George Armitage Miller lived in a world of words. Every object that fell into his vision and every word he heard instantly set off a cascade of associations, synonyms, and antonyms that flashed through his mind. A psychologist with an interest in understanding the cognitive processes behind language and information processing, he founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. And, in 1980, long before digital networks were part of everyday life, he was the driving force behind the development of Wordnet, a still functioning online database that details the myriad lexical relationships between most words in the English language.

But for a while in 1983 he was stuck looking for a word to describe the relationship between living organisms and information. A fan of Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life, Miller was certain that Schrödinger had left something important out of his definition of life. In order for living organisms to consume free energy per entropy’s demands, Miller insisted, they had to be able to find it, and to find it they had to have the ability to acquire, interpret, and then respond to useful information about the world around them. It meant, in other words, that a significant proportion of the energy they captured was expended seeking out information using their senses and then processing it in order to find and capture more energy.

At this time there still existed a union of literary and scientific cultures; there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come. There was indeed, between Coleridge and Davy, a close friendship and a sense of almost mystical affinity and rapport. The analogy of chemical transformation leading to the emergence of wholly new compounds was central to Coleridge’s thinking, and at one point he planned to set up a chemical laboratory with Davy. The poet and the chemist were fellow warriors, analyzers and explorers of a principle of connectedness of mind and nature.

Coleridge and Davy seemed to see themselves as twins: Coleridge the chemist of language, Davy the poet of chemistry.

I do not think my experience is unique. Many scientists, no less than poets or artists, have a living relation to the past, not just an abstract sense of history and tradition but a feeling of companions and predecessors, ancestors with whom they enjoy a sort of implicit dialogue. Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought,” independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.

It was the act of imagining herself as she had once been that enriched her syntax and extended not only her images but the coherent flow of association that led directly into the task at hand.

The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. It was, after all, a baptism by fire that was being described. To see her ambitious young self burning to know what her mentor knew, we had to see the mentor as well: an agent of threat and promise: a figure of equal complexity.

Across his life, Franklin displayed an encoded operating mode of active curiosity. Never content to just ponder, he felt compelled to observe directly, to experiment, to test and measure, to invent, to question, to figure out how the world around him worked— to chase the whirlwind. Franklin charted the Gulf Stream, identified the meteorological forces of storms, and became famous for his experiments with lightning and electricity. He established many of the terms we still use today in discussing aspects of electricity, such as “charge,” “conductor,” “electric shock,” and “battery.