The Pinball Effect

The interaction of two or more events colliding has changed history and its evolutionary impact  over and over throughout time. Water gardens inspiring the first carburetor. Guttenberg, a jeweler, getting the date wrong randomly then inventing the printing press in the 15th century.

Or Einstein determining the speed of light (186,282 mi/sec) while picnicking noticing two distant cars pass safely through an intersection perpendicular to one another without ramming one another and wondering why not. Realizing in a light bulb moment the reason was the drivers had to see each’s position at the same time. Concluding light has constant speed. Without it, the drivers would miscalculate if light speed was different for each person. If light speed were random, the driver’s in question would ram into each other in the intersection. Of course inattention could still cause a collision but couldn’t be blamed on lightspeed.

Light has to be travelling at the same speed to react appropriately from all angles to avoid an accident. Light entered their retinas at precisely the same time because light travel at the same speed.

History is littered with accidental discoveries from one set of series of extremely unlikely events intersecting with something completely unrelated threading together with incredible random discoveries moving human industry, civilization and evolution forward, mostly. And continues every day unwittingly all around us.

Darwin has nothing on the The Pinball Effect. Biological evolution and natural selection are one thing. It’s adaptive and makes sense allowing a species to mutate, grow stronger, bigger, smaller, camouflaged, grow horns or a hammer head among a long list of biological moves helpful too species survival.

Burke’s groundbreaking existential human gray matter angle is much more interesting. From early man to the present Burke shines a light on the impact of all those quirky meaty phycological effects. Intellectual survival acquired from random human-to-human interaction (networking) that wrote the first draft of evolutionary development.

He shows how a single inquiring mind, just one intuitive person who sees possibilities plus seizes the moment changes everything.

Perhaps only one person out of a hundred or one out a 100 hundred million might see something special no one else sees, hidden uniqueness, and the only one that notices there’s more than to something that meets the eye no one else in the history of the world noticed and acted upon it.

Spurred on by intellectual prowess and curiosity alone.

That one person let’s call Jackson notices something no one else picked up on. And Jackson tells his neighbor let’s call her Janet and Janet being Janet figures out the missing element that no one ever considered. Thus randomly together putting their individual skills into play, they turn a series of random events that pushes the evolutionary advancement forward caused by the pinball effect.

The actual pinball machine company that built the first coin operated version changed its name to Bally (a modified homophone) in 1932 and the rest is history. A world giant today, Bally is now in gaming palaces around the world. A percussor to software games, their ball and flipper game was the genesis of an empire. All random games of chance randomly coming together by chance over almost a hundred years ago.

Cornering around 90% of slot machines worldwide by the end of the 1960’s, they later put out megahits Pac-man and Ms. Pacman, eventually acquired by Caesars Entertainment, Inc.

It would be tempting to call these events planned growth or long-term strategy or preordained. But that predisposes millions of human interactions were somehow inevitable and clearly were not.

The unique angle Burke brings to randomness and human curiosity bumping into world changing inventions and solutions. The first airplane company began from the Wright brothers bicycle storefront, for example.

An analogy to understand this book is to think of the billions of functions going on inside our body every minute. Those intricate overlapping systems and cell division have got to get it right almost every time. If it doesn’t, unexpected happen, things go sideways. Cells mutate after billions of times splitting perfectly normal. Pinball is about the billions of things going on outside and inside our bodies every day.

Burke references the first Homo sapiens 200,000 years-old ago and a few curious behavior vestiges from them still around today.

It’s important to note that the book itself is uniquely part of its own topic. You can read it just fine traditionally from front to back. Or you can read it from any random page inside to learn more about the subject you are interested learning more about by following the margin numeric notation to pinball backward or forward to another page within the book with more info by following the bread crumbs.

It’s a consciousness expander with scientific rigor with dozens and dozens of citation pages but the story of humans is told in an intriguing asymmetric way. While non-fiction often can be unsatisfactorily dry, it’s written with storytelling in mind and proves truth can be stranger than fiction.