The same is true of private car services Lyft and Uber. Airbnb saw untapped supply and unaddressed demand where others saw nothing at all. Before Airbnb, travelers had little choice but to pay high prices for a hotel room, and property owners couldn’t easily and reliably rent out their unoccupied space. Consider the Silicon Valley startups that have harnessed the spare capacity that is all around us but often ignored. Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works. But we will never learn any of these secrets unless we demand to know them and force ourselves to look.

We can invent faster ways to travel from place to place over the surface of the planet we can even learn how to escape it entirely and settle new frontiers. We can find new ways to generate energy that free the world from conflict over fossil fuels.

We could cure cancer, dementia, and all the diseases of age and metabolic decay. We are within reach not just of marginal goals set at the competitive edge of today’s conventional disciplines, but of ambitions so great that even the boldest minds of the Scientific Revolution hesitated to announce them directly.

There is more to do in science, medicine, engineering, and in technology of all kinds. The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers. If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. He needed brilliance to succeed, but he also needed a faith in secrets. After nine years of hard work, Wiles proved the conjecture in 1995. Wiles started working on it in 1986, but he kept it a secret until 1993, when he knew he was nearing a solution. He claimed to have a proof, but he died without writing it down, so his conjecture long remained a major unsolved problem in mathematics. Pierre de Fermat had conjectured in 1637 that no integers a, b, and c could satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer n greater than 2. Andrew Wiles demonstrated this when he proved Fermat’s Last Theorem after 358 years of fruitless inquiry by other mathematicians-the kind of sustained failure that might have suggested an inherently impossible task. You can’t find secrets without looking for them.

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