We’ve already seen the striking spectrum of where children sleep around the world and how a child’s bedroom both reflects and reinforces society’s gender norms. In A Girl and Her Room, photographer Rania Matar takes this direction of curiosity a step further and explores the inner lives of teenage girls through the interiors of their bedrooms. From upperclass mansions to displaced person camps to college dorm rooms, and just about every bedroom variety in between, Matar’s tender yet powerful portraits capture the private spaces of these wildly diverse young souls — punk rockers, peace activist, valedictorians, teen moms, refugees, dog-lovers, cat-lovers.

Matar, herself the mother of a teenage daughter, focuses on the two worlds most familiar and formative to her own teenage years and young adulthood — America and the Middle East. She reflects on the project’s process:

I was discovering a person on the cusp on becoming an adult, but desperately holding on to the child she barely outgrew, a person on the edge between two worlds, trying to come to terms with this transitional time in her life and adjust to the person she is turning into. Posters of rock stars, political leaders or top models were displayed above a bed covered with stuffed animals; mirrors were an important part of the room, a reflection of the girls’ image to the world; personal objects, photos, clothes everywhere, chaotic jumbles of pink and black make-up and just stuff, seemed to give a sense of security and warmth to the room like a womb within the outside world.

Andrea, Beirut, Lebanon 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Emma S, Cambridge, MA 2009

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Jess, Jamaica Plain, MA 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Shannon 21, Boston MA, 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Amal, Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp, Beirut, Lebanon 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Ellice, Jamaica Plain, MA 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Zahra, Beirut, Lebanon 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Dima, Beirut, Lebanon 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Ai, Boston, MA 2009

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Shifa'a, Jerusalem, West Bank 2009

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Georgina, Roxbury, MA 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Tori, Exeter, NH 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Hollie, Harrisville, RI 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Ariel, Winchester, MA 2009

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Sarah 17, Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp Beirut, 2010

© Rania Matar | raniamatar.com

Both visually stunning and culturally captivating, A Girl and Her Room offers a rare vista into one piece of what it means to grow up as a girl and to metamorphose into a woman, with all her obsessions, convictions, and fascinations, prompting us to find the parallels and universals amidst the differences and contrasts.

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Human vision is one of the most remarkable capacities of our bodies, its precise mechanism the subject of much fascination, from gorgeous vintage illustrations to cutting-edge modern science to Sesame Street stop-motion. In 1938, The Handy (Jam) Organization — the same folks who brought us an homage to makers and hands-on creativity, an animated explanation of how radio broadcasting works, a visual tour of mid-century design, the original Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer animation, and a primer on ultraviolet light — produced Color Harmony: a fantastic animated explanation of how color vision works, how other animals use their eyes, and how the human eye functions to see colors both separately and in combination.

The irony, of course, is that on the timeline of film innovation, color didn’t permeate Hollywood until the 1950s — mainstream film technology in 1938 was confined to black-and-white, so all the live footage is devoid of color, complemented instead by hand-drawn color animation.

We are able to see mixtures of two-color rays as one color. We don’t need green light in order to see green, and we don’t need orange light to make us see orange. Mixtures of blue and yellow light and yellow and red light will create green and orange for us. To make the eyes see all color, then, only the three primaries — red, yellow, and blue — need be used. From these primaries, a complete color circle can be created. That is why it is possible to reproduce the brilliant colors of nature, faithfully, with just three primary colors in modern color reproducing processes.

↬ Doobybrain

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Do you ever stop to think what happens when a web page, like this one, manifests as digital text and image on your screen to transmit ideas between someone else’s brain and your own across time and space — and how it all works, in practical terms? The very thought of this physical underbelly of our information ecosystem feels strange and uncomfortable, as if betraying our dichotomous culture of “virtual” vs. “real,” cyberspace vs. physical space. And yet, while we may ponder its cultural impact, its biases, and its economics, the internet — despite our metaphors of clouds and information superhighways, and our concept of a “wireless” web — is a thoroughly physical thing. That’s precisely the unsettling realization at which Andrew Blum arrived after a squirrel in his Brooklyn backyard nibbled through the cable connection of his internet, the internet, causing it to falter. Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet records Blum’s quest to uncover what few of us consider and even fewer understand — the jarringly tactile, material nuts and bolts of an intricate architectural system we tend to see as an abstract, amorphous blob.

If you have received an email or loaded a web page already today — indeed, if you are receiving an email or loading a web page (or a book) right now — I can guarantee that you are touching these very real places. I can admit that the Internet is a strange landscape, but I insist that it is a landscape nonetheless… For all the breathless talk of the supreme placelessness of our new digital age, when you pull back the curtain, the networks of the Internet are as fixed in real, physical places as any railroad or telephone system ever was.

From the vast data warehouses of major tech companies and giant labyrinths of undersea cables that bridge continents to the nano scale of optical switches and fine fiberglass, Blum reveals an internet that has “a seemingly infinite number of edges, but a shockingly small number of centers.”

Submarine cable map by TeleGeography, depicting more than 150 cable systems that connect the world.

He writes in the introduction:

This is a book about real places on the map: their sounds and smells, their storied pasts, their physical details, and the people who live there. To stitch together two halves of a broken world — to put the physical and the virtual back in the same place — I’ve stopped looking at web ‘sites’ and ‘addresses’ and instead sought out real sites and addresses, and the humming machines they house. I’ve stepped away from my keyboard, and with it the mirror-world of Google, Wikipedia, and blogs, and boarded planes and trains. I’ve driven on empty stretches of highway and to the edges of continents. In visiting the Internet, I’ve tried to strip away my individual experience of it — as that thing manifest on the screen — to reveal its underlying mass. My search for ‘the Internet’ has therefore been a search for reality, or really a specific breed of reality: the hard truths of geography.

What emerges is Blum’s three-way Venn diagram of understanding:

The networks that compose the Internet could be imagined as existing in three overlapping realms: logically, meaning the magical and (for most of us) opaque way the electronic signals travel; physically, meaning the machines and wires those signals run through; and geographically, meaning the places those signals reach. The logical realm inevitably requires quite a lot of specialized knowledge to get at; most of us leave the that to the coders and engineers. But the second two realms — the physical and geographic — are fully a part of our familiar world. They are accessible to the senses. But they are mostly hidden from view. In fact, trying to see them disturbed the way I imagined the interstices of the physical and electronic world.

Still, we seem drawn to the spatial and physical mystery of the internet, often visualizing it with the same egocentrism with which medieval man visualized the universe. Blum points to The Internet Mapping Project, in which Kevin Kelly asked ordinary people to sketch how they conceive of the internet, constructing a kind of “folk cartography” and exposing the internet as what Blum calls “a landscape of the mind.”

An entry from Kevin Kelly's Internet Mapping Project, soliciting hand-drawn depictions of the internet.

Blum, in fact, dedicates an entire chapter to maps — a treat for a cartographically compulsive map-lover like myself. In it, he recounts the story of a Milwaukee printer that runs into technical difficulties in printing TeleGeography’s annual map of the global internet. Blum observes:

The networked world claims to be frictionless — to allow for things to be anywhere. Transferring the map’s electronic file to Milwaukee was as effortless as sending an email. Yet the map itself wasn’t a JPEG, PDF, or scalable Google map, but something fixed and lasting — printed on a synthetic paper called Yupo, updated once a year, sold for $250, packaged in cardboard tubes, and shipped around the world. [This] map of the physical infrastructure of the Internet was itself the physical world. It may have represented the Internet, but inevitably it came from somewhere — specifically, North Eighty-Seventh Street in Milwaukee, a place that knew a little something about how the world was made.

To go in search of the physical Internet was to go in search of the gaps between fluid and fixed. To ask, what could happen anywhere? And, what had to happen here?

But Tubes is far more than a technical anatomy, revealing instead the broader implications of this seemingly ubiquitous parallel world that two billion of us inhabit, in one form or another, on any given day. In the epilogue, Blum transcends the physicality of his quest to ponder the philosophical:

As everyone from Odysseus on down has pointed out, a journey is really understood upon arriving home. […] What I understood when I arrived home was that the Internet wasn’t a physical world or a virtual world, but a human world. The Internet’s physical infrastructure has many centers, but from a certain vantage point there is really only one: You. Me. The lowercase i. Wherever I am, and wherever you are.

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Since the dawn of recorded history, humanity has been turning to the visual realm as a sensemaking tool for the world and our place in it, mapping and visualizing everything from the body to the brain to the universe to information itself. Trees of Life: A Visual History of Evolution (public library) catalogs 230 tree-like branching diagrams, culled from 450 years of mankind’s visual curiosity about the living world and our quest to understand the complex ecosystem we share with other organisms, from bacteria to birds, microbes to mammals.

Though the use of a tree as a metaphor for understanding the relationships between organisms is often attributed to Darwin, who articulated it in his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the concept, most recently appropriated in mapping systems and knowledge networks, is actually much older, predating the theory of evolution itself. The collection is thus at once a visual record of the evolution of science and of its opposite — the earliest examples, dating as far back as the sixteenth century, portray the mythic order in which God created Earth, and the diagrams’ development over the centuries is as much a progression of science as it is of culture, society, and paradigm.

Theodore W. Pietsch writes in the introduction:

The tree as an iconographic metaphor is perhaps the most universally widespread of all great cultural symbols. Trees appear and reappear throughout human history to illustrate nearly every aspect of life. The structural complexity of a tree — its roots, trunk, bifurcating branches, and leaves — has served as an ideal symbol throughout the ages to visualize and map hierarchies of knowledge and ideas.

The Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Intellect, not tree-like at first glance, but certainly branching dichotomously, the steps labeled from bottom to top, with representative figures on the right and upper left: Lapis (stone), Flamma (fire), Planta (plant), Brutum (beast), Homo (human), Caelum (sky), Angelus (angel), and Deus (God), a scheme that shows how one might ascend from inferior to superior beings and vice versa. After Ramon Lull (1232–1315), Liber de ascensu et descensu intellectus, written about 1305 but not published until 1512.

The 'Crust of the Earth as Related to Zoology,' presenting, at one glance, the 'distribution of the principle types of animals, and the order of their successive appearance in the layers of the earth’s crust,' published by Louis Agassiz and Augustus Addison Gould as the frontispiece of their 1848 Principles of Zoölogy. The diagram is like a wheel with numerous radiating spokes, each spoke representing a group of animals, superimposed over a series of concentric rings of time, from pre-Silurian to the 'modern age.' According to a divine plan, different groups of animals appear within the various 'spokes' of the wheel and then, in some cases, go extinct. Humans enter only in the outermost layer, at the very top of the diagram, shown as the crowning achievement of all Creation.

'Genealogy of the class of fishes' published by Louis Agassiz in his Recherches sur les poissons fossiles (Research on fossil fishes) of 1844.

The 'genealogico-geographical affinities' of plant families based on the natural orders of Carl Linnaeus (1751), published by Paul Dietrich Giseke in 1792. Each family is represented by a numbered circle (roman numerals), the diameter of which gives a rough measure of the relative number of included genera (arabic numerals).

The unique egg-shaped 'system of animals' published by German zoologist Georg August Goldfuss in his Über de Entwicklungsstufen des Thieres (On animal development) of 1817.

'Universal system of nature,' from Paul Horaninow’s Primae lineae systematis naturae (Primary system of nature) of 1834, an ingenious and seemingly indecipherable clockwise spiral that places animals in the center of the vortex, arranged in a series of concentric circles, surrounded in turn by additional nested circles that contain the plants, nonmetallic minerals, and finally metals within the outermost circle. Not surprisingly, everything is subjugated to humans (Homo) located in the center.

Ernst Haeckel’s famous 'great oak,' a family tree of animals, from the first edition of his 1874 Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des menschen (The evolution of man).

(More on Haeckel’s striking biological art here.)

Tree by John Henry Schaffner showing the relationships of the flowering plants. The early split at the base of the tree leads to the monocotyledonous plants on the left and the dicotyledons on the right.

Schaffner, 1934, Quarterly Review of Biology, 9(2):150, fig. 2; courtesy of Perry Cartwright and the University of Chicago Press.

A phylogeny of horses showing their geological distribution throughout the Tertiary, by Ruben Arthur Stirton.

Stirton, 1940, plate following page 198; courtesy of Rebecca Wells and the University of California Press.

Ruben Arthur Stirton’s revised view of horse phylogeny.

Stirton, 1959, Time, Life, and Man: The Fossil Record, p. 466, fig. 250; courtesy of Sheik Safdar and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Used with permission.

William King Gregory’s 1946 tree of rodent relationships.

Gregory, 1951, Evolution Emerging: A Survey of Changing Patterns from Primeval Life to Man, vol. 2, p. 757; fig. 20.33; courtesy of Mary DeJong, Mai Qaraman, and the American Museum of Natural History.

The frontispiece of William King Gregory’s two-volume Evolution Emerging.

Gregory, 1951, Evolution Emerging: A Survey of Changing Patterns from Primeval Life to Man, vol. 2, p. 757; fig. 20.33; courtesy of Mary DeJong, Mai Qaraman, and the American Museum of Natural History.

Images courtesy of Johns Hopkins University Press

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‘Tis the season for exceptional graduation speeches, in which cultural icons bequeath their life’s wisdom to a new generation of, ideally, hungry-eyed thinkers and doers — icons like Neil Gaiman, David Foster Wallace, Ellen DeGeneres, Aaron Sorkin, Barack Obama, Ray Bradbury, J. K. Rowling, Steve Jobs, Robert Krulwich, Meryl Streep, and Jeff Bezos. This month, one of my big heroes, Acumen Fund founder Jacqueline Novogratz, addressed departing Gettysburg College seniors and imparted upon them, through anecdotes from her own remarkable story, a handful of beautiful aspirations to live by, summarized below.

We’ve become a society seeking instant gratification. We want simple answers, clear pathways to success… Life does not work that way. And instead of looking for answers all the time, my wish for you is that you get comfortable living the questions.

Novogratz’s four pieces of advice, synthesized:

1. Focus on being interested, not on being interesting — don’t fall for status, seek opportunities that help you grow. (Cue in Paul Graham on prestige.)

Focus more on listening and learning — the rest will come.

2. Don’t worry about what other people think of you. (Cue in Hugh MacLeod on ignoring everybody.)

Take risks. Ask the “dumb” questions. Fail if you have to, and then get up and do it again.

3. Avoid cynicism. Pessimists can tell you what’s wrong with the world, but it’s the optimists who set out to change it. (Cue in E. B. White on the duty to elevate rather than lower down.)

Inspiring hope in a cynical world might be the most radical thing you can possibly do. Hope may not feed us, but it is hope that sustains us.

4. Build on what came before. (Because we know creativity is combinatorial, everything is a remix, and giving credit matters.)

Before you finished getting out of bed, brushing your teeth with clean tap water, putting on clothes, making breakfast, turning off the light, walking out the door, you are benefiting from the work of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals from all around the world. They all deserve your spirit of generosity. So walk with humility and reverence for the human endeavor, and know it’s your job to help take that endeavor forward.

↬ TED-Ed

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On the heels of last month’s omnibus of children’s books by famous graphic designers comes the charming Get Dressed! (public library) by celebrated graphic designer* Seymour Chwast (who happens to be married to another design icon, the great Paula Scher).

The playful and unusual book infuses the daily routine of getting dressed with whimsy, exploring not how to get dressed, but why: “Get dressed to hide,” “Get dressed to make believe,” “Get dressed to build a castle,” “Get dressed to sing.”

On their blog, the folks at Abrams Books offer a tongue-in-cheek “outtake” — Seymour Chwast in his own work attire, “Get dressed to illustrate!”:

With its clever die-cut magnetic cover closure and its half and full gatefolds, Get Dressed! belongs with the kind of books that remind us of the beautiful, playful physicality of the analog.

* Thanks, Tina

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To celebrate their second birthday, my friends at The Story Collider, the finest science storytelling show around, teamed up with American Museum of Natural History media writer and producer Mindy Weisberger to bring to life the recent #IAmScience meme — real-life stories about the unconventional, unexpected ways in which people ended up in science — in a lovely short film. Starring a wide range of science jockeys, from physicists to forensic scientists to journalists, it bespeaks the oft-overlooked truth that, much like the path of science, the path to science is a journey of discovery, of questions rather than answers, and of embracing serendipity.

Featuring:

• Erin Barker, producer / editor, The Story Collider
• Shelly Ben David, psychologist
• Deborah Berebichez, physicist and science popularizer
• Cat Bohannon, PhD student, narrative and cognition
• Samuel Crane, PhD student, entomology
• Matt Danzico, journalist
• Jeanne Garbarino, biochemist
• Meghan Groome, science educator
• Amy Harmon, journalist
• Smriti Keshari, documentary filmmaker
• Lance Langstrom, geneticist
• Ben Lillie, writer / co-founder, The Story Collider
• Eric LoPresti, painter
• Luis Quevedo, radio producer
• Theanne Schiros, physicist
• Lou Serico, forensic scientist
• Julian Taub, science writer
• Kelly Vaughn, science teacher
• Mindy Weisberger, media writer / producer

You can support Story Collider with a tax-deductible donation, treat yourself to their podcast, and come to the next live show.

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As a lover of all things Alice in Wonderland, I was so taken with these glass lantern slides originally found in 100 Ideas That Changed Film that I thought they deserved individual attention. Created as a set of 24 slides based on Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations for the Lewis Carroll classic but altered to avoid copyright conflicts, these gems were meant for viewing on a magic lantern, or Laterna Magica — a primitive projector dating back to the 17th century, consisting of a concave mirror in front of a light source. Though the exact year is unknown, the slides were created sometime between 1910 and 1925.

For a modern contrast, see Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama’s psychedelic recent illustrated adaptation of Alice.

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What a magical Rube Goldberg machine of discovery literature is — the original “inter-net,” if you will, with the allusions, citations, and references in one work opening doors to countless others. One such Rube Goldberg chain reaction began in last month’s Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity, which first led me to the 1939 gem A Technique for Producing Ideas, and then to The Art of Scientific Investigation (public library; public domain) — an absolutely fantastic treatise on creativity in science and, by extension, in all endeavors of the mind, originally written by Cambridge University animal pathology professor W. I. B. Beveridge in 1957 and published with an appropriately open to interpretation all-black textless cover. Using a wealth of anecdotes and case studies of legendary scientists and watershed discoveries, Beveridge synthesizes insights on what makes successful science. But with entire chapters exploring subjects like serendipity, intuition, and the imagination, he goes far beyond the scope of science to deliver a potent prescription for the mental techniques that best prepare us for discovery and creativity in any discipline — because, after all, as John Cleese once put it, “Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.”

One recurring emphasis by Beveridge is the eclecticism of influence necessary for true originality and the idea that creativity is combining and connecting things:

Successful scientists have often been people with wide interests. Their originality may have derived from their diverse knowledge … Originality often consists in linking up ideas whose connection was not previously suspected.

[…]

Therefore reading ought not to be confined to the problem under investigation nor even to one’s own field of science, nor, indeed, to science alone.

Beveridge also repeatedly insists on method, on process over product, illustrating his point by citing a number of famous scientists. For instance, the great French physiologist Claude Bernard observed:

Good methods can teach us to develop and use to better purpose the faculties with which nature has endowed us, while poor methods may prevent us from turning them to good account. Thus the genius of inventiveness, so precious in the sciences, may be diminished or even smothered by a poor method, while a good method may increase and develop it … In biological sciences, the role of method is even more important than in the other sciences because of the complexity of the phenomena and countless sources of error.

Bernard offers validation for the idea that ignorance fuels science by observing:

It is that which we do know which is the great hindrance to our learning, not that which we do not know.

Henry Bessemer, who discovered the method of producing cheap steel, corroborated this:

I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.

This osmotic balance of influence — “what’s been done before” — and original thought is, as Beveridge illustrates, the central paradox of creativity. To those who deny the combinatorial nature of creativity, the poet Lord Byron quipped:

To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.

In a chapter titled “Preparation,” Beveridge offers a solution:

The best way of meeting this dilemma is to read critically, striving to maintain independence of mind and avoid becoming conventionalized. Too much reading is a handicap mainly to people who have the wrong attitude of mind. Freshness of outlook and originality need not suffer greatly if reading is used as a stimulus to thinking and if the scientist is at the same time engaged in active research. In any case, most scientists consider that it is a more serious handicap to investigate a problem in ignorance of what is already known about it.

(Cue in Carl Sagan’s wisdom on balancing skepticism and open-mindedness.)

Francis Bacon, pioneer of the scientific method, phrased it thusly:

Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted … but to weigh and consider.

One particularly interesting technique Beveridge recommends in preparing the mind for originality involves index cards to create florilegia of reading materials:

Most scientists find it useful to keep a card index with brief abstracts of articles of special interest for their work. Also the preparation of these abstracts helps to impress the salient features of an article in the memory. After reading quickly through the article to get a picture of the whole, one can go back to certain parts, whose full significance is then apparent, re-read these and make notes.

Bear in mind, this is the 1950s. Yet the description and function of this method bears a striking resemblance to using a platform like Tumblr today, which lets us “clip” excerpted information onto “index cards.” To say, then, that every scientist should have a Tumblr isn’t such a terrible idea after all.

Beveridge opens a chapter on “Chance” with some timeless wisdom by Nobel-winning French bacteriologist Charles Nicolle:

Chance favors only those who know how to court her.

This, of course, is a play on Pasteur’s famous maxim, “Chance favors the prepared mind,” which Steven Johnson modified to “chance favors the connected mind” more than half a century later, in his study of where good ideas come from.

Beveridge argues that although the role of chance in discovery appears to be common knowledge, the exact magnitude of its importance is rarely realized or fully understood. He offers the following advice on reaping the benefits of chance in pursuing discovery:

Although we cannot deliberately evoke that will-o’-the-wisp, chance, we can be on the alert for it, prepare ourselves to recognize it and profit by it when it comes. Merely realizing the importance of chance may be of some help to the beginner. We need to train our powers of observation, to cultivate that attitude of mind of being constantly on the look-out for the unexpected and make a habit of examining every clue that chance presents. Discoveries are made by giving attention to the slightest clue. That aspect of the scientist’s mind which demands convincing evidence should be reserved for the proof stage of the investigation. In research, an attitude of mind is required for discovery which is different from that required for proof, for discovery and proof are distinct processes.

[…]

A good maxim for the research man is ‘look out for the unexpected.’

(And, one might argue, for the artist as well.)

Beveridge makes the case for cultivating this serendipity-opportunism through the stories of famous scientists. The influential medical educator and researcher Alan Gregg wrote:

One wonders whether the rare ability to be completely attentive to, and to profit by, Nature’s slightest deviation from the conduct expected of her is not the secret of the best research minds and one that explains why some men turn to most remarkably good advantage seemingly trivial accidents. Behind such attention lies an unremitting sensitivity.

And writing of his father, Charles Darwin’s son put it thusly:

Everybody notices as a fact an exception when it is striking and frequent, but he had a special instinct for arresting an exception. A point apparently slight and unconnected with his present work is passed over by many a man almost unconsciously with some half considered explanation, which is in fact no explanation. It was just these things that he seized on to make a start from.

(Cue in legendary graphic designer Paul Rand, who knew that the “role of the imagination is to create new meanings and to discover connections that, even if obvious, seem to escape detection.”)

Citing polymath-surgeon Sir Henry Souttar, Beveridge captures the single most important condition for cultivating a capacity for chance discovery:

It is the content of the observer’s brain, accumulated by years of work, that makes possible the moment of triumph.

(Celebrated designer Paula Scher can attest to this.)

Beveridge dives deeper:

The scientist who has an independent mind and is able to judge the evidence on its merits rather than in light of prevailing conceptions is the one most likely to be able to realize the potentialities in something really new. He also needs imagination and a good fund of knowledge, to know whether or not his observation is new and to enable him to see the possible implications.

He offers compelling historical evidence for the additive, combinatorial nature of creativity, countering the genius-myth of how creativity works:

[M]any of the classic discoveries were anticipated in this way but were not properly developed until the right man came along. Edward Jenner was not the first to inoculate people with cowpox to protect them against smallpox, William Harvey was not the first to postulate circulation of the blood, Darwin was by no means the first to suggest evolution, Columbus was not the first European to go to America, Pasteur was not the first to propound the germ theory of disease, Lister was not the first to use carbolic acid as a wound antiseptic. But these men were the ones who fully developed these ideas and forced them on a reluctant world, and most credit rightly goes to them for bringing the discoveries to fruition. It is not only new ideas that lead to discoveries. Indeed few ideas are entirely original. Usually on close study of the origin of an idea, one finds that others had suggested it or something very like it previously.

(Mark Twain spoke to this in his brilliant letter on originality to Helen Keller.)

Beveridge summarizes his insights on chance:

Interpreting the clue and realizing its possible significance requires knowledge without fixed ideas, imagination, scientific taste, and a habit of contemplating all unexplained observations.

Next week, we’ll be taking a look at Beveridge’s ideas on intuition and the imagination — stay tuned.

The Art of Scientific Investigation is available as a free download in multiple formats from The Internet Archive, but be aware the text was digitized poorly using optical character recognition and is plagued with legibility errors.

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Somewhere between Fibonacci’s invention of arithmetic, which changed the world of numbers as we know it, and scientists’ ambitious visualizations of the scale of the universe lies a daunting fundamental question: How do we actually use these numbers to measure the universe? That’s precisely what the Royal Observatory Greenwich answers in this wonderful short animation, a teaser for a new exhibition titled Measuring the Universe: from the transit of Venus to the edge of the cosmos.

In a nod to this morning’s affirmation of the additive nature of scientific discovery, narrator Dr. Olivia Johnson observes:

What’s most incredible to me is how all these measurements build on each other. It’s only by knowing the scale of our Solar System — the distance between the Earth and Sun — that we’re able to measure the distances to nearby stars using parallax.

The charming animation was done by Robert Milne, Ross Phillips, and Kwok Fung Lam.

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Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.