In this rousing tour of the history and psychology of innovation, one of the most entertaining science writers of our time reveals the five counterintuitive mental steps behind every scientific breakthrough, offering inspiration to anyone who dreams of inventing something new.
Here's the biggest mystery in human history: Why did it take us 300,000 years to invent the toilet?
Thinking about it, why did it take so long to figure everything out? Why did we spend 1,500 years believing that magnets could be disabled with garlic? Why did centuries pass between the invention of the button and the buttonhole?Why didn't we get the randomized controlled trial - you know, the backbone of modern science - until 1948? Today, we put more time, effort, and money into scientific breakthroughs, so why does the data indicate that scientific progress is slowing down?
In his first book, Adam Mastroianni, creator of the popular Experimental History series on Substack, offers the answer that discovering things is hard for humans because discovery, in the short term, is a bad idea.We did not evolve to do this, and it is a miracle that we are able to do so at all. That's why we still live in the Dark Ages, where countless diseases remain untreated, and where we accidentally raised the temperature and can't figure out how to lower it again. We don't even know if flossing is really helpful.But there is good news. We can overcome our psychological obstacles and build a better world, if we accept the strange. Mastroianni draws on stories of little-known discoveries—from Elizabethan jokes about poop to physicists who set themselves on fire—to reveal five strange ways of thinking that lead to breakthroughs, such as building a tolerance for weirdness and realizing that no one really knows what they're doing.Anyone who masters these skills can discover new knowledge, whether they are a distinguished university professor in a laboratory or a teenager in his basement. Our future depends on both.
With its unique style that blends humor and precision, which has made it one of the most widely read books on the Substack platform, The World's Strangest Idea is a book like no other. Filled with unexpected details, dead ends, hidden pages, visual tricks, interactive moments, and surprise endings, it turns expectations on their head.It exposes scientific myths that even scientists themselves believe, and most importantly, it offers an antidote to despair.
