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...
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...
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.
The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing
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...
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...
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,...
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.
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...
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
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...
Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.
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...
During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA.
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...
Riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it
Turing exclaiming once, No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.