What Stephen Curry, Amazon and wormholes have in common.

When Amazon drops off a package at your home, it’s as if you are at one end of a wormhole in the space-time continuum. How did that package get to you? Who knows? You just know it arrived. You might be sad that your local bookstore went out of business, but you sure like that you can now whip out a device, order the latest Stephen King novel (or a neon spandex suit) with a “1-click.”

Amazon has mastered the art and science of moving packages from point A to point B.

Which brings us to Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors point guard, superstar and (unanimous!) selectee as the Most Valuable Player of the 2015-16 NBA season. Curry has mastered the art and science of shooting a 9.5-inch-diameter basketball from at least 22 feet away – swoosh! – into the 18-inch-wide hoop to score a 3-pointer. Some of Curry’s long-distance shots are so improbable and so difficult to defend that they appear to violate the laws of the space-time continuum.

Like Amazon, Stephen Curry owes his success to his ability to move an object from point A to point B with great speed, accuracy and frequency.

When it comes down to it, almost all innovation is about moving something from point A to point B – but doing it better, faster, cheaper or with a higher quality than it was done before. Innovators who engineer new and improved ways to move an object – whether a ball, a package or a person – from point A to point B can change the world. When these new innovations first arrive on the scene, whether it’s the telephone moving the human voice, the passenger train moving human bodies or the internet moving human knowledge, they create such a sense of wonder that they do seem to violate the laws of the space-time continuum. Social theorist David Harvey uses the term “space-time compression” to explain how technology can collapse spatial or temporal distance.

In 1851, a British author sounded the alarm about a Victorian era version of a wormhole created by the passenger train. “Time, our best and dearest possession, is in danger,” he wrote, describing how time was being forced to obey “the laws of a railway company.”

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the term “creative destruction,” writing that a capitalist society like ours “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

He compared capitalism to a severe storm system that regulates itself with the “perennial gale of Creative Destruction.” But one man’s creativity is another man’s destruction. Disrupters like Jeff Bezos and his Amazonians might be radically “creative,” but the people who lose out, such as bookshop owners, only experience the “destruction.”

Who exactly is the destroyer? It’s us, the consumer.

Back when the dunk was revolutionary, it was vilified by almost everyone.

Americans in the 1850s ditched the Pony Express when telegraph companies developed the technology to send messages from one place to another at the speed of electricity. Who was going to pay for a horse-and-buggy ride when a motorcar could transport them much faster from here to there? Why go to a record store when Apple can deliver songs straight to your phone? Once you’re in the wormhole, you’re never coming back out.

It all begins with the early adopters who are the first to embrace the latest thing. But these futurephiles only make up about 13 percent of the population according to Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory. Most of the rest of us are purists. Deep down we want the world to stay pretty much the same. Every generation romanticizes the good old days; every generation gripes about newfangled things. But even though we might resist the siren call of technology, eventually we will all succumb.

Which brings us back again to Stephen Curry. Some people grumble about Curry and how his epic long-range missiles have changed the game. Behind the backlash is the disturbing feeling that even though his play is radically creative, he’s “destroying” the game that we know and love.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, wants to change the rules so it’s harder to make a 3-point shot. Some former players are yearning for the good old days when the heroes were big men who battled below the basket. Even Curry’s former coach Mark Jackson accused him of “hurt[ing] the game.” Why? Because when Jackson goes to high school gyms he see kids, and “the first thing they do is they run to the 3-point line.” The nerve of these kids – modeling their game on the greatest player of the day!

One of the strangest ironies of great innovations is how the perception of such advances changes over time. Yesterday’s futuristic wormhole is today’s object of nostalgia. Take passenger trains. They evoke in us a sepia-toned feeling of yesteryear. Trains!

But when trains were introduced, they were the great technological disrupter. The same is true for the slam-dunk. Basketball’s miraculously athletic and spectacularly soaring shot might be today’s crowd-pleaser, attracting 7 million TV viewers to the most recent NBA slam dunk contest, but decades ago – back when the dunk was a revolutionary innovation – it was vilified by almost everyone.

In 1935, a disapproving college coach tried to block the shot with his vitriolic essay, “Dunking Isn’t Basketball.” A Boston Celtic from the 1960s, Satch Sanders, described how players who were anti-dunk tried “take people out of games,” punishing those who dared to dunk by slamming into them while they were still soaring toward the hoop.

Dozens of changes were made to the game to discourage the dunk. In 1967, the NCAA rule-makers even banned the shot, believing that one player’s mastery of the dunk – Lew Alcindor (aka Kareem Abdul Jabbar) – was destroying the game.

Dunking was its own wormhole, a revolutionary way of getting the ball from point A to point B. Eventually, the once-feared dunk was no longer seen as a game destroyer but as one of basketball’s most creative innovations.

But there was one rule that was instituted by the NBA in the 1979-80 season to make it a little easier for the small guys to shoot and a little harder for the big men to dominate.

It’s taken a while for the rule to have its desired effect. It’s called the 3-point goal.

CAMILLE SWEENEY and JOSH GOSFIELD are the authors of The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well. This piece first appeared on Observer.com