The Laws of Invention

The Laws of Invention

It is obvious to anyone who has seen the lack of realism in the policies that politicians put out to stimulate invention, that their policies are not based upon a proper understanding of the phenomenon of invention. Perhaps it is a wise move to start and try to formulate such laws.

For investors trying to find moneymaking inventions and for inventors trying to attract investors there are other laws and rules to consider. As soon as money and business is involved, things become mundane, sordid even, and practical, in other words, one has to cater to the current needs of Mankind and gear oneself to the craziness of Man. This may be the subject of a future blog. This issue is for long-term thinkers and politicians.

1. A formulation of The Laws of Invention

There are four separate laws that need to be understood in order to be able to stimulate invention.

The Law of Confluence for Invention

Invention needs a simultaneous availability of knowledge, ambition, necessity, circumstance, materials, structure, capital and cultural incentives. 

One might look upon this list as the primordial hotchpot of necessities for invention to take place. People familliar with the theory of methodology will recognize this as a set of necessary conditions. It may be that in the course of creating an invention a new necessary condition must be fulfilled, like adding an extra ingredient to a hotchpot to make it tasteful or, indeed, palatable.

The Law of Sparking Inventions

Inventions are hatched from the set of necessities for invention when an individual is allowed to satisfy his curiosity and sees satisfaction and reward in the solution of a particular problem that presents itself in present time.

Inventions are done to solve a problem in the present, not in the past or the future. You may think it is something in the future because it may take years, even decades, before an invention is put in practice, but the solution is always about something that is experienced 'now'.

The Spiritual Laws of Invention

a. Inventions are done by individuals, developments are done by groups.
b. An invention done in one place, could be done by someone else in another place at almost the same time.

The problem with inventions is that when the time is ripe, more than one person may come up with the same idea. How this works is not known but it can be proven to exist. It is known under the term 'synchronicity' and has been put down in writing for the first time by Rupert Sheldrake. See the Notes below.

The Energy Laws of Invention

a. To invent something, the inventor must be kept carefree for the time he works on his invention so that he can give his attention to inventing.
b. There must be some attainable future goal that the inventor is trying to achieve for himself.

These are called 'energy laws' because money is a form of energy and a being is able to create energy from the ambition to achieve some kind of goal in the distant future.

a. is generally done by funding him and putting him in a safe environment.
b. implies also benefits for others, for contrary to the gospel of the current Republican Party in the USA, no-one can live just for himself by himself.

2. Notes on The Laws of Invention

Notes on The Law of Confluence for Invention

Confluence is the concept that you need a tremendous amount of factors for inventions to take place and for inventions to get to the market, which is not understood by politicians. For reasons of populist propaganda, they simply call out something, one factor, and then consider it done.
Apart from that lackadaisical attitude, there are cultural factors involved that make inventions difficult. The English remember the difficulties the inventor of the sea clock John Harrison had with the commission appointed by the Queen in 1714 to get his invention accepted in 1761 and onwards. He was not member of the establishment and therefore his invention was not acceptable. This is hidden from official annals but can be found in history books.

One of the factors is risk. But risk is anathema to politicians and the traditional investors in Europe. Another factor is atmosphere and culture. People have to allow other people to do 'crazy things' when they are busy inventing. This latter factor is missing in Europe. There is no acceptance of people that are different. So you find the most boring and badly performing CEO's at the top of European companies and no Google, no Facebook, no Uber, no AirBnB, no well-funded Spotify, no Microsoft, no Intel, no Sun, no Cisco, etc. in Europe. Hundreds of billions of euros flow out of Europe each year because of this conservatism, or rather backwardness, on the part of European politicians and financiers. It is culture and therefore one might argue that politicans have no choice. The truth is that the people on the street are not like that, they want to, but they are not allowed to. Politicians are supposed to bring a culture forward but most of them are solely concerned with keeping the status quo in place because that is their powerbase. So-called democratic elections are seldom more than a returning ritual to assuage the disgust of populations with their leaders (exactly because of the factors menationed here) and to give an air of legitimacy to their positions.


Something is only invented when there is an infrastructure by which it can be made or realized, and that there is demand, which is to say, a spectrum of applications for its use.

Notes on The Law of Sparking Inventions

Something is only invented when the time is ripe.

The sole reason that inventions are extremely rare in areas like India, Africa, and other dictatorial or slave societies, is the fact that everything belongs to some boss. An invention or even slight improvement of efficiency always only benefits the usurper, like a maharadja, and never the inventor. This dissuades people to try and change things for the better. This is the reason there is no development in such areas and the reason there was a fast development in Europe. Unfortunately, most inventions in Europe were a result of the necessities of waging war. As soon as there were no more wars, the flood of inventions stopped. America, by contrast, is for a large part stuck in a pioneer culture and that, ipso facto, stimulates inventions. Also, America is engaged in economic and military wars all of the time, even more than Rome in antiquity. So, inventions in America are raining down. Add to that the unlimited amounts of available venture capital as well as an acceptance of risk by financiers, and you have the perfect cocktail for top-rate inventions at top-rate speed.
Europe does not understand that at all and sticks to its crazy ways of keeping the status quo as much as possible. For instance, subsidies that are meant to stimulate invention or putting inventions on the market (called valorisation) must first be financed by the inventor himself and are only eleigible for 50% funding after the fact. This means the inventor or company has to finance 100% himself. In the USA, one need to finance 0% as there is plenty of risk-taking funds available. And no-one in the American Congress was troubled by granting Elon Musk $1.2 billion in government funding by way of an advance to be paid back later, if any. This stupidity on the part of European politicians enrages entrepreneurs I talk to about this subject. Only large corporations that do not need the money get funded, increasing the inequality between companies that the subsidies were intended to decrease (according to the PR smoke screens that tend to surround such measures).
Therefore, I concluded that in order to do anything in Europe, one has to work with things politicians and financiers understand: buildings of steel and stone. Internet cannot be seen, so it is beyond their understanding. I am very sorry to have to say this.
China, by the way, has a culture that is more than 3000 years older than the Western culture. They have learned to absorb immense shocks and survive. That is why the central government is able to allow unimaginable freedoms next to unimaginable restrictions. One can do and invent anything and get grants for anything as long as it does not undermine the power of the central powers. That has been so for thousands of years. Chinese people do not mind to be one people. It is a concept that has helped them build the Great Wall and become the strongest economy of the world within ten years. Compare that to the total incompetence and utter weakness of Europe and one can see where the future of this world will be coming from.

Notes on The Spiritual Laws of Invention

Rupert Sheldrake found proof of the phenomenon of synchronicity and telepathy, which he called ' morphogenic resonance', as follows. The newspaper The Times in London had a cryptogram puzzle every day and there were a certain amount of winners. One day, there was a delay in the distribution of the newspaper and people in the country got the paper a couple of hours later. In the meantime, people in London had started to solve the puzzle. All of a sudden, there were far more people who had sent in their correct answers than usual. This caught the attention of Sheldrake. He devised experiments where he could repeat this phenomenon. It is comparable with telepathy. It is a well-known and well-registered phenomenon that when two people are emotionally closely attached, and one of them experiences a serious emotional event, the other person will 'feel' or 'know' or 'co-live' that emotion at the very same time, regardless of the distance between them. An English pilot that was crashing in the Pacific Ocean evoked that same co-experience with his wife in England, 20.000 kilometers away. She just 'knew' he had crashed and died. A terrible thing, of course, but very interesting to researchers who are not funded by Big Pharma. Unfortunately, Sheldrake tried to explain his findings by material elements and called it 'spiritual'. This made him a laughing stock of both the people funded by Big Pharma and government as well as the laughing stock of the people who are in actual spiritual research. But his discovery stands. If you discard his explanations involving the brain and atomic particles, then you are left with a correct and very workable theory.

Notes on The Energy Laws of Invention

Contrary to official lore, a being can create energy out of nothing.
Try to do something you really like and you really go for. Then try to do something against your will. You will feel the huge differences in energy even though your body is exactly the same.
But this subject of spiritual elements is denied in official circles, it is deemed to be politically incorrect talking about it. Male directors in companies scoff at it. So we will leave that subject alone.

3. Sources

I am fortunate to have obtained the studies of professor doctor Amy Friedlander done for the Corporation of National Research Initiatives (CNRI), Reston, Virginia, USA, published between 1992 and 1996. The object of the study assignment was to find out how new technologies develop in a social and economic way. It was written for the movers and shakers of the digital industries that were wondering which directions they had to take with their companies.

I derived The Laws of Invention

4. Some observations

Perhaps one or more additional laws can be derived from the following observations.

The need for self-esteem

Slef-esteem is a necessary ingredient for identity. One of the most valuable things in the world is an identity. It explains almost everything. I am working on a book on Identity called "ID-entity". The title is the summary of the principal motive of the book.

A population wants its own folk to be smart. It is a kind of survival thing. If you can have confidence that when your people are smart, you as a person have a better chance of survival. So we find the claim for the invention of the printing press in the 15th century in several countries. Of course, it had been invented in China in the 13th century but we do not know China and we in the Est think we are technologically superior, so we do not like others to be centuries ahead. For a long time, Chinese or Eastern peoples were considered stupid and worthless even though their cultures predate our Western cultures by 3.000 to 15.000 years, if not more.
What is even more worrying is that the invention of printing was not about the printing press at all, contrary to what Stephen Fry in his documentary about Gutenburg suggested when he followed the reconstruction of such a press. Printing presses had existed for over 400 years. The invention was 'movable type', i.e. the production and use of individual letters on such a large scale that it became possible to print anything that had words in unlimited quantities. That would not be possible without movable type. Before the invention of movable type, we had printing with wood engravings. It is nigh impossible to carve all letters of a page of a book in wood and then print it, let alone a whole book.
So we have William Caxton in England who 'invented' the printing press and introduced it in 1476 in Westminster. We have Laurens Janszoon Coster in Haarlem of The Netherlands who alledgedly invented the printing press in 1423. And Johannes Gutenberg who introduced bookprintingin 1440. Each time, people stood in awe before the printing press but the invention was the dirty boxes with thousands of letters of movable type or molds to make them in from molten lead. This system was in use by newspapers as recently as 1990, possibly even later. The introduction of plastic pages that could be created from a raw page with pieces of text and photos glued onto it, was introduced gradually from 1980 onwards.

The only way to make a novelty acceptable

Perhaps there is another Law of Invention. One might formulate it as follows: In order for a novel invention to be accepted, one has to present it as something people already know. I'd call it The Law of Acceptance of Invention.
The craziness of Man is such that he does not accept new things or novelties. Anything first has to be presented in a form that is familiar to him. So, a motor car was first introduced as a coach without a horse. The first motor cars with either a combustion engine or an electric engine looked exactly like a carrage car that people knew, only in this case a carriage without a horse. There was also a steam powered motor car. Well, what did people know that wa steam driven? A train with a steam locomotive. The first steam cars looked like a train. Because of the unwieldiness of such a contraption it never caught on. But you can see steam cars in some car musea.
The first Tesla cars or rather the first 100% electric cars of today, have to look exactly like an ordinary motor car otherwise nobody would buy it. So, Tesla modeled its first mass production car on the most coveted car of the time, an Aston Martin. In another blog I will show some pictures illustrating this Law of Acceptance. But you can find plenty of images on the web by yourself that illustrate this principle.


Amsterdam, April 8, 2018.