159 Quotes by Steven Johnson

As Lawrence Lessig has so persuasively argued over the years, there is nothing “natural” about the artificial scarcity of intellectual property law.

You have to jump around in time to get the facts right. Linear chronology makes for good popular storytelling, but it doesn’t always capture the deep causes that drive history. Some causes are proximate, in the moment. Some are echoes of distant shock waves, still reverberating a hundred – or a thousand – years later.

A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer’s knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.

The computer scientist Christopher Langton observed several decades ago that innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the “edge of chaos”:.

Like any other thought, a hunch is simply a network of cells firing inside your brain in an organized pattern. But for that hunch to blossom into something more substantial, it has to connect with other ideas. The hunch requires an environment where surprising new connections can be forged: the neurons and synapses of the brain itself, and the larger cultural environment that the brain occupies.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.