I've been reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. What jumps out of the story is the degree to which engineering was critical, not just to building the bomb, but to understanding the atom itself.
I was expecting a story of great ideas by theorists being tested by experimentalists and then implemented by engineers in a kind of linear march down a value chain.
But far from it. They had to engineer ways of seeing the results of the experiments just to test an idea. Then it was often the experimenter who had the first idea of what was going on and iterated rapidly, hoping to publish the theory before someone else did it first.
Really it makes you think the theorists are just along to write it all up neatly at the end.
And the process is cooperatively iterative, one little find here informing the next one, really everyone dependent on the things that came before, but fighting hard to make their own innovative contribution. Sort of like today's startups and open source projects.
Similarly my wife recently told me that David Bowie was before his time. But we agreed that even in a creative field like music, everything is still derivative, and every new artist changes the ideas of all that come after them. So you can't really be before your time, you can only be original, lasting and influential.
That's kind of what launching a new product or service is like as well. You are in the middle of a whirl of incumbents and competitors. You have to experiment just to find the ideas that explain what is really happening now, that predict the future and let you enable it.
Sure when it is all done and adopted by millions it looks like a big idea changed the world. But really it was small insights well tested that made it happen.