How important ideas get reawakened, with David Byrne

Flora Lichtman (0:02)

Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. On this show, as you know, we love to talk about ideas, especially ideas that have the power to shape the future. But there are plenty of groundbreaking ideas that almost don't make it out of the lab or the art studio, ideas that are birthed but then fall into a deep slumber until years later they're resurrected.

Why and how ideas go dormant and then wake up is the subject of a new book, Sleeping Beauties, Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, written by David Byrne, artist, musician and lead singer, of course, for the Talking Heads. David, welcome to Science Friday, and thank you so much for coming into the studio.

David Byrne (0:46)

Thank you. Good to be here.

Flora Lichtman (0:48)

You seem blessed with the freedom to do almost any creative project you want these days, though maybe that's not true. You can correct me. But I'm curious why you wanted to take this on now and in this format.

David Byrne (1:04)

It's true. I'm very lucky that I could do a book like this, which is for the most part outside of the boundaries of what people might expect me to be doing. And the publisher said, okay, okay.

So I'm lucky that way. What was the second part of the question?

Flora Lichtman (1:26)

Why this? Why did you want to do this?

David Byrne (1:28)

Why this? Why this? I read the term Sleeping Beauties in a science paper that was about the phenomena of Sleeping Beauties in science. It was about papers that get a little bit of attention when they come out. And then the citations and references kind of drop off sometimes to almost nothing. And that can go for some years, it can go for decades. And then somebody stumbles on the paper again, and it's revived and resurrected. And people go, this is exactly what we're trying to deal with now, and this person kind of figured it out maybe. So I thought, I know this phenomena. I know it from music and art, literature.

It happens in everything.

Why restrict it just to science papers? So I started, I thought, this is such an intriguing idea.

Flora Lichtman (2:28)

But wait, why does it intrigue you?

David Byrne (2:31)

Everybody loves the story of a resurrection, a return.

Flora Lichtman (2:36)

It is age-old.

David Byrne (2:38)

Yeah, something that's saved. Everybody, somebody who comes back from the dead, somebody who's forgotten and then suddenly we realize, no, this person was a great artist. We love those kind of stories, and I'm no different. So every time I'd be reading an article about some artist or read a review of something about Herman Melville and it would say, Melville?

Melville was incredibly successful, the most successful author in the United States or in North America, and then Moby Dick, and that was a failure. And he was so forgotten that at one point, somebody wanted to write something, and they said, isn't he dead now? No, he wasn't dead.

Flora Lichtman (3:34)

That's how far he fell.

David Byrne (3:35)

That's how far he fell.

Flora Lichtman (3:37)

Yeah.

David Byrne (3:37)

And then, yeah, it was quite a while later, 50 years, 60 years later, more contemporary writers started checking out this book that he'd written and realized, particularly after World War I, when people started to question, what are we, who are we, that we could do something like this?

Flora Lichtman (4:04)

Yeah.

David Byrne (4:04)

What's our psychological makeup? What's our national makeup? What's our, all those kinds of questions? And that book deals with a lot of those kind of questions.

It deals with that kind of psychology, it deals with racism, it deals with cultural imperialism, it deals with all colonialism, all sorts of stuff that was on people's minds at that point. And there weren't very many other books that touched on those subjects. So, bingo, he's back.

Flora Lichtman (4:36)

It was ahead of its time.

David Byrne (4:38)

In some ways, yes.

Flora Lichtman (4:39)

You know, you write a lot about science in the book, and there's this story about Vera Rubin, who on this show is like a household name, but she's an astronomer, she pioneers dark matter. And she has this moment where she kind of puts together her ideas. They crystallize after she takes out a sketch pad.

What did you love about this story? Why did you want to include it?

David Byrne (5:03)

Well, just the science is interesting, how she realized that there must be forces out there in the universe that are causing the rotation of galaxies and all this to behave in a certain way. That it was a force or something was out there that we didn't know what it was.