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.
Moviegoers will report liking a movie more when they hear beforehand how good it is. In this example, small chance influences created a snowball effect and made a huge difference in the future of the...
Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.
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...
Yes, as distasteful as it is, it is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us. So if you hate conspiracy theories and run into someone who believes that we faked the moonlanding and Einstein p...
Why is the human need to be in control relevant to a discussion of random patterns? Because if events are random, we are not in control, and if we are in control of events, they are not random, there...
We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.
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 the voters in 1960, the name Nikita Khrushchev carried great emotional significance. To these students, he sounded like just another hockey player.
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 researchers also investigated whether people will apply the social norms of politeness to computers. For example, when put in a position where they have to criticize someone face-to-face, people o...
The nobility of the human race lies in our drive to know, and our uniqueness as a species is reflected in the success we’ve achieved, after millennia of effort, in deciphering the puzzle that is natur...
The cord that tethers ability to success is both loose and elastic. It is easy to see fine qualities in successful books or to see unpublished manuscripts, inexpensive vodkas, or people struggling in...
The Nazis confiscated his personal property, burned his works on relativity, and put a five-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.
That brings us back to the default mode. When your mind is at rest, what it is really doing is bouncing thoughts back and forth, Andreasen says. Your association cortices are always running in the bac...
Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.15 I
On an emotional level many people resist the idea that random influences are important even if, on an intellectual level, they understand that they are.
Newton was not finally reducible to the criteria by which we comprehend our fellow human beings.