Accomplishing the Impossible


Accomplishing the Impossible


The movie Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan, opens with the Kobayashi Maru test being administered to an aspiring starship captain. This test is a simulation of an attack on the student's ship, to test the student's responses to the various calamities resulting from the attack. As each difficulty is dealt with, the simulation computer issues a new, even more difficult, problem until it is no longer humanly possible to handle the situation. It was impossible to win the simulation game. And yet one person, James Kirk, had won it. It was impossible, but he did it. How? He hacked into the simulation computer the night before the test and reprogrammed it. He cheated, but he won.

Anything that seems to be impossible is only impossible within the conditions, rules, laws, hypotheses, assumptions, that limit the means that may be taken to accomplish the desired effect. This set of conditions define the paradigm, or “box”, that restricts the mental activity of the potential problem solver - but they are the rules of the game.

Throughout my career I witnessed many (more than a dozen) situations in which the seemingly impossible had been accomplished by innovative scientists. For this to happen, the hypotheses, the rules, assumed for the problem have to be violated. That is, the scientist has to cheat – just as Kirk cheated.

I'll mention just a couple of examples. This one the reader can identify with. Suppose you had never before seen an airplane, but now found yourself standing near a huge military cargo plane being loaded with tanks weighing hundreds of tons. Then someone says, “Now we're going to make this monster fly in the air”. Observing that air is so tenuous that you're hardly aware of it, you would think that he was insane. It seems impossible but it takes off and flies.

The second example is Dr. Whitcomb's invention of the “supercritical wing”. A highly respected theoretician had published a paper proving the nonexistence of isentropic supersonic flow. To a fluid flow scientist, logic seems to dictate that once a flow becomes supersonic, it can revert to subsonic only through a shock wave, which by its nature is nonisentropic. However, Whitcomb invented an airfoil on which the surface flow became supersonic and returned to subsonic isentropically. The hypotheses of the theory had been violated because they didn't account for the effect of the local airfoil surface angle relative to the surface flow direction.

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