Don’t get me wrong, science does work. Innumerable concepts from insights to inventions have found their way into human experience at depth and scale in our history. Most are trivial and forgettable, a few catch on as important ideas, and still fewer see explosive growth in application through commercialization. But it does happen every day around us.
What people need to remember is that this is all very messy and haphazard. Nobody is in charge of all this! Usually a small forgettable idea would simply die of obscurity (or bankruptcy of its commercial backer) unless the idea gets picked up by another person with another small forgettable idea which dovetails with the first idea to make something more. A whole new outlook or invention may require much more than two little ideas holding hands.
The wonderful James Burke television series Connections explored this chaotic system and how it begat everything from novelties like barometric pressure to complex implementations like a Boeing 747. The ‘typical’ path involves somebody’s brother-in-law who has money or needs money and happens to share a tailor with a famous professor. Or some-such. There is no ‘typical’! The following video illustrates one such chain, which begins and ends with preserved food (we pick up in the middle, which of course is over a paper making machine).