People often credit their ideas to individual "Eureka!" moments. But Steven Johnson shows how history tells a different story. His fascinating tour takes us from the "liquid networks" of London's coffee houses to Charles Darwin's long, slow hunch to today's high-velocity web.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
I'm not talking about the tv show Eureka here, which was mostly silly fluff but not especially problematic. I'm talking about the famous anecdote about Archimedes of Syracuse, who supposedly realized the principle that bears his name when slipping into a bath, distracted by a problem he had been…
Last month everyone was all a-twitter about the big screen Charles Darwin biopic, Creation. The film, based upon the biography Annie's Box, was released in England with great fanfare, but whether it would come to the United States was another question altogether. A U.S. distributor was hard to come…
"Think about it this way - a boomerang goes out and comes back to you if you throw it. If you throw it out at the universe, it will come back down to you on Earth." -J. B. Smoove
Give a planet a kick, and it goes into a more distant orbit around our star. Give it a hard enough kick, and it will…
There are many fascinating stories linked to the early days of evolutionary biology and geology, and more than one of them is intertwined with our understanding of coral reefs. I had always thought that Darwin's interaction with the question of how coral reefs form was central to Darwin's own…