How to be as innovative as the Wright brothers - no computers required

"The scientist was Lord Kelvin. Born in early nineteenth-century Ireland to a mathematics teacher, he was from his youngest summers a wizard with numbers. Like a living computer, he thought effortlessly in digits, entering college at the age of ten and dashing up the ranks to full professor. By his middle age, he had reduced electricity to algorithms, unified the known rules of physics, and formulated thermodynamics, achieving such eminence that in 1892, he became the first scientist elevated to England's House of Lords."

"In our modern space age, it's easy to laugh at Lord Kelvin. He was a luddite, a fogey, a stick in the mud. But we shouldn't be so quick to smirk. The mistake that the good lord made then is one that almost everyone on earth is making now. The mistake is to confuse probability with possibility. Probability is the statistical likelihood that an event will occur - and so too, in modern parlance, is possibility."

Lord Kelvin rose from early mathematical talent to prominence as a 19th-century physicist who unified electricity and thermodynamics and became the first scientist in the House of Lords. In 1895 he declared heavier-than-air flying machines impossible. Within a decade the Wright brothers achieved powered flight, exposing the error. The core error described is conflating probability with possibility: treating low probability as equivalent to impossibility. Probability denotes statistical likelihood; possibility denotes being within the probability spectrum, however small. This conflation causes technological and cultural blindspots that lead experts and societies to dismiss feasible innovations prematurely.

Read at Big Think