You may have gleaned from recent quiz content that I have been watching, again, The Ascent of Man. A pure pleasure. All the heroes are there: Galileo, Newton, Einstein, whoever it was who made the first wheel.
Waiting for me next in the you-may-have-also-enjoyed-this-five-decades-ago section is Connections by James Burke. I’d love to see that again too. These were tales of discovery and innovation; audacious, inspired, entirely inadvertent. A large dimension of our history entails falling ass-backwards into new opportunities and possibilities. We stand on the shoulders of giants, looking around for beer and pizza.
Burke’s thesis would be not so much: this happened because of that, as: if this had not happened, we may not have got that. Thus are revealed the dots that connect gin, tonic, mosquitoes, and twentieth century air conditioning.
