How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World Quotes

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Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

The time travelers are usually adapt at "intercrossing" different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your gara...

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

...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.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place...

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World