Potentialities for growth, then, are available in all directions—toward what has never been thought and back to what must be rethought.

Most germane for our purposes, knowledge, too, can be analyzed as a network. In this case, nodes can be pieces of information, or experiences, or words, or knowers themselves, while the edges can be the relationships between those pieces of information, those experiences, words, or knowers.

Real possibility, however, is a potentiality that is live precisely because it is rooted in the material here and now (unlike either faux or formal possibilities). Importantly, real possibility can open onto the past just as much as onto the future. The present has the potential to be curiously disrupted along both its edges: the “forward-dawning”

the connectional account of curiosity also challenges the common-sense view of possibility as solely related to growth. While nodes can be added, they can also be removed or changed, and while edges can be added, they can also be broken and rewired

Sometimes, however, possibilities are quite old—longstanding and patient. And likewise, some curiosities are ancient—questions that have been either long-touted or long-buried. How might we dispel, then, the novelty bias to which curiosity and possibility are so regularly subject? How might we better appreciate curiosity and possibility wherever

Without curiosity, possibility cannot appear on the scene, and without possibility, curiosity has no scene to work with in the first place. The two make one another possible.

Scientific progress, then, is not unidirectional but multidirectional and its characteristic discoveries both add new information and reformulate old information. Scientific curiosity, in this context, drives individual scientists and scientific communities to fill internal and external network cavities with informational nodes and conceptual

If knowledge is a network and curiosity is its growth principle, and if the adjacent possible is indeed hovering over the edges of knowledge systems as they currently exist, then curiosity is at least one of, if not the primary, epistemic access point to that field of adjacent epistemic possibilities. Crucially, that field of adjacent epistemic

Without curiosity, the space of the adjacent possible would exist but remain unplumbed and inactive. Curiosity then opens up adjacent possibilities, whether that means new nodes and edges or the reformulation of existing nodes and edges (and ultimately of the network itself).