From psychopaths to ‘everyday sadists’: why do humans harm the harmless? Why are some humans cruel to people who don’t even pose a threat to them – sometimes even their own children? Where does this behaviour come from and what purpose does it serve? Ruth, 45,......
‘Regime shift in North Korea in two years.’ ‘Sour grapes for France as Argentinian wines expected to dominate.’ ‘Euro collapse likely.’ ‘Low-cost space flights by 2025.’ ‘No more crude oil in 15 years.’ Every day, experts bombard us with predictions, but how reliable are they?......
Harry Harlow’s experiments with wire monkeys are central demonstrations in the psychology of attachment. Harlow was able to show that infant monkeys cared more for a soft surrogate mother than a metal milk-bearing one, and with this finding, a whole science of touch was born.......
The new discoveries mean that Saturn has not only reclaimed the top spot in the list of most known moons, surpassing Jupiter with 95, but is also the first planet with over 100 moons discovered. Over the last two decades the environment of Jupiter has......
While the family unit is certainly the cornerstone of American social development, the main institution where values and attitudes are taught, it is also the institution in which the greatest hostility, anxiety, stress, and depression are learned and expressed. If you visit a mental institution......
European space officials have called for establishing a separate time zone on the moon. The European Space Agency (ESA) said the idea was discussed at a recent meeting held at the agency’s Space Research and Technology Centre in the Netherlands. ESA said the......
Before we begin, we may well ask whether we should bother fighting in the first place. Self-deception has been favored by natural selection, the better to deceive others and ourselves, so why should we fight such tendencies in ourselves? They are advancing our own evolutionary......
John Rawls (1921 —2002), a modest, quiet Haward academic, wrote a book that changed the way people thought about these things. That book was A Theory of Justice (1971) and the result of nearly twenty years of hard thinking. It’s really a professor’s book meant......
In addition to realizing that you are unique in this world, you must also accept that you are always alone. Yes, alone! No one can ever feel what you are feeling, whether you are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, or making love......
The 2020 World Population Data Sheet indicates that world population is projected to increase from 7.8 billion in 2020 to 9.9 billion by 2050. This level represents an increase of more than 25% from 2020. The current global total fertility rate is 2.3 births per......
Though an alluring idea, the “10 percent myth” is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. Although there’s no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been......
One striking discovery is that humor and laughter appear to be positively associated with immune benefits. Humor in turn can be seen as anti-self-deception. Humor is often directed at drawing attention to the contradictions that deceit and self-deception may be hiding. These are seen as......
Fata Morgana (Italian: [ˈfaːta morˈɡaːna]) is a complex form of superior mirage visible in a narrow band right above the horizon. The term Fata Morgana is an Italian translation of “Morgan the Fairy” (Morgan le Fay of Arthurian legend). These mirages are often seen in......
Why do we repeat ourselves so often? Why do we have compulsions that reappear despite our every effort to suppress them? Why do we have lifelong arguments inside ourselves that hardly change and are never resolved? Why no learning? The details differ from case to......
One of the most striking statements of this theme has come from Kenneth Boulding, an eminent economist and imaginative social thinker. In justifying his view that the present moment represents a crucial turning point in human history, Boulding observes that “as far as many statistical......
It’s been an eventful year for space exploration, with successes including the completion of NASA’s Artemis 1 mission (finally), the inauguration of the James Webb Space Telescope, and the completion of China’s Tiangong space station. 2023 is set to be another busy year. Here are......
People of the Future The inhabitants of the earth are divided not only by race, nation, religion or ideology, but also, in a sense, by their position in time. Examining the present populations of the globe, we find a tiny group who still live, hunting......
In the eighteenth century, the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus had shown that flowers had sexual organs (pistils and stamens), and indeed had based his classifications on these. But it was almost universally believed that flowers were self-fertilized—why else would each flower contain both male and......
Like all falsifiable scientific theories, relativity makes predictions that can be tested by experiment. In the case of special relativity, these include the principle of relativity, the constancy of the speed of light, and time dilation.The predictions of special relativity have been confirmed in numerous......
At its introduction in 1915, the general theory of relativity did not have a solid empirical foundation. It was known that it correctly accounted for the “anomalous” precession of the perihelion of Mercury and on philosophical grounds it was considered satisfying that it was able......
The Economic Revolution was the most important revolution, from the point of view of shaping modern society, that ever took place— fundamentally more disturbing by far than the French, American, or even the Russian Revolutions. To appreciate its magnitude, to understand the wrenching which it......
American and European astronomers have announced that they have made the most distant detection to date of a black hole swallowing a nearby star, some 8.5 billion light-years away, while at the same time it is sending a tremendously bright jet of radiation toward our......
“You are made of stuff that is as old as the planet, one third as old as the universe, though this is the first time that those atoms have been gathered together such that they think that they are you.” FRANK CLOSE, BRITISH PARTICLE PHYSICIST......
THE BRAIN In a new breakthrough to understand more about the mammalian brain, University of Copenhagen researchers have made an incredible discovery. Namely, a vital enzyme that enables brain signals is switching on and off at random, even taking hours-long “breaks from work”. These findings......
The story of “blue being invisible in history” begins in 1858 when William Gladstone, who later became Chancellor of the Exchequer then Prime Minister of Great Britain, read Homer’s The Odyssey . Gladstone noticed that Homer described the sea color as “wine-dark” – leading him......
This fable tells the story of how a frog placed in a pot of boiling water is able to make a leap and exit immediately. But if on the other hand it is introduced into cold water that is slowly warmed, he will not realize......
The ability of living organisms to faithfully transmit the instructions to make another of themselves – whether a robin, rhododendron or a person – was, for centuries, profoundly puzzling. In his ‘51st Exercitation’ of 1653, the English surgeon William Harvey wrote: Although it be......
Today, at dusk, I went to St. Sergius, locally called Mar Sarkis, from the Aramaic, the cemetery of my side of the family, to say hello to my father and my uncle Dédé, who so much disliked my sloppy dressing during my rioting days. I......
Gurdjieff, an imposing and impressively mustachioed Russian who was active in the early to mid-twentieth century, believed that most people lived their lives in a hypnotic form of ‘waking sleep’. It was possible to awaken out of this state, Gurdjieff taught, into a state of......
When I was 8 years old, a revelation forever changed my life. The year was 1955, and newspaper headlines announced the death of a renowned scientist. A photo accompanied one article, showing his office desk strewn with papers and books. As I recall, the photo......
“This distinction between past and future is not present in the basic grammar of the world. It comes about only because we have a blurred vision of reality.” – Carlo Rovelli Time is often treated as some sort of fundamental substance. But the more scientists......
A fringe group of scientists and tech moguls think they’re closing in on the fountain of youth. Here’s everything you need to know: What is biohacking? Silicon Valley is built on the idea that technology can optimize, or “hack,” any aspect of our lives —......
With its gas chambers, mass executions, and willful destruction, World War II was human behavior at its worst. Moreover, when the Western world took stock after the dust had settled, it was impossible to ignore the savagery that had been committed in the heart of......
The word ‘empathy’ made its first appearance in the English language in 1909, as a translation of the German ‘Einfühlung’, in turn introduced by the German philosopher Robert Vischer, which means ‘feeling into’ Vischer first talked about Einfühlung referring to the field of psychology of aesthetic experience......
This chapter is aimed at further exciting you about yourself and, through your example, at exciting those around you, especially your family members, about being a human being and being alive. I want to interest you in learning more about how your various parts work,......
Plant and animal species are disappearing at an ever faster rate due to human activity. What are the causes and why does biodiversity matter? Biodiversity, or the variety of all living things on our planet, has been declining at an alarming rate in recent years,......
Nikola Tesla was a great Serbian-American engineer who played the major role in perfecting and promoting alternate current. He was also a visionary who predicted smartphones, renewable energy and creation of artificial Suns, much before time permitted. However, it is surprising that Tesla sometimes took......
Quantum mechanics is the theory that describes the workings of the microscopic world—by which I do not mean the tiny world only visible under a microscope, but rather the far, far tinier world of atoms and molecules and the subatomic particles (the electrons, protons, and......
As I walk along Braes Bayou, surrounded by wildlife, I realize that I am also surrounded by math. For instance … A lot of people walk their dogs along the paths. If you watch a walking dog, you quickly notice how rhythmic its movement is.......
Neurotransmitters, the molecules that relay messages between neurons in the brain, have entered everyday vocabulary. Here are just a few examples: we find ourselves associating the pleasure gained from sport with the release of endorphins. We speak of an ‘adrenalin high’ when it keeps us......
The Dichotomy is the next of Zeno’s paradoxes and it is very simple to state: In order to reach your destination you must first cover half the distance, but in order to cover half the distance you must first cover a quarter of the distance,......
With its gas chambers, mass executions, and willful destruction, World War II was human behavior at its worst. Moreover, when the Western world took stock after the dust had settled, it was impossible to ignore the savagery that had been committed in the heart of......
The Reformation: Where Lies the Authority for Faith? – Christianity dominated the social, political, and religious life of Europe for more than a 1000 years, from the fall of Rome till at least the 17th century. The first major division of Christianity occurred with the......
And now the most important; you asked me whether you would have to give up your sense of beauty to study mathematics, whether everything would become just numbers and equations to you, laws and formulas. Rest assured, Meg, I don’t blame you for asking this,......
In the 17th and 18th centuries, the countries of the West had witnessed the fastest, most radical transformation in living standards ever known in history. The majority of the population of medieval and early modern Europe had belonged to the peasant class. They had been......
Just imagine you’re four years old, and someone makes the following proposal: If you’ll wait until after he runs an errand, you can have two marshmallows for a treat. If you can’t wait until then, you can have only one—but you can have it right......
Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible, as we can see if we look for a moment at the process of innovation. Technological innovation consists of three stages, linked together into a self-reinforcing cycle. First, there is the creative, feasible idea. Second, its......
Habits, scientists say, emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit, because habits allow our minds to ramp down more often. This effort-saving instinct......
When the MIT researchers started working on habits in the 1990s— at about the same time that Eugene came down with his fever—they were curious about a nub of neurological tissue known as the basal ganglia. If you picture the human brain as an onion,......
The chances of spouses having things in common are about 100 percent. Likewise the chances are 100 percent that they will find differences from one another. Bringing up children highlights these kinds of differences. So does making decisions, which is a major part of any......
Half the time I am a hyperskeptic; the other half I hold certainties and can be intransigent about them, with a very stubborn disposition. Of course I am hyperskeptic where others, particularly those I call bildungsphilisters, are gullible, and gullible where others seem skeptical. I......
The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we’re not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them “animals.” But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being......
Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have discovered a network of brain cells that expresses our sense of time within experiences and memories. The area of the brain where time is experienced is located right next to the area that codes for space.......
The Lindy effect is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be......
The history of the economies of Western nations has, since the early nineteenth century, been one of repeated cycles of growth and recession. Typically, four or five years of expansion have been followed by one or two years of retraction, with occasional massive retrenchments lasting......
The misconception that falling in love is a type of love is so potent precisely because it contains a grain of truth. The experience of real love also has to do with ego boundaries, since it involves an extension of one’s limits. One’s limits are......
TWELVE-ITEM TEST Here are twelve questions about you and your behavior toward institutions and things. Take this little quiz as your personal introduction to this chapter on how institutions and personal attitudes can victimize anyone who is willing to let it happen. Yes No ____......
The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159. It has been represented by the Greek letter “π” since the mid-18th century, though it is also sometimes spelled out as “pi” (/paɪ/). Being an......
AMHERST, Mass. – Imagine a rubber band that was capable of snapping itself many times over, or a small robot that could jump up a set of stairs propelled by nothing more than its own energy. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered......
What’s happening in genomics, and how this revolution is about to change everything we know about the world, life, ourselves, and how we think about them. If you saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you heard the boom, boom, boom, boom, and you saw......
Looking at the impressive growth figures of emerging countries, it is easy to forget the immense destitution that the peoples of the planet suffer. Half of humans live on less than two euros a day. The enrichment of the south is an indisputable fact, but......
TWELVE-ITEM TEST You will never win if you have to prove that you are the winner. That is what this chapter on becoming quietly effective in your life pursuits is all about. Your answers to the test below will indicate how quietly effective you are......
We continually create false personal narratives. By enhancing ourselves and derogating others, we automatically create biased histories. We were more moral, more attractive, more “beneffective” to others than in fact we were. Recent evidence suggests that forty- to sixty-year-olds naturally push memories of negative moral......
I would like to describe the major, natural steps a family undergoes at its members grow. All of these steps mean crisis and temporary anxiety and require an adjustment period and anew integration. The first crisis is the conception, pregnancy, and birth of a child.......
The tetractys (Greek: τετρακτύς), or tetrad, or the tetractys of the decad is a triangular figure consisting of ten points arranged in four rows: one, two, three, and four points in each row, which is the geometrical representation of the fourth triangular number. As a......
Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgment. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by......
Happily, it is possible to raise anyone’s self-esteem, no matter what one’s age or condition. Since the feeling of low worth has been learned, it can be unlearned, and something new learned in its place. The possibility for this learning lasts from birth to death,......
False historical narratives are lies we tell one another about our past. The usual goals are self-glorification and self-justification. Not only are we special, so are our actions and those of our ancestors. We do not act immorally, so we owe nothing to anyone. False......
Since the first report of coronavirus (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China, it has spread to at least 100 other countries. As China initiated its response to the virus, it leaned on its strong technology sector and specifically artificial intelligence (AI), data science, and technology to track......
Television and advertising play on an essential aspect of human nature: the pathological need to compare oneself with others. A person can genuinely cry at the misfortune of someone else, and yet simultaneously be envious of the person who succeeds better than he does. In......
Robert Merton, Jr., and Myron Scholes were founding partners in the large speculative trading firm called Long-Term Capital Management, or LTCM, which I mentioned in Chapter 4. It was a collection of people with top-notch résumés, from the highest ranks of academia. They were considered......
In those days, in Mesopotamia, the region was thriving. At the end of the fourth millennium BC, the small villages we visited earlier had transformed into flourishing towns. Some of them now already had several tens of thousands of inhabitants. Technology was advancing at a......
Ξέρουμε ότι η εξίσωση του Αϊνστάιν είναι τρομακτικά σημαντική, και ότι έχει κάποια σχέση με την ατομική βόμβα. Αλλά τι σημαίνει πραγματικά για εμάς, τους απλούς ανθρώπους, στην καθημερινή μας ζωή; I know that Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is terribly important, and that it has something to......
Information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What......
The touch of a human hand, the sound of a human voice, and the smells in the home are the experiences by which a baby begins learning what the new world is all about. How a parent touches and sounds to the child form the......
All these exciting discoveries of exoplanets, along with the novel ideas brought about by a fresh new generation of visionaries, are rekindling the public’s interest in space travel. Originally, what drove the space program was the Cold War and superpower rivalry. The public did not......
Take a straw poll today among scientists asking them what they think is the most successful, far-reaching and important theory in the whole of science and the answer will likely depend on whether you are asking someone working in the physical or the life sciences.......
Another fundamental trait of human nature is its incredible capacity for adaptation. Polar bears and brown bears form two distinct species. Humans, by contrast, undertook long migrations both north and south; they did not mutate, but instead adapted. Inuits and Pygmies belong to the same......
In the third century BC, the famous Greek mathematician Archimedes issued a challenge to the Alexandrian mathematicians, headed by Eratosthenes. Written in the form of an epigram, Archimedes’s challenge begins thus: “Compute, o friend, the number of oxen of the Sun, giving thy mind thereto,......
Well, no, there is nothing about us that can escape the norms of nature. If something in us could infringe the laws of nature we would have discovered it by now. There is nothing in us in violation of the natural behaviour of things. The......
What role do we have as human beings who perceive, make decisions, laugh and cry, in this great fresco of the world as depicted by contemporary physics? If the world is a swarm of ephemeral quanta of space and matter, a great jigsaw puzzle of......
With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever. Coughlin hates what he calls “the narrative,” according to which new tech appeals to newer people. “There’s no reason for this enormous prejudice in favor of youthfulness in Silicon......
With greater longevity, the quest to avoid the infirmities of aging is more urgent than ever. Aging, like bankruptcy in Hemingway’s description, happens two ways, slowly and then all at once. The slow way is the familiar one: decades pass with little sense of internal......
It is the echo of Euclid, 23 centuries after he lived. The work was studied by the great Italian scholars of the sixteenth century and by a young Cambridge student named Isaac Newton a century later. We have a passage from Carl Sandburg’s biography of......
This work had a profound impact on Western thought as it was studied, analyzed, and edited for century upon century, down to modern times. We can think, for instance, of a circle as being a totally curvilinear, and thus quite intractable, plane figure. But, if......
The Academy produced many capable mathematicians and one indisputably great one, Eudoxus of Cnidos. A century and a half passed between Hippocrates and Euclid. During this span, Greek civilization grew and matured, enriched by the writings of Plato and Aristotle, of Aristophanes and Thucydides, even......
In the Monty Hall problem you are facing three doors: behind one door is something valuable, say a shiny red Maserati; behind the other two, an item of far less interest, say the complete works of Shakespeare in Serbian. You have chosen door 1. The......
As newspaper columns go, Parade magazine’s “Ask Marilyn” has to be considered a smashing success. Distributed in 350 newspapers and boasting a combined circulation of nearly 36 million, the question-and-answer column originated in 1986 and is still going strong. One might ask, especially if one......
The structure of society and the personality of man changed in the late Middle Ages. The unity and centralization of medieval society became weaker. Capital, individual economic initiative and competition grew in importance; a new moneyed class developed. A growing individualism was noticeable in all......
Modern rationalism has looked upon the Middle Ages as an essentially dark period. It has pointed to the general lack of personal freedom, to the exploitation of the mass of the population by a small minority, to its narrowness which makes the peasant of the......
The number e is an important mathematical constant that is the base of the natural logarithm. It is approximately equal to 2.71828,and is the limit of(1 + 1/n)n as n approaches infinity, an expression that arises in the study of compound interest. It can also......
Quantum mechanics (QM; also known as quantum physics or quantum theory), including quantum field theory, is a fundamental branch of physics concerned with processes involving, for example, atoms and photons. Systems such as these which obey quantum mechanics can be in a quantum superposition of......
The “Epicurean paradox” is a version of the problem of evil. Lactantius attributes this trilemma to Epicurus in De Ira Dei: God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing......
European politics, philosophy, science and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the “long 18th century” (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, in France and throughout......
More complicated is the kind of neurotic disturbance in love which is based on a different kind of parental situation, occurring when parents do not love each other, but are too restrained to quarrel or to indicate any signs of dissatisfaction outwardly. At the same......
A different form of neurotic pathology is to be found in such cases where the main attachment is that to father. A case in point is a man whose mother is cold and aloof, while his father (partly as a result of his wife’s coldness)......
The basic condition for neurotic love lies in the fact that one or both of the “lovers” have remained attached to the figure of a parent, and transfer the feelings, expectations and fears one once had toward father or mother to the loved person in......
Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were, a motherly and a fatherly conscience. Motherly conscience says: “There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive you of my......
In order to understand this shift from mother to father, we must consider the essential differences in quality between motherly and fatherly love. We have already spoken about motherly love. Motherly love by its very nature is unconditional. Mother loves the newborn infant because it......
For most children before the age from eight and a half to ten,” the problem is almost exclusively that of being loved— of being loved for what one is. The child up to this age does not yet love; he responds gratefully, joyfully to being......
It is only through a vast amount of experience and a lengthy and successful maturation that we gain the capacity to see the world and our place in it realistically, and thus are enabled to realistically assess our responsibility for ourselves and the world. There......
We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them. This statement may seem idiotically tautological or self-evident, yet it is seemingly beyond the comprehension of much of the human race. This is because we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it.......
The hedgehog’s dilemma, or sometimes the porcupine dilemma, is a metaphor about the challenges of human intimacy. It describes a situation in which a group of hedgehogs all seek to become close to one another in order to share heat during cold weather. They must......
One of the aspects of dependency is that it is unconcerned with spiritual growth. Dependent people are interested in their own nourishment, but no more; they desire filling, they desire to be happy; they don’t desire to grow, nor are they willing to tolerate the......
I define dependency as the inability to experience wholeness or to function adequately without the certainty that one is being actively cared for by another. Dependency in physical healthy adults is pathological-it is sick, always a manifestation of a mental illness or defect. It is......
Illusion or not, what explains the fact that for us time ‘runs’, ‘flows’, ‘passes’? The passage of time is obvious to us all: our thoughts and our speech exist in time; the very structure of our language requires time – a thing ‘is’ or ‘was’......
At first glance, the idea that our ignorance implies something about the behaviour of the world seems irrational: the cold teaspoon heats up in hot tea and the balloon flies about when it is released regardless of what I know or don’t know. What does......
‘What is heat?’ Until the mid-nineteenth century, physicists attempted to understand heat by thinking of it as a kind of fluid, called ‘caloric’; or two fluids, one hot and one cold. The idea turned out to be wrong. Eventually James Maxwell and the Austrian......
We can already see how these biases and errors in thinking affect the way that people make financial decisions. When a large number of people and businesses are making these mistakes there is clearly the potential for these to impact on the wider economy and......
‘Economists think about what people ought to do. Psychologists watch what they actually do.’ Daniel Kahneman Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economic sciences in 2002. Kahneman’s citation was for ‘integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under......
All Mediterranean cultures developed through time a dogma against debt. Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: “Happy is he who owes nothing.” Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have......
First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have......
Not all the chapters of Cardano’s book treat technical issues. For instance, chapter 26 is titled “Do Those Who Teach Well Also Play Well?” (he concludes, “It seems to be a different thing to know and to execute”). Chapter 29 is called “On the Character......
In the years leading up to 1576, an oddly attired old man could be found roving with a strange, irregular gait up and down the streets of Rome, shouting occasionally to no one in particular and being listened to by no one at all. He......
The jellyfish of the kind Turritopsis nutricula seems to be the only animal that has discovered the secret of eternal youth.This jellyfish has the ability to pass from the mature adult stage to the immature stage of the polypus and again from the beginning.Thus, basically,......
If it is easy to fall victim to expectations, it is also easy to exploit them. That is why struggling people in Hollywood work hard to look as though they are not struggling, why doctors wear white coats and place all manner of certificates and......
The actor’s name is Bruce Willis, and while he was in Los Angeles, an agent suggested he go on a few television auditions. One was for a show in its final stages of casting. The producers already had a list of finalists in mind, but......
People systematically fail to see the role of chance in the success of ventures and in the success of people. We afford automatic respect to superstar business moguls, politicians, and actors and to anyone flying around in a private jet, as if their accomplishments must......
In 1814, near the height of the great successes of Newtonian physics, Pierre-Simon de Laplace wrote: If an intelligence, at a given instant, knew all the forces that animate nature and the position of each constituent being; if, moreover, this intelligence were sufficiently great to......
Relativity showed that we lived in a stranger, more complex universe where space and time were no longer fixed, but could be stretched by mass and motion. This was a universe of black holes and warped space-time that seemed to have little in common with......
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......
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......
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......
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......
It’s anything but easy to break old habit patterns and become a leveler. One way you might help yourself achieve this goal is to learn what some of your fears are that keep you from leveling. To thwart the rejection we so fear, we tend......
COMPUTER Words ultrareasonable: “If one were to observe carefully, one might notice the very workworn hands of someone present here.” Body computes: “I’m calm, cool, and collected.” Insides: “I feel vulnerable.” The computer is very correct, very reasonable, and shows no semblance of feeling. The......
After many years of listening to interactions among people, I gradually became aware of certain seemingly universal patterns in the way people communicate. Over and over again I observed four ways people had of handling the negative results of stress. These four patterns—which I call......
How different it is to be in a nurturing family! Immediately, I can sense the aliveness, the genuineness, honesty, and love. I feel the heart and soul present as well as the head. People demonstrate their loving, their intellect, and their respect for life I......
After knowing hundreds of families, I find that each one can he placed somewhere along a scale from very nurturing to wry troubled. I see many similarities in the way nurturing families operate. Troubled families, too, no matter what their problems, seem to have much......
CRISPR is a hot new molecular biology tool, that you may have heard of, because everybody is using it to edit genomes, to fix genes, and break genes, and do all kinds of things. CRISPR started out as a bacterial defense system and sniffs out......
Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) was the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe that was dominant before the development of modern science. It is considered to be the precursor of natural science. From the ancient world, starting with......
In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense,......
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism......
Figuring out the nuts and bolts of the cell’s recycling machinery has earned the 2016 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology has received the prize for his work on autophagy, a method for breaking down......
Epigenetics is the scientific field of Genetics particularly developed during the last two decades, and it studies the influence of the environment of an organism in its genome, and how external factors affect its development and behaviour. Examples of these factors are the toxic load,......
I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions...
Does a flower really have beauty? Does a fruit really have beauty? No: they have only color and form And existence. Beauty is the name of something...
There one has to be pure in heart The Zuider Zee is a dead sea, or almost. With its flat shores, lost in the...
The first night They approach And pick a flower from our garden And we don’t say anything. The second night, No longer hiding, they Stomp on the flowers, kill...
Two neighbours came before Jupiter and prayed him to grant their hearts' desire. Now the one was full of avarice, and the other eaten...
Mr. K. talked about the bad habit of silently allowing an injustice suffered to eat at one, and told the following story: A...
Be good, be good, be always good, And now & then be clever, But don’t you ever be too good, Nor ever be too clever; For such as be...
6. "'Mouse' (in latin "mus") is a syllable. Now a mouse eats cheese; therefore, a syllable eats cheese." Suppose now that I cannot...
Do not love half lovers Do not entertain half friends Do not indulge in works of the half talented Do not live half a life and...
While many legendary philosophers and writers developed their ideas during long solitary strolls through the city streets or the countryside, Camus was mostly...
