is fine but as soon as you stop it you no longer have to speed andmomentum to the object. There is no guarantee that you can just say that becausethe object was moving a certain speed that obviously it still will have the sameresults. This is because there are many things that can effect your result. Ifyou were to try to find out both of them at the same time all your informationwould become impossible to understand.
Because of figuring out such aninformative theory Heisenberg has been awarded many time. He received thefollowing awards: The Nobel Prize in 1932, and the Follow of the Royal Societyin 1955. Another of Heisenberg’s great moments in life was during the SecondWorld War. Here he headed the “unsuccessful” German nuclear weapons project. He worked with Otto Hahn, one of the discoverers of nuclear fission, on thedevelopment of a nuclear reactor but failed to develop an effective program fornuclear weapons.
Whether this was because of lack of resources or a lack of adesire to put nuclear weapons in the hands of the Nazis is unclear. After thewar he was interned in Britain with other leading German scientists. However, hereturned to Germany in 1946 when he was appointed director of the Max Planckinstitute for physics and Astrophysics at G?ttingen. In 1958 the Institutemoved to Munich and Heisenberg continued as its director. This man was verytalented and had many other interests. Such as in the philosophy of physics, andbecause of this great interest he wrote “Physics and Philosophy” in 1962 and”Physics and Beyond”‘ in 1971.
Virtually every person has “ThoughtOutside the Box” at one point in their lives or another . . . I can remember,about four years ago when my parents were re-modelling the upstairs, where mybedroom was located. My father was trying to figure out some way to convertthree bedrooms into two, while keeping a nice square landing that is rightoutside the doors. Well with the way that the upstairs was shaped there was muchdifficulty.
Finally one day, I was sick of seeing my father stressing out oversomething like that. So I took a pencil and a piece of paper and I drew theoutline of the upstairs. Then rather than drawing a straight line right acrossthe middle of where the bedrooms would be I drew a diagonal like that still leftspace for closets and when it angled down back towards the stairs (the wall). This allowed my dad to have the nice even square landing right out side thebedroom doors. . .
I was very proud of myself, and I now have the honour of sayingthat I designed my bedroom. . . can you guess who’s room was larger? I guesswhat I am trying to say is that all a person has to do is apply themselves andthey will have the ability to “Think Outside the Box.
” It isn’t somethingthat is extremely easy to do. It is like most things in a person’s life, theymust practice and learn. Some people don’t even realize it when they are doingit, which is great. But if only they could recognise this ability, apply it tosomething, and improve life for all!
