49. The Practical Training of Thinking
And I can make it clear to you what these inner pushers of thought are. During my time as a student, a colleague approached me with a red face and said: I have now made a wonderful invention; I have to go quickly to Radinger – that was the departmental representative – and explain my invention to him. It's something revolutionary. — He couldn't be stopped, he ran to the specialist and came back a little dejected. He had to wait an hour and yet had no time to lose with his world-changing invention! In the meantime, he wanted to explain the matter to me. He started. He was very perceptive and told me about an extraordinarily well-designed machine construction. He couldn't come to any other conclusion than that he had solved the problem: by using as little steam power as possible, which the machine initially consumes, with the help of the most diverse translations, it ultimately achieves a huge amount of work. I had the matter explained to me and finally I said: Yes, you see, if you boil the matter down to a simple idea, it is just as feasible as the important problem of standing inside a railroad car and pushing it. As surely as you move it forward, so surely does this machine work. — He also saw the matter immediately and no longer went to the expert.