It all began when the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn’t kill him, died of gangrene.
A vivid example of such a change in social equilibrium occurred in the months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when travelers, afraid to take airplanes, suddenly switched to cars. Their fear t...
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die,
A FEW YEARS AGO a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his accomplishment, he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. I dreamed of the numb...
Few people would engage in extended activity if they believed that there were a random connection between what they did and the rewards they received,15 Lerner concluded that for the sake of their own...
What can you prove about space? How do you know where you are? Can space be curved? How many dimensions are there? How does geometry explain the natural order and unity of the cosmos? These are the qu...
The difficulty in making sense of even simple speech is well appreciated by computer scientists who struggle to create machines that can respond to natural language. Their frustration is illustrated b...
Says Bargh: „We all hold dear idea that we´re the captain of our own sould, and we´re in charge, and it´s a very scary feeling when we are not. In fact, that´s what psychosis is – the feeling of detac...
Say your boss has been taking longer than usual to respond to your e-mails. Many people would take that as a sign that their star is falling because if your star is falling, the chances are high that...
Research suggests when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence.
Our assessment of the world would be quite different if all our judgments could be insulated from expectation and based only on relevant data. A
Not too long ago, the man who was then the president of Iran was quoted as saying that Jews descended from monkeys and pigs.
Meanwhile, a serving of broccoli may contain sixty aphids and/or mites,
In his theory Perrow recognized that modern systems are made up of thousands of parts, including fallible human decision makers, which interrelate in ways that are, like Laplace´s atoms, impossible to...
Historians, whose profession is to study the past, are as wary as scientists of the idea that events unfold in a manner that can be predicted.
Dershowitz may have felt justified in misleading the jury because, in his words, the courtroom oath—‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’—is applicable only to witnesses. Defe...
Deep concentration causes the energy consumption in your brain to go up by only about 1 percent. No matter what you are doing with your conscious mind, it is your unconscious that dominates your menta...
After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling…. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.6
The destination was the local cemetery, where everyone was ordered to dig a mass grave and then was shot dead and buried in it.
Well, I have been working on my own theory for twelve years, and then he proceeded to describe it in excruciating detail. When he was finished, Feynman turned to me and said, in front of the man who h...