: . . . Why are all the great ideas so damned obvious when someone else thinks of
: them?! . . .

This is a very profound question, and I wish I had the complete answer. At best I can only hope to believe that I know a bit of the answer.

I believe that the entire answer would go straight to the heart of the definition of "Humanity". Certainly it would explain the process of mental creation, discovery, creativity, and invention.

The occasional "Eureka! moments" in history, whether real, like the discovery of displacement, or imaginary, like the story of Newton and a falling apple, have provided many wonderful stories which have allowed but mere glimpses into the process of how humans learn new things. But there are so many different stories that it seems there must be many paths to these points. In fact, for every invention you can find a story that documents the development of that invention.

There are a few lkarge groupings here that help to organize things. Some were merely hard work and engineering, others were dumb luck, and still others were ther result of nothing more than careful observation and analysis. But for all of the inventions that were derived form these processes there are many more that had unique origins.

One thing that I do believe (and I believe this only on the strength of faith as I have no facts to bear this out) is that people build ideas with "mental tools", just like we build boats with cutting and shaping tools. Our education provides us with a basic set of these mental tools, and where groups of peoples share a common heritage they also share in the same basic mental "toolbox". At some point a person acquires enough of these mental tools and discovers that they can now create more by a proccess of combining simple concepts into larger ones. Where and when these concepts can be passed along (and hopefuly recorded) the knowledge base of an entire civilization can increase.

I think that newspapers, fax machines, telephones, TV, radio, computers, and particulary the internet have done a tremendous job of accelerating the dissemination of new concepts. Hopefully the world will be a better place for it.

Now that I have given you these thoughts you can understand my answer to your question. The reason that a "great idea" looks so "obvious" in hindsight is because someone has put together that idea and passed it on to you as a complete entity. You can then look at it, and by using the mental tools you've picked up over the years you can "reverse engineer" the idea. An analogy: In effect, someone has pointed out a specific leaf on a tree, and once that is identified to you, it is simple for you to follow it from leaf to stem to twig to branch to trunk to ground, and thus follow the entire process, until you've come to the very basis for that idea.

If I tell you this next thing, you will do it because it has been first suggested to you here, and your mind accepts suggestions very rapidly and adds them to your personal mental toolbox: You will build your next boat in your head many times before you cut the first piece of wood for it.

You are now empowered. Go think about building something.

PGJ