Stephen Hawking once told me that there was a sense in which he was glad to be paralyzed, because it allowed him to focus much more intensely on his work.
Pauli turned to the audience and argued, Yes, my theory is crazy enough! Then Bohr insisted, No, your theory is not crazy enough!
For while anyone can sit back and point to the bottom line as justification, assessing instead a person's actual knowledge and actual ability takes confidence, thought, good judgement, and, well, guts...
Believing in what you desire to be true and then seeking evidence to justify it doesn’t seem to be the best approach to everyday decisions.
A dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther of the two
Though you are unaware of it, when you run cool wine over your tongue, you don’t just taste its chemical composition; you also taste its price.
It is dangerous to judge ability by short-term results.
They left for California, Einstein had told his wife to take a good look at their house. You will never see it again, he told her.
The human sensory system sends the brain about eleven million bits of information each second.9 However, anyone who has ever taken care of a few children who are all trying to talk to you at once can...
Research on hunter-gatherer groups ranging from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries shows that the average nomad worked just two to four hours each day.
If events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random. There is therefore a fundamental clash between our need to feel we are in control and our ability...
You’re wasting your time, he said. You don’t learn how to discover things by reading books on it. And psychology is a bunch of bullshit.
Paleolithic humans migrated often, and, like my teenagers, they followed the food.
Our species had to engage in complex cooperative behavior in order to survive in the wild, and—as I keep reminding my teenage children—pointing and grunting get you only so far.
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Einstein, who was then a professor in Berlin, was by chance visiting Caltech in the United States the day Hitler was appointed.
Another recent work, an academic article that described research on a single type of nerve cell in the hypothalamus, was over one hundred pages long and cited seven hundred intricate experiments.
True randomness sometimes produces repetition, but when users heard the same song or songs by the same artist played back-to-back, they believed the shuffling wasn’t random. And so the company made th...
Regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one.
Recent years psychologists have found that the ability to persist in the face of obstacles is at least as important a factor in success as talent.