There is also the fact that massive wads and scads and piles of knowledge exists and is freely available to those of us who live in a free society. Someone of average intelligence or higher, who is willing to put int he time and effort, can find the necessary information to build almost anything thta strikes their fancy. Eventually. Recall the famous story of the school kid who built a working model of a fission bomb. All heneeded was uranium. The federal government fulled its collective pants, but nothing he did was illegal, and it was all done with commercially available supplies.

“1% inspiration, 99% perspiration” like the guy said.

I am also acquainted with a gentleman, humorously nicknamed “McGyver’” who literally can construct whatever you can conceive of, within the limits of technology.

Stephen Hawking jumps to mind right off the bat. Freeman Dyson? Or what about other people in our own line of work, such as Ray bradbury, who have been responsible for inventing so many new concepts?

I will grant that hardware development is often complicated, and expensive. But that doesn’t apply to all types of creation. Not even all hardware creation.

My background is primarily in civl engineering. I have seen a lot of field adaptations done on-the-fly in order to meet the needs of unexpected issues. Many of them were quite clever. Some of them even approached the level of genius, in my opinion. And many of them were created by people who lacked college degrees.

All knowledge is interconnected. I also grant that it is impossible for any person to be an expert in everything. But it is certainly possible for a person to be an expert in more than one field, and some people are capable of becoming experts in multiple fields, while maintaining at least some core competencey in a variety of other areas. Because all knowledge is interconnected, and one fact inexorably leads to another, and another, and so on.

Do movies and tv oversimplify the process of learning and invention to a ridiculous extent? Certainly. But that doesn’t mean the lone inventor is obsolete. It depends on what he/she is inventing. A new artifical heart might require a team and a large budget. A small, wind-powered led lamp suitable for use in a third world hut might be a different matter.

And, please, don’t rack the slide every time you pull out your pistol. That just wastes ammunition.

I think you got most of the big ones. I complained about many of these same points on my blog earlier this year.

The only one I’d add is the issue of the resources involved in this kind of work – the big money that only government, and large corporations (themselves often underwritten by government) are able to supply, which is rarely given any thought.

As you point out in your references to Sam Carter, Stargate really is awful about this stuff, but Eureka is probably worse. In fact, I’ve taken to calling this “the Eureka paradigm.”

If this was just what we saw in science fiction, that would be bad enough – but a bigger problem is that people really do believe these images, with the result that they think of technological R & D as the stuff of an Edisonade.

But you’re right: these days, it’s impossible to invent things by oneself or for one person to know all/many subjects intimately. Hubby is a geographer/climatologist so he has working knowledge of physics, chemistry, statistics, computer programming, and social science research, but he only has expert knowledge in maybe one or two of those areas.

And the joke is, if you want to invent something, get a grant and assemble a team, isn’t it?

It is hard to watch movies/series for my family too. The most common gaffe is hearing explosions in space – that’s an easy one – but there are so many, many things that make us smack our foreheads. We recently watched The Avengers via Netflix, and if I had a dollar for every time our 16 year old muttered about something defying the laws of physics or some other aspect of science (Thor exempted, naturally, since he is a god), we could have paid for theater tickets. But, then again, nobody in the theater would appreciate us complaining about science being butchered on the big screen.