January 2017  
  
Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we
underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because
anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become
the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either.  
  
Biographies of Newton, for example, understandably focus more on physics than
alchemy or theology. The impression we get is that his unerring judgment led
him straight to truths no one else had noticed. How to explain all the time he
spent on alchemy and theology? Well, smart people are often kind of crazy.  
  
But maybe there is a simpler explanation. Maybe the smartness and the
craziness were not as separate as we think. Physics seems to us a promising
thing to work on, and alchemy and theology obvious wastes of time. But that's
because we know how things turned out. In Newton's day the three problems
seemed roughly equally promising. No one knew yet what the payoff would be for
inventing what we now call physics; if they had, more people would have been
working on it. And alchemy and theology were still then in the category Marc
Andreessen would describe as "huge, if true."  
  
Newton made three bets. One of them worked. But they were all risky.  
  
  
  
  
  

