Multiple discovery, the adjacent possible and the ether

It's intriguing that several people can have the same idea or reflection at almost the same moment. Once you think you have an original idea, you see it popping up in other places. I got curious and started looking into it. Turns out there are a few theories about that.

The scientific one starts with an observation called multiple discovery. In 1922 Ogburn and Thomas listed 148 inventions that different people made independently at roughly the same time. Newton and Leibniz both arrived at calculus. Darwin and Wallace both arrived at natural selection. Bell and Gray filed for the telephone on the same day. Ogburn and Thomas argued that once a culture has enough knowledge and tools, some inventions become close to inevitable. Someone was going to make them. Stuart Kauffman later called this the adjacent possible. You can't invent the lightbulb before electricity. Once the pieces are there, the next step is open to anyone paying attention. Robert Merton, a sociologist, went further. He said these "multiples" are the normal way science moves.

The poetic version is Elizabeth Gilbert's. In Big Magic she writes about ideas being "in the ether", a kind of life-form separate from us with one impulse: to be made manifest. An idea looks for a human to work through, and if you ignore it long enough, it goes to someone else.

I like both, and they end up giving the same advice. Gilbert would say the idea left you. The science would say it was never only yours, because the adjacent possible opens for everyone at the same time. Either way the window is short, and if you've had the thought, others are close behind. So write it down and ship it before someone else does.