Quotes About Discovery

You can see the fingerprints of the adjacent possible in one of the most remarkable patterns in all of intellectual history, what scholars now call "the multiple": A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year.

Ogburn and Thomas found 148 instances of independent innovation, most them occurring within the same decade.

The adjacent possible is as much about limits as it is about openings. At every moment in the timeline of an expanding biosphere, there are doors that cannot be unlocked yet.

All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines.

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.

endangered joy of serendipity

La cuestión es inventarse formas de explorar los límites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno físico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo específico de red social, o mantener ciertos hábitos en la forma de buscar y archivar la información.

Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.

The first electrical battery was invented separately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746. Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele independently isolated oxygen between 1772 and 1774.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

JUPITER'S MOONS (1610)

LOGARITHMS (1614)

Greatbatch's pacemaker is an instance where a great idea came—literally—from a novel combination of spare parts. Sometimes those novel combinations arrive courtesy of the random collisions of city streets or the dreaming brain. But sometimes they come from simple mistakes. You reach into the bag of resistors and pull out the wrong one, and four years later, you're saving someone's life.

BLOOD CIRCULATION (1628)

SLIDE RULE (1632)

LAW OF FALLING BODIES (1634)

Being wrong on its own doesn't unlock new doors in the adjacent possible, but it does force us to look for them.

ANALYTIC GEOMETRY (1637)