Ideas: My Digital Voice
In 2011, the BBC co-organised a contest with the Genootschap-Nederland-Engeland (Netherlands-England-Society) for young speakers and authors to try their talents for a prize. This year, they tried out a third medium: digital voice. The concept was to create a short, 1–2 minute video along with a blog post.
Having won this contest, I wanted to share that with people, but for whatever reason they took my entry off the website soon after the end of the contest. I though I had lost the text, but now — eight years later — I’ve found it in an old email to my English teacher at the time: Mrs. Fitzpatrick. So here it is! For you, if you’re interested in reading it, and for me, so now I know where it is!
The topic I chose: Ideas that can change the world
Jeremy Rumble
Anna van Rijn College — Nieuwegein
While unfortunately it’s not currently possible to “sponsor” an idea, at least not in the sense that the video portrays, there are ideas being neglected. Throughout history there have been ideas which were branded as blasphemy. Ideas which we today know to be true. The world is indeed a sphere. We are not the center of the universe. The sun does not bathe in the ocean. It is possible to travel faster than 30 miles per hour, and live. It is possible to ascend into the heavens on wings of metal.
But years, decades or centuries ago, the people who came up with these notions were ridiculed. In these cases the ideas were fortunately proven to be true. But what if they had simply been dismissed as the ravings of lunatics and left at that? Where would we be today?
We’d still be the center of all things, the sun would bathe in the ocean at night, swimming around the flat earth to emerge on the other side, we would still be reliant on horses for transportation and planes would not exist.
These ideas changed the world. Or rather, the world remained the same but they caused a shift in the way that we see the world. A paradigm shift.
Today we commonly say that people with such ideas were (way) ahead of their time. But what about the people who are today way ahead of us? We know about some of them, but others simply go unnoticed or are written off as nutters. Their ideas are, like the video says, neglected or even forgotten simply because they don’t accord with what we know today. For example, Nikola Tesla came up with an idea for wireless electricity, and actually had it working about a hundred years ago, yet we are just now trying to replicate that work today. He also came up with other ideas which aren’t even being explored today because they are deemed highly improbable by our current knowledge.
The thing is, though, what if an idea is deemed impossible, but isn’t? It seems rather a shame that ideas should be wasted simply because what we think we know tells us not to give them a fair chance. We need to experiment. If the results don’t accord with the laws of physics then clearly something is wrong with either the experiment or the laws of physics. We must not assume that the laws of physics or anything else are infallible. After all, what we think we know is largely based on ideas which were, at one time, deemed impossible by what people thought *they* knew.
In the end, my point is this: We are not infallible, and should not assume such. If an idea seems implausible today, you might want to take a second look because it could change the world tomorrow.
The funny part about this, is that at the awards ceremony only the video was shown. The actual meat of what I was saying is in the text. So this, this post, is its chance to be heard. Thank you for reading it :)
❤
