Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson is a journey undertake to understand how as time progresses networking is the source for new ideas in the future.
Book is an excellent read on how ideas flow.
Book is worth reading. Key takeaways from the book is reproduced below on for reference purpose:
Importance
of Coral reefs
Coral
reefs make up about one-tenth of one percent of the earth’s
surface, and yet roughly a quarter of the known species of marine life make
their homes there.
Mystery
of Scaling
Scientists
and animal lovers had long observed that as life gets bigger, it slows down.
Flies live for hours or days; elephants live for half-centuries. The hearts of
birds and small mammals pump blood much faster than those of giraffes and blue
whales. But the relationship between size and speed didn’t
seem to be a linear one. A horse might be five hundred times heavier than a
rabbit, yet its pulse certainly wasn’t five hundred
times slower than the rabbit’s. After a formidable
series of measurements in his Davis lab, Kleiber discovered that this scaling
phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called “negative
quarter-power scaling.” If you plotted mass versus
metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that
led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami. Physicists
were used to discovering beautiful equations like this lurking in the phenomena
they studied, but mathematical elegance was a rarity in the comparatively messy
world of biology. But the more species Kleiber and his peers analyzed, the
clearer the equation became: metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter
power. The math is simple enough: you take the square root of 1,000, which is
(approximately) 31, and then take the square root of 31, which is (again,
approximately) 5.5. This means that a cow, which is roughly a thousand times
heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5 times longer, and have a
heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck’s.
As the science writer George Johnson once observed, one lovely consequence of
Kleiber’s law is that the number of heartbeats per
lifetime tends to be stable from species to species. Bigger animals just take
longer to use up their quota.
Importance
of Incubator
Because
incubators focus exclusively on the beginning of life, their benefit to public
health—measured by the sheer number of extra years they
provide—rivals any medical advance of the twentieth
century. Radiation therapy or a double bypass might give you another decade or
two, but an incubator gives you an entire lifetime.
Trick
to having good ideas
The
trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try
to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
Wrong conjecture by author
First
codified by the Franciscan friar and mathematician Luca Pacioli in 1494, the
double-entry method had been used for at least two centuries by Italian bankers
and merchants. We do not know if the method originated in the mind of a single
visionary proto-accountant, or whether the idea emerged simultaneously in the
minds of multiple entrepreneurs, or whether it was passed on by Islamic
entrepreneurs who may have experimented with the technique centuries before.
Author
trolling book wisdom of the crowds
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.
Author
and confusion
The act
of creation, in Koestler’s account, is something that
happens exclusively in the mind.
On a
basic level, it is true that ideas happen inside minds,
but those minds are invariably connected to external networks that shape the
flow of information and inspiration out of which great ideas are fashioned.
Source
of Darwin’s idea
In a
famous passage from his Autobiography, Darwin
describes his great moment of insight as a young man struggling to understand
the evolution of life:
In
October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic enquiry,
I happened to read for amusement Malthus
on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence
which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals
and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable
variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.
The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at
last got a theory by which to work.
What
internet stole from us
Yet in
recent years, a puzzling meme has emerged on op-ed pages with a strange
insistence: the rise of the Web, its proponents argue, has led to a decline in
serendipitous discovery. Consider this
representative
elegy to the “endangered joy of serendipity,” authored by a journalism professor named William McKeen:
Think
about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed
people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key
words into a search engine and you find—with an
irritating hit or miss here and there —exactly what you’re looking for. It’s efficient, but
dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves,
of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding . . .
Looking for something and being surprised by what you find—even
if it’s not what you set out looking for—is one of life’s great pleasures,
and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience.
Example
of Inversion
In the
spring of 1958, Frank T. McClure, the legendary deputy director of the Applied
Physics Laboratory, called Guier and Weiffenbach into his office. McLure had a
confidential question to ask the men: If you could use the known location of a
receiver on the ground to calculate the location of a satellite, McClure asked,
could you reverse the problem? Could you calculate the location of a receiver
on the ground if you knew the exact orbit of the satellite? Guier and
Weiffenbach ran the logic through their heads for a few minutes, and then
answered in the affirmative. In fact, deducing the location from a known orbit—instead of a stationary ground position would make the results
significantly more accurate. Without explaining his ultimate interest in the question,
McClure told the two men to run a quick feasibility analysis. After a few
furious days of crunching the numbers, Guier and Weiffenbach reported back: the
“inverse problem,” as they
called it, was eminently solvable.
Soon,
Guier and Weiffenbach would learn why the inverse problem was so important to
McClure: the military was developing its Polaris nuclear missiles, designed to
be launched from submarines. Calculating accurate trajectories for a missile
attack required precise knowledge of the launch site’s
location. This was easy enough to determine on land—say,
for a missile silo in Alaska—but it was fiendishly
difficult in the case of a submarine floating somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
McClure’s idea was to take the ingenious Sputnik solution
and flip it on its head. The military would establish the unknown location of
its submarines by tracking the known location of satellites orbiting above the
earth. Just as sailors had used the stars to navigate for thousands of years,
the military would steer its ships using the artificial stars of satellite
technology.
The project was dubbed the Transit system. Just three years after Sputnik’s launch, there were five U.S. satellites in orbit, providing navigational
data to the military. When Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down in 1983
after drifting into Soviet airspace thanks to faulty, ground-based navigation beacons,
Ronald Reagan declared that satellite-based navigation should be a common good” open to
civilian use. Around that time, the system took on its current name: Global
Positioning System, or GPS. Half a century later, roughly thirty GPS satellites
blanket the earth with navigational signals, providing guidance for everything
from mobile phones to digital cameras to Airbus A380s.
