These are just a few of the ways that the pure chemistry of ideas mutates into new compounds through exposure to the oxygen of real societies, patterns which mean that the originators of ideas can rarely know what will happen to them. Nor is there any easy way to situate imaginative ideas in time—to know whether they might bear fruit in a decade, a

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Our slow growth is a puzzle. We have generated huge amounts of useful knowledge. We have made it easier and easier to access this knowledge from anywhere in the world. We have Jstor and Google Books to dig through existing knowledge, and easy data analysis with Excel. We can collaborate with people all over the world through Zoom and Slack. And... See more

But there’s a different point of view, a point of view in which science is an endless frontier, where there are always new phenomena to be discovered, and major new questions to be answered. The possibility of an endless frontier is a consequence of an idea known as emergence.(...) The mere fact of emergent levels of behavior doesn’t necessarily... See more