Futurist.com: Futurist Speaker Glen Hiemstra

Discovering the Future

by Glen Hiemstra on 16/12/08 at 3:57 pm |  

I’ve been reading a popular old book, Blue Highways, by William Least Heat Moon (1982). This is the story of his long driving tour of the U.S., keeping to “blue highways” (or two-lane roads) and small towns.

At one point he gets lost (more than once actually), and writes about it, commenting in a way that relates well to scientific discovery, and to discovering the future through curiosity.

Again on the road, I drove up a lumpy, dry plateau, all the while thinking of the errors that led me to Hat Creek. The word “error” comes from a Middle English word, erren, which means, ‘to wander about,’ as in the knight errant…. Yesterday I had been mistaken and in error, taking one road after another. As a result, I had come to a place of clear beauty…

The annals of scientific discovery are full of errors that opened new worlds: Bell was working on an apparatus to aid the deaf when he invented the telephone; Edison was tinkering with the telephone when he invented the phonograph. If a man can keep alert and imaginative, an error is a possibility, a chance at something new; to him, wandering and wondering are part of the same process, and he is mistaken, most in error, whenever he quits exploring. (pp. 223-224)

You can wander around, here.

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