Quotes from Steven Johnson

You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands. This is one way in which the human history of innovation deviates from the natural history. New ideas do not thrive on archipelagos.

De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.

The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.

Plagues and political unrest have a long history of following the same cycles.)

There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.

You and I may not live to see the day," Snow explained to the young curate, "and my name may be forgotten when it comes; but the time will arrive when great outbreaks of cholera will be things of the past; and it is the knowledge of the way in which the disease is propagated which will cause them to disappear.

today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.

Even in the best of times, life aboard a seventeenth-century privateering ship was a challenging and claustrophobic experience. The fact that a community of a hundred or more people could survive on the open seas for months at a time, in a vessel with dimensions not much larger than a tennis court, should go down as one of the great achievements in our long history of creating life-sustaining habitats in fundamentally inhospitable environments.

if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale's head for an afternoon.

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.

Our safety depends on being able to predict the evolutionary path that viruses and bacteria will take in the coming decades, just as safety in Snow's day depended on the rational application of the scientific method to public-health matters. Superstition, then and now, is not just a threat to the truth. It's also a threat to national security.

Jane Jacobs observed in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: "The larger a city, the greater the variety of its manufacturing, and also the greater both the number and the proportion of its small manufacturers.

as the historian Tom Standage observes, they were "among the first to recognize the importance of trademarks and advertising, of slogans, logos…. Since the remedies themselves usually cost very little to make, it made sense to spend money on marketing.

The wealthiest cities of the world will follow Venice's lead and simply try to engineer their way around the problem. The poorest cities will follow New Orleans' lead—at least so far—and just move to other nearby cities. Either way the poplation stays urban.

In other words, a serious crisis of nonrenewable energy resources is likely to accelerate the urbanization trend, not derail it.

And so this is why the whole world has suddenly taken an interest in whether Thai poultry workers get their flu shots: because the world wants to ensure that H5N1 stays as far away as possible from ordinary flu viruses.

Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.

The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.

The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.

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

Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years.

The FBI's information network was a classic closed network: not only could outsiders not access information in it, but also, the system was designed so that documents were carefully shielded from other members of the organization, a legacy of an institution predicated on secrets and "need to know" restrictions.