Who could possibly think to build walls around the sea? Even better… what about making the walls and then pump the trapped water and build houses and pastures in the gained land? Well, we know the answer. The idea in itself is not that weird. Take a look at the shore of the Netherlands and you will see dunes going from the far north to the last southern point of the country. At the other side, the North Sea, well know by the fury of its storms. So it is not so crazy to make artificial dunes, or dykes, as a defense against the water. Then look at the places where a storm has broken through, allowing the sea to go inland, and get trapped. I am still in awe about the industry of the dutch, but the idea is there to be copied. It is not even the industry in itself, but the level of collaboration that making this idea work demands. There is no way that you can build a dike on your own. The dutch dykes are a testimony to the power of the work of the many, capable of controlling the mighty.
Now, innovation. Innovation as extreme observation of nature, perhaps. Innovation as intelligent copying of already existing ideas. Perhaps an intrinsic need of observing nature is needed for innovate. As an example: who could even think of hearing the starts? We have been trying to see the starts as good as possible since we raise our eyes beyond the horizon, but hearing them? That doesn’t make much sense, does it?
But it does.
Today I was walking through the dutch heather, when emerging from a group of trees appeared what looked like a huge radar dish, some twenty meters diameter. The Netherlands indeed has a long tradition of radio telescopy, and we had bounced with one of the many dishes build more than fifty years ago, in order to, literally, hear the starts. Admiring this dish, I thought of the LOFAR, one of the most impressive examples of big science, and at the same time, a great example of the power of the many to understand the mighty. The LOFAR is an assembly of around 20000 antenas, roughly arranged in a 1000 kmt diameter area. Most of it is in The Netherlands, but there are stations in other countries. The information that all these small antennas receive was combined and processed by a dedicated super computer. But nowadays the computational work is done by COBALT, a processing unit created by combining a great number of off-the-shelf GPU’s. So it is not only in the combination of small antennas that the dutch have manage a superb instrument to hear the starts, but also in combining simple Graphic Processors to build the computer capable of making sense of the information received.
Let that sink for a moment.
I really dislike to use the obvious different national identities that coexist in Europe to explain complex phenomena. Those standard (and idiotic) one liners, like saying that the germans are square and the spanish intense, the italian lazy, the dutch greedy, and so forth and so forth, ad nausea.
But which other country could have produced such examples of collaboration?