IDEAS AND INVENTIONS
Ideas and inventions are important and worthy. Sadly, many people give up on their dreams of ideas and inventions in their adult lives because the practicality of life kills creativity and many people are afraid to walk in the opposite direction to the ‘normal’ flow. Our brains are often telling us not to do unknown things, because these unknown things could produce unwanted results. This article could encourage and motivate people to hold onto their ideas and inventions, and think in a way different to the status quo. I have been inspired by the words of Sir Ken Robinson, who talks of how creativity is killed at a young age, why it happens, and what we can do to empower and encourage people: ‘The role of the creative is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they are valued.’
So, what is an idea? An idea is a quick thought which strikes you at any moment in your life. Also called a ‘Eureka moment’, it may come when you are deep in sleep, when you are having important conversations with your boss, when you are exercising, and even when you are meditating. Ideas can be of any kind, including social, medical, and technological.
An invention is a tool to implement and process an idea in a practical sense. It takes a lot of effort to invent unique ideas or unique inventions to be developed or updated by the same idea. The main extraordinary thing about an idea is that the neurons in our brains come up with different configurations in different states, or levels of thinking. Many inventions made were the result of a type of Eureka moment - an unexpected moment. This includes: the displacement of water for Archimedes; the apple falling from the tree for Newton; the ploughing of a potato field ‘line by line’ for Farnsworth, where the electron beam could scan images 'line by line'; and laying on the bed and watching up in the sky a flying plane and thinking about how far it might be from the wall and ceiling for Descartes and his Coordinate Geometry.
Many inventions have been made by learning about natural resources. Some examples include:
The invention of the satellite: As the moon revolves around the earth, can a human made object revolve around the earth? But why and how?
The invention of the invisible tank: As the chameleon hides himself by adjusting his colour into the corresponding environment, could a manmade object do that too?
The invention of multi-cellular organisms such as were present 200 million years ago.
The invention of power, which is felt as current and which can then be converted to heat, and then converted back into current.
And one of the most promising inventions: the aircraft. If a bird can fly, why can't we?
So, how to make a structure of your idea? First of all you need to have courage to walk the odd path, and in many cases may lead to failure and the halt of this great innovation within your mind. You must always write down your ideas whenever they pop into your mind. Try some simple, small experiments and note down the theory and also the pros and cons so that the risk of failure decreases. Make a hierarchy of each step; have a stepwise implementation for a specific module in an experiment; discuss your idea with good professionals in that corresponding field and use respective resources to develop your skill in your experiments.
My advice to you is to plan and experiment, take advice from good professionals or engineers to reduce the errors which come up while experimenting, then construct and design a new model or idea once you have summed up the errors, and go on planning and experimenting this way until you reach a conclusion. Always make sure you have noted down all the performed tasks. And all the best for your Ideas and Inventions!
Ruchir Patil is a proud student of Charles Darwin University studying a Masters of Information Technology in Software Engineering.
