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After Steve Jobs died on Wednesday, many reflected on his innovations, and how they changed what the world has come to expect from technology. His intuitive understanding of design and human psychology helped him to create a user-friendly approach to high-tech computing which, in turn, made Apple one of the most popular brands in the world.

Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?

Steven Johnson looks into what sparks brilliant ideas and how innovation happens. In Where Good Ideas Come From, he tells the exciting and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

Everyone knows what it feels like to come up with a good idea. It comes from someplace, not completely made out of thin air. Usually it’s being formed in the back of your head among all of the little, unconnected thoughts, memories and hunches until... BAM! It arrives.

What if we tracked the history of the most significant ideas that humans have ever come up with, in order to see if there’s a pattern to these little moments of genius? That'd be a pretty good idea all on its own, right?

Experts said our interconnected world was going to make outbreaks like H1N1 far worse than those that came before. But author Steven Johnson says that information spreads faster than people do, and that's what will keep us safe. This is thanks to what he calls "information ubiquity," which is the same force behind the decline of newspapers and the rise of e-readers like the Kindle. Johnson is the author of a recent book about the 1854 cholera epidemic in London called The Ghost Map as well as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, and his most recent book is The Invention of Air. He is also the founder of hyper-local reporting site Outside.In.

For more, read Steven Johnson's article in the Wall Street Journal, How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write.

We look at the life of J.B. Priestley, the 18th century radical thinker who discovered oxygen and founded the Unitarian Church. Steven Johnson’s new book about Priestley is The Invention of Air.

Events:
Steven Johnson will be speaking and signing books at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble tonight ...