Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
It struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
The universe is computing its own destiny.
IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
Even before the exact answer was reached, Crick crystallized its fundamental principles in a statement that he called (and is called to this day) the Central Dogma. It is a hypothesis about the direct...
An unusual chain-letter reached Quincy during the latter part of 1933, wrote a local Illinois historian. So rapidly did the chain-letter fad develop symptoms of mass hysteria and spread throughout the...
It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them,...
The new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms...
The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowi...
The Difference Engine stands—for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London—as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactne...
God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies which we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be...
Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agen...
The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor a...
The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.
The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
Margaret Atwood writes: As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your...
Gregor Mendel’s years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but some...
Riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.