It is dangerous to judge ability by short-term results.
In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be av...
Em vez de convencer as pessoas, os dados apenas polarizaram o grupo. Assim, até mesmo padrões aleatórios podem ser interpretados como evidências convincentes quando se relacionam a noções preconcebida...
Chemicals were easier to procure than friends, and when I wanted to play with them they never said they had to stay home to wash their hair or, less politely, that they didn’t associate with weirdos.
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.
Albert Einstein wrote, One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness.… Each makes this cosmos and its con...
We are highly invested in feeling different from one another—and superior—no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being. You
Theory produces a good deal but hardly brings us closer to the secret of the Old One. I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.
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.
Medieval scholars made surprising progress, despite living in an age in which people routinely judged the truth of statements not according to empirical evidence but by how well they fit into their pr...
In 1904 he applied for a promotion from patent clerk third class to patent clerk second class and was turned down.
First no one knew exactly how to interpret,
Claiming publicly that comets follow natural law and not God’s whim was a gutsy thing to do, especially given that the prior year—almost fifty years after Galileo’s condemnation—the professor of mathe...
Upon learning of the young man’s interest in a physics book, Lindemann, a number theorist, abruptly ended the interview, saying, In that case you are completely lost to mathematics.
Unfortunately, in 1861, when he was forty, Buckle caught typhus while traveling in Damascus. Offered the services of a local physician, he refused because the man was French, and so he died.
To gain a true understanding of human experience, we must understand both our conscious and our unconscious selves, and how they interact. Our subliminal brain is invisible to us, yet it influences ou...
The study showed that a combination of the nutritional supplements glucosamine and chondroitin is no more effective in relieving arthritis pain than a placebo. Still, one eminent doctor had a hard tim...
The participants gave higher ratings to the studies that confirmed their initial point of view even when the studies on both sides had supposedly been carried out by the same method. And in the end, t...
The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome;
The modern concept of the unconscious, based on such studies and measurements, is often called the new unconscious, to distinguish it from the idea of the unconscious that was popularized by a neurolo...