On reinventing the wheel

During our entire school careers, we are reinventing the wheel. We are repeating things that other people have figured out. A minuscule subset of what we do entails novelty. Essays and the art we make in kindergarten fall into this small category.

This is also true for our undergraduate education. When we learn and apply Newton's laws, we are repeating something discovered 300 years ago.

When we start working, however, we are told not to reinvent the wheel. We are told to pay someone to do the "boring stuff" so that we can build from there and do the cool stuff. It is exceedingly rare for a postgraduate mechanical engineering student to write their own Finite Element Method (FEM) implementation from scratch, except if that is their topic. It is also unheard of for a student to write their own implementation of the Fast Fourier Transform.

I believe there is a lot of merit to reinventing the wheel. We encounter deeply fundamental principles that we can apply elsewhere, or that simply leads to deeper understanding of our fields.

James Clerk Maxwell, when tasked with writing a review paper on the state of electromagnetism in 1821, repeated many of the fundamental experiments within the field. He repeated the experiments, not to discover something new, but simply to understand the field better. As it happened, he did discover something new, and that something set the stage for magnificent discoveries later in his life.

Maybe our society needs to value reinventing the wheel more than inventing new, useless things.

Maybe reinventing the wheel is the quickest way to invent the hoverboard.