Galileo vs Newton: Smack Down at Story Town

You all know that I am a big Podcast fan (Mainly because I have two hours of drive time each day). I recently listened to one that I think directly applies to how we at iDefense go about our business.

The Podcast is called Radio Lab and the particular episode is called “Tell Me A Story“. You can get it off of iTunes and listen to it with your MP3 player.

This particular episode talks about the importance of telling stories when you attempt to describe a complex thing. Let’s face it. Everything we do here at iDefense is an attempt to describe complex things. The featured Podcast speaker, Robert Krulwich, talks about how scientists don’t particularly like to “dumb down” their material for the average Joe. Scientists figure that if this Joe guy is too dumb to understand the content, then he doesn’t deserve to hear about it either. Sir Isaac Newton was one of these scientists. When he published his famous book describing Calculus (The Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), he purposely wrote it so that only the most advanced mathematical minds could understand what he was talking about (maybe five total in the entire world at the time). Newton didn’t want to deal with ankle biters who didn’t understand the larger picture so he excluded them from the discussion.

Krulwich disagrees with this approach and so do I. Far be it from me to disagree with the great Sir Isaac Newton, but Krulwich offers up another famous scientist who comes from a different school of thought: Galileo. When Galileo wrote his famous book proving that the planets do not orbit around the earth but instead the Earth orbits around the sun (Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle machie solari – Account and Evidence of the Sun Spots), he wrote it in Italian not Latin. The target audience was the average Joe (or in this case, the average Tony). And that’s how he got into so much trouble with the church back then. The Church did not like Galileo contradicting their explanation of how the universe worked especially in a language that Tony could understand. The Church knew that Tony might actually learn something.

And that is the point isn’t it? With all these complex things popping up in security world, we can either elect to exclude the average Tony or to try to include him. At iDefense, we do our best to include. Sometimes we fail, but most times we get it right. When we do get it right, it is beauty to behold. It is like Galileo tagging us to enter the wrestling ring after he has softened up his opponent. We climb to the top of the ropes and leap through the air putting the Smack Down on Sir Isaac Newton. The crowd goes wild. Again. Chalk one up for the Tony’s of the world.