How important ideas get reawakened, with David Byrne

Why do some breakthroughs go dormant—and then wake up? Artist David Byrne writes about these sleeping beauties in his new book.

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• 0:17Speaker 01

  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 studio.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Thank you. Good to be here.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  You seem blessed with the freedom to do almost any creative project you want these days, although 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?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  It's true, I'm very lucky that I could do a book like this, which is, for the most part, out of the, outside of the kind of boundaries of what people might expect me to be doing. And, and the publisher said, okay, okay. So I'm lucky that way. What was the second part of the question?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Why this? Why did you want to do this?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  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 has, 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 phenomenon. I know it from music and art, literature.

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

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  But wait, why does it intrigue you?

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  Everybody loves the story of resurrection, of return.

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  It is age-old.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, something that's saved. Everybody, somebody who comes back from the dead, somebody who's, who's forgotten and then suddenly realize, 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.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  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.

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  That's how far he fell.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  That's how far he fell.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

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  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?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  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, with kind of 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.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  It was ahead of its time.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  In some ways, yes.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  You know, you, 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. 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 sketchpad. Why did, what, what did you love about this story? Why did you want to include it?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  That takes a lot of imagination from the jump, right?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yes, from the jump, to, to make that leap. And she, she says that, too. She says, I had to make the leap to say, what if it's something we can't see? What if not everything emits photons, emits light?

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  Which is hard for scientists, right?

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Hard for scientists, because everything we know, everything we see emits photons or reflects photons or whatever. And so to say, what if there's something that doesn't, is just like, yeah, what if the Earth is square? Yes, it seemed like a ridiculous idea.

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  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  But her dream is to work, I think it was Mount Palomar, the newest, biggest telescope maybe in the world at that point. And so she, you know, had an appointment to go and do her, some of her research there because she needed to actually observe the behavior of these galaxies in order to see if any of her ideas were correct. And they said, of course, everyone in the observatory was men, it was all men. And they said, we work at night, and we have no facilities for women.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  So she took a piece of paper and some scissors and cut out a little figure of a woman, stuck it on a, on a restroom door and said, now you do.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  I wondered, too, I mean, you talk about this a little bit. I know you work across many mediums. Like, do you think that, you know, so in this story, she's, she writes on a sketchpad and then sort of puts something together that she wasn't able to before. Do you feel like you're able to understand things differently when you cross mediums in your work?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely, yes. I didn't get to that part, that she's having, she's got all this data, and she starts plotting it out as drawings. And then suddenly, it becomes more apparent to her, this is what's happening. And I thought, yeah, I know that feeling of when you take a thing and move it into another medium, a astronomical idea and expressing it as a drawing, you suddenly can see, oh, now I see why that happens.

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  We have to take a break, but when we come back, I want to ask you about how you know when not to give up on an idea.

• 8:22Speaker 03

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• 9:55Speaker 01

  So I've reported a lot on scientists who are out on a limb with their ideas. I find this to be a very interesting theme. And do you happen to know the story of Catalin Carrico?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Can I tell it to you?

• 10:09Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  OK, so she's a biochemist, and she worked for decades, basically, like, in obscurity. She was-- she never got a professor position. She was demoted, fired from her job, and then she won the Nobel Prize for the basic science that led to the COVID vaccine. And it's really a remarkable story.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Is this like the mRNA?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Things, yes. And now there's going to be more of them.

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  Yes. And one of the things that fascinated me so much about it is that for all those years, when people were saying, this is a fool's errand, this is a dead end, why are you doing this? You know, we're literally laughing at her by her description. She was very confident she was right. And I want to just play you this tape because I think it's so amazing. This was from an interview I did with her. So she's getting fired, and this is what-- her boss is firing her, and this is what she says.

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  I literally told the chairman, this place will be a museum.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  You told him it'd be a museum?

• 11:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  That's an amazing thing to say when you're being basically kicked out of your job.

• 11:21Speaker 04

  Yes, because I believe so much that one day, you know, it will be important.

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  What does that make you think?

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Thank God she was tenacious and held on to her beliefs. There was another scientist in this book, Lynn Margulis, who was also very tenacious. She kind of educated herself in a wide variety of areas, genetics and mathematics and different things, which helped her imagine how things could work in a way that other people could not. She had lots of theories and ideas why her ideas weren't being accepted, and not just hers, but other ideas.

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  She said that the specialization that happens in science is sometimes detrimental. She also talked a lot about the hierarchies and the descriptions and the taxonomies that separate things into different things when there actually, there are connections. But when you put them in these different boxes, those connections are conceptually severed. And she said that makes it hard to think about relations. She said, everything is about relations, not about isolated things.

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  Do you feel like you're tenacious in the way that Lynn Margulis or Catalin Carrico is tenacious?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  I've been told that I'm stubborn sometimes, yeah. If that's-- yeah, if that's tenacious.

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  I think it's probably required.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  To some extent, yeah. I mean, but it's also-- you also have to know when you're wrong or when, yeah, it's not the right time to push an idea.

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  Yes, I think that can be hard to know. Do you have an idea or a project that you're trying to wake up right now that's been slumbering?

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I don't want to talk about it. I'm sorry.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  This is a cliffhanger.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  I know, but it's, yeah, it's a curse, too.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Is there something that has woken up recently that you feel excited about?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  That-- oh, my God, that is very recent. The discovery of how Roman concrete worked.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Our favorite topic on Science Friday. A lost recipe.

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  A lost recipe. 2023, that's when it was

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  Amazing.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  announced, oh, now we see how it works.

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  We covered it, of course.

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  What if I have an idea that I think should be woken up? How do you do that? Do you have any suggest-- advice?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  Is there anyone else who might be a champion or a supporter that would get the-- have the ear of whatever, the public or whatever? I think that's important.

• 14:34Speaker 01

  We'll talk offline, yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  You're that person for me.

• 14:39Speaker 02

  I think, as we've mentioned, you have to see if the culture's ready for the idea.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  And if it's not, if it's not totally ready, is there an angle where you can kind of wedge part of the idea in?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I like that.

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  Do you know what I mean?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Maybe the whole thing is too big of a bite.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Too much. But there's some little piece that could fit.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, get a foot in the doorway there.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Before we let you go, we're recording right now on Varick Street in WNYC's studios. I know this is a neighborhood I think that you spent a lot of time in, in Soho.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I lived in Soho for a while.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  I haven't been in a while, but I used to go to a club called S.O.B.'s, which is about a block north of here. Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  And I wondered if you look back on that time, you know, one of the things that seemed true, reading through your book, is that some of these ideas, like, there was a turning point where they could have gone either way. Like, they could have continued to slumber, or they could have woken up, or maybe they never would have gone to sleep if something was different. Do you feel like that's true for your own career? Like, are there moments like that where if something had gone different?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  You would be in a different place.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I have said to people many times, I said, we were in the right place at the right time to get noticed, and we were very lucky.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I mean, we can take credit and say, well, what we were doing was really innovative and interesting. That might be the case, but that doesn't mean that anybody's going to hear it. We happened to be here when other people were doing things, too. And so there was kind of an attention going towards a little handful of musicians and artists and different people who were doing things at that moment, and we happened to be there.

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  So I think, yeah, there's a lot of luck involved.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  So true of most of life.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  David, thank you so much for talking to me today.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. That was fun.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  It was really a pleasure. David Byrne, member of Talking Heads and author of the new book, Sleeping Beauties. If you want to see this interview, you can watch it on our YouTube channel. And if you want to check out an excerpt from the book, head to our website, sciencefriday.com/sleepingbeauties.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  And before we go, seps on the silver screen. From sea monsters to wise teachers, cephalopods are stars. And for cephalopod week, we are diving into their cinematic evolution in a new Science Goes to the Movies. Read it at sciencefriday.com/cephalopodweek.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. Thank you to Wayne Schulmeister, Valentina Powers, and the team at WNYC for their help. I'm Flora Lixman. Thank you for listening.