If we had to choose one town as the birthplace of the twentieth century then our prime contender must be Zurich, an ancient city which straddles the River Limmat just north of the Swiss Alps. In the year 1900 it was a thriving town of tree-lined...
THE ROMANS generally scorned mathematics, at least the mathematics of the Greeks. In the words of the Roman statesman Cicero, who lived from 106 to 43 B.C., “The Greeks held the geometer in the highest honor; accordingly, nothing made more brilliant progress among them than...
In the story of mathematics the ancient Greeks stand out as the inventors of the manner in which modern mathematics is carried out: through axioms, proofs, theorems, more proofs, more theorems, and so on. In the 1930s, however, the Czech American mathematician Kurt Godel —...
Where the Relevant Is the Sensational Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities. Consider our life in a primitive environment where process and result are closely connected. You are thirsty; drinking brings you adequate satisfaction. Or even in a not-so-primitive environment, when you engage in...
Assume that your activities depend on a Black Swan surprise—i.e., you are a reverse turkey. Intellectual, scientific, and artistic activities belong to the province of Extremistan, where there is a severe concentration of success, with a very small number of winners claiming a large share...
Do you believe in the power of telepathy? Many ordinary people accept telepathy as true and some say they even had telepathic experiences themselves. However, most scientists still remain skeptic and say there is no conclusive evidence supporting such claims. Nonetheless, there are hard-core scientists...
According to two leading scientists, the human brain is in fact a ‘biological computer’ and the consciousness of humans is a program run by the quantum computer located inside the brain that even continues to exist after we die. As experts explain it; “after people die,...
Is economics a science? The short answer is no. Economics acts like a science and quacks like one—it has developed an impressive mathematical apparatus and awards itself a Nobel Prize each year—but it is not yet a science. It fails to ground itself in underlying...
Sexual desire aims at fusion and is by no means only a physical appetite, the relief of a painful tension. But sexual desire can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the wish to conquer or be conquered, by vanity, by the wish to...
Brotherly love is love among equals; motherly love is love for the helpless. Different as they are from each other, they have in common that they are by their very nature not restricted to one person. If I love my brother, I love all my...
