Historians of the future will look back on this moment as the abrupt end of the beginning. This sort of book is one of many responses to the “big bang” of the digital/biological era that has us all reeling. Wilson and Isaac Newton Steve Jobs launching the iPhone the Egyptian Sphinx and African mami wata Ruppy the transgenic puppy, a Shinkansen, Wegner and tectonics, Darwin and evolution, Richard Branson and Jasper Johns and Eli Whitney and Henry Ford and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jony Ive and … and … It’s a dizzying barrage, designed to loosen up stale presumptions readers may have, all tethered together in about a dozen pithy essays. riffing on smartphones in the hands of dummies Van Gogh and Gaugin E.O. At the outset, Brandt and Eagleman promise they will “rifle through the inventions of human society like paleontologists ransacking the fossil record.” The examples they unearth include NASA’s stunning 1970 rescue of Apollo 13 juxtaposed with Picasso’s Bordel d’Avignon Louis C.K. If you were a fan of James Burke’s brilliant Connections, or perhaps of Don Norman’s ruminations on design, there’s a similarly sumptuous buffet of brain candy here on which to pig out.
Quite interestingly, Shannon took time to muse on creativity in a brief speech from 1952 called “ Creative Thinking.”īrandt and Eagleman have written an exuberant book about creativity. What is creativity, anyway? Edwin Land defined it as “a sudden cessation of stupidity.” Claude Shannon might have described it abstractly as a process that increases informational entropy.
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