In any field of endeavor, it is impossible to make a significant contribution without first being strongly influenced by past achievements within that field.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement

The author puts forward an unwarranted claim strongly emphasized by the use of the word ‘impossible’. Thereby, the author asserts that a strong influence of the past achievements is a necessary condition for making a significant contribution to a field. In claiming so however, the author overlooks the case of the pioneers of a field and also the achievers who find motivation in past failures rather than successes. Instances of successes in the past do help in achieving an incremental success but a disruptive achievement is often preceded by a series of failures.

Pioneers are the ones who explore the frontiers of human wisdom in a sphere of life, and hence, do not have any illustration or roadmap from the past to guide them through in this journey, for that matter, sometimes they even have serendipitous experiences. For instance, Cristopher Columbus, set out from Spain in 1492, in a hope to reach Asia, in a search for gold, pearls and spices. He instead discovered America, without accurate maps and dependent only on steady wind and calmness of the sea water. And in the process his crewmates underwent apprehensions about how long it will take them to reach the land, which he desperately attempted to mollify. Under such uncertainties, a constant sense of foreboding and a paucity of even any anecdote as a guide in their pioneering journey, they achieved success, though serendipitously.

Sometimes people pursue a problem just out of their interest and the affinity they ‘feel’ towards solving that problem and don’t even know or care about what has been achieved in the field. An instance of the Indian mathematical prodigy Ramanujan seems apt this category. Ramanujan was believed to have ‘re-discovered’ many foundational aspects of number theory just out of the sheer pleasure he derived from solving the problems in that field. Before reaching Cambridge, he was not even completely aware of the fact that majority of the results he has discovered were already deemed as established facts in the germane mathematical circles. He nevertheless continued working in the same direction, and left many recondite results in his now ‘Lost notebooks’, which contemporary mathematicians still find elusive to decipher.

History is awash with instances of individuals who motivated by failures instead of successes, go on to rewrite it with achievements. A popular instance in this direction is attributed to Thomas Alva Edison, who despite his innumerable failures during his journey of the invention of incandescent bulbs, persisted and later developed the pioneering design of bulbs, variants of which have still been in use today, only to be superseded by more power efficient LED bulbs today. Even the story of the development of white light LED bulbs which was later awarded the Nobel prize in 2014 has similar takeaways. Before early 1990s, only red and green LED were developed and the intricacies of blue LEDs remained elusive to grapple, thereby hamstringing the development of white-light LED bulbs. The efforts from both academia and industry failed to develop blue LEDs, however, a group of Japanese scientists(Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura) persisted and solved those problems, giving energy efficient and environmental friendly white LED light bulbs to the mankind.

Past achievements bolster the confidence of a novice entering in a field or even the veterans of the field gearing up to address significant challenges, however, they cannot be deemed as a necessary condition for further innovation, as substantiated by the instances above. In a nutshell, a contribution whatever be its scope, derives the required impetus from the persisting willingness even to the extent of stubbornness of the mankind, to explore the frontiers of human knowledge.