Quotes from Steven Johnson

When those parts became available, the discovery of oxygen entered the realm of the adjacent possible.

What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

With that increase in population came a crucial increase in the number of possible connections that could be formed within the group. Good ideas could more readily find their way into other brains and take root there. New forms of collaboration became possible.

somewhere within a thousand years of the first cities emerging, human beings invented a whole new way of inventing.

Amplification created an entirely new kind of political event: mass rallies oriented around individual speakers.

The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.

But serendipity is not just about embracing random encounters for the sheer exhilaration of it. Serendipity is built out of happy accidents, to be sure, but what makes them happy is the fact that the discovery you've made is meaningful to you. It completes a hunch, or opens up a door in the adjacent possible that you had overlooked.

high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.

No one recognized – and exploited – this new power more quickly than Adolf Hitler

If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don't need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it.

The challenge, of course, is how to create environments that foster these serendipitous connections, on all the appropriate scales: in the private space of your own mind; within larger institutions; and across the information networks of society itself.

Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and spread through the population at large.

imagine a business problem as a maze. One person might be motivated to make it through the maze as quickly and safely as possible in order to get a tangible reward, such as money—the same way a mouse would rush through for a piece of cheese. This person would look for the simplest, most straightforward path and then take it. In fact, if he is in a real rush to get that reward, he might just take the most beaten path and solve the problem exactly as it has been solved before.

When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn't magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network.

While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.

people tend to condense the origin stories of their best ideas into tidy narratives, forgetting the messy, convoluted routes to inspiration that they actually followed.

If you looked at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.

DEVONthink features a clever algorithm that detects subtle semantic connections between distinct passages of text.

Dunbar's generative conference room meetings remind us that the physical architecture of our work environments can have a transformative effect on the quality of our ideas. The quickest way to freeze a liquid network is to stuff people into private offices behind closed doors, which is one reason so many Web-era companies have designed their work environments around common spaces where casual mingling and interdepartmental chatter happens without any formal planning.

Because they are fixed physical structures, most offices have a natural tendency to disrupt liquid networks of information. They themselves are, quite literally, made out of solids, and they often map out the conceptual solid of a formal org chart, with its neatly defined departments and hierarchies.

If the commonplace book tradition tells us that the best way to nurture hunches is to write everything down, the serendipity engine of the Web suggests a parallel directive: look everything up.

anti-"lightbulb moment," the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

Flow is not the singular intensity of focusing "like a laser," as we often say. And it is not the miraculous illumination of a sudden brainstorm. Rather, it is more the feeling of drifting along a stream, being carried in a clear direction, but still tossed in surprising ways by the eddies and whirls of moving water.

But standing in the atrium of Building 99, it's impossible not to think that this space was designed to conjure up a different kind of flow: the collective flow of energized minds forming liquid networks in their mixing spaces and situation rooms. Building 99—like Building 20 before it—is a space that sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw. It is designed to leak. In this, it shares some core values with the liquid networks of dense cities.