Adjacent possible: Difference between revisions

The adjacent possible is at the same time an opportunity because the very act of knocking on that immediate door and finding out what is behind it — pushing into the adjacency, as it were — incrementally expands your universe and in itself creates — not reveals: ''creates'' — further adjacencies, and further possibilities. It is this non-destructive development path that all knowledge goes through. Some rooms you might have discovered earlier may remain useful (for example, mathematics) others may lose their practical utility (phlogiston, ether, the humours, the [[Dewey]] decimal system etc.) but in all case they remain tools in the kit — there is no right or wrong about them; just potential — even metaphorical — applications.

That much is obvious. However as we inevitably look at developments in hindsight it is easy to to diminish the intellectual significance of this. It is not just that one distant possibility depends on on a series of iterations through adjacent possibilities, but that the very possibility of those distant two possibilities is contingent on on arriving at the adjacencies.