Many of the most important discoveries read at first like small tweaks to something that already existed. Often their own inventors initially thought of them this way.
This seems a bit sweeping to me. Surely many new things have been impossible, at least at first, to parse as mere variations on something old. Quantum mechanics stands out as a striking example. Even today, its relation to its predecessor theory remains obscure in many ways.
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The newest of new things, at any rate, seem to me often to require a great deal of sophisticated analysis before they divulge their true relation to predecessor ideas -- and that relation, once divulged, often proves largely to have eluded the discoverers of the new new thing.
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