In any field of endeavor, it is impossible to make a significant contribution without first being strongly influenced by past achievements within that field.Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement

I partially agree with the statement that past achievements have significant impact on the contribution made by successors working in that field. It is true in many cases that past achievements have guided and helped people pursuing that field to contribute more significantly but there are situations when excessive focus on past activities can put a limitation on the creativity of the new generation.

Newton’s formulation of the basic laws of motion was truly inspired by the works of Galileo. Even, the discovery of the fact that earth is the centre was also based on previous works done by other scientists. Actually, it is sometimes said that a new invention is nothing but an amalgamation of different previous inventions and ideas. So the contributions in past have definitely a significant effect on the present achievement.

The failures made by people in the past have a significant influence on the output of people working in the present. Earlier it was believed that atom is the smallest particle in the universe, but some contradictory results was proving it wrong. Based on all these observations, it was finally concluded that there are even smaller particles that an atom. Even in case of scientific theories, people, by reading previous work come to know where the flaws were and what the reasons of failure were so that they can avoid those failures in order to arrive at some useful result.

But the excessive dependency on past activities limits the creativity of the new idea or invention in any endeavour. For example, if you learn painting from a painter, in the beginning its fine to imitate his paintings but after that continuous imitation restricts your line of thought and hence the output is not new or original. Similarly , there are many evidences where major breathtaking inventions have taken place because there were people who were not much influenced by past thought but they preferred out-of-the-box thinking and came up with an altogether new idea.

Before the invention of aeroplane by Wright Brothers, no one ever thought that even humans can geta chance to fly, but their invention proved them wrong. History is evident that even the evolution and development of humans is the combined result of past contribution and some new additions not influenced by past.

So, aggregating the above two somewhat divergent paths, it can be said that the past has definitely significant impact on new achievements but there the effect has to be limited otherwise , it can prove detrimental to the creativity of the new idea.