Are they often effective?
Sometimes the solutions to complex problems in our human past have seemed, in retrospect, to be surprisingly simple. I could mention many examples, from the legend of Alexander the Great cutting the Gordian Knot with his sword, to Copernicus and Galileo simplifying our understanding of the universe by propounding the heliocentric idea of the solar system, to Darwin’s systematization of biology with his Theory of Evolution, to Einstein’s revolution of physics with his Special Theory of Relativity, summarized by the deceptively simple equation E = mc^2. (I don’t know how to produce exponents with Medium’s authoring software. Maybe there’s a simple solution to that problem that I just don’t know about. :)
Unfortunately all of those examples are highly misleading in the simplicity with which they are commonly (mis)understood, and with which I have just described them. Real evidence for the Gordian Knot legend is scarce, and the scientific problems that I mentioned all involved much detailed work before the theories that solved them could be discovered and described adequately. Furthermore, learning to understanding those theories well is not a simple task.
We may mistake ingenious solutions for simple solutions. Ingenious solutions aren’t usually obvious until we change our ways of thinking about particular…
