For Monday  Chapters 1-4,  For Wednesday the rest of book

Monday In Class
Also for Wednesday:  Eric Betzig’s Life Over the Microscope, New York Times August 28. 2015
Do you see elements of Steven Johnson’s ideas in Eric Betzig’s career?  Where?

What were your ideas about how innovation happens before you read this book.  What makes a good engineer?  Did this book change them?  How?  Could this book have been written before the Internet?  Why?  What does this tell us?

Who is Johnson?  Is he a professor at a university?

Does it make sense to you to study “good ideas” instead of “inventions”  ?  Why/why not?  What does that tell us about the relation of engineering to other areas of creativity?  Do you think there are fundamental similarities between them?  In what ways?   Music, art, …

It it reasonable to use evolution to study technology?  What does that mean about how we think about technology?

What does the “adjacent possible” mean?  Why didn’t Babbages’s Analytical Engine make it?  How is the adjacent possible different for us than it was 50 years ago?

Is space really a multiple–US vs. USSR?

You are Stephen Johnson with a time machine.   You want to study the innovations behind the Apollo program.  Where do you set the dial?   Where do you look?  What do you think you would see?

Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox  and Stephen Johnson discuss the Apollo program.  How do you think their conversation would go?

What is the difference (in personal terms) between being in a gaseous network, a solid network and a liquid network?  Have you ever been in one of these?  (In a work or learning environment?)  Why does he call cities a liquid network?  What did it lead to?   Why does he think cities are more innovative than other places?  Is NC State a liquid network?  Why or why not?

How would you define a platform?  What platforms are relevant to you?  Why are they important?  What different scales do platforms work on?  Why does Johnson see exaptation as so important?  Can you think of other examples of exaptation, either in history or in your own life?

Next month, researchers in Chemistry, Physics, Medicine and Economics will be honored with the world’s highest intellectual honor, the Nobel Prize.  (Note that no more than three people can be awarded a Nobel Prize in a year in any one discipline.)  Nobel Prize==should we give it at all?  Could we think of it as harmful in the sense that it perpetuates a misunderstanding of how creativity works.   Jeff Bezos has given a billion dollars to endow a new prize for creativity.  He knows that you are a careful student of Steven Johnson and creativity and has hired you as a consultant.  He is paying you one million dollars for your thoughts so should really be good ones.  How should this prize be structured?  How should we determine who gets the prize?

Based on Johnson’s book, what would you say are the characteristics of a good engineer?  What are three practical things you can do to implement some of Johnson’s ideas?