This Book Will Blow Your Mind: Journeys at the Extremes of Science

by New Scientist

Entropy is a way of quantifying disorder in a system, and the rules of thermodynamics say that when something is more disordered it is more stable.

Science has been slow to catch up with rogue waves.

You wouldn’t stand facing the back of the lift or sit out front in the garden, would you? Well there you are. Proof positive that you’re not in control of your actions – the people around you are. And not just them. Your environment controls you, as do habits you don’t even know you have.

We work this way because neurons are expensive to run. If we had to do everything consciously, we would have no energy for anything else – automation frees up processing power.

If you think you ought to do some exercise but don’t really feel like it, just put your running gear on anyway, and wait and see what happens, she says. ‘The kit takes you for a run. You let it control your behaviour.’

‘If you saw a shadow in the grass and it was a lion and you lived to tell the tale, you’d make sure to run the next time you saw a shadow in the grass,’ says Gardner. This inbuilt fear factory is highly susceptible to immediate experience, vivid images and personal stories. Security companies, political campaigns, tabloid newspapers and ad agencies prey on it.

We are wired to be prejudiced and a bit racist, says Caroline Williams, but our instinct for collaboration can trump our worst instincts.

All you have to do to head off prejudice, it seems, is to convince people they are on the same team.

You will find it hard to increase the proportion of slow-twitch muscle fibres you have, but if you find yourself flagging, take your time and take comfort in the fact we evolved to jog, rather than sprint, over the finish line. ‘Millions of people run marathons and people tell us we are crazy,’ says Lieberman. ‘Actually, it’s part of who we are.’

The problem back then was that we could only see the planets as revolving around Earth; it took Copernicus to turn things around, and suddenly all was plain and simple. Perhaps we have constructed theories such as relativity and quantum theory with a similarly limited view, in thrall this time to a sense of space and time that might not exist beyond ourselves.

With its multiverses and cats both alive and dead, quantum mechanics is certainly weird. But some physicists have proposed that reality is even stranger: the universe only becomes real when we look at it.

For Wheeler, this meant the universe couldn’t really exist in any physical sense – even in the past – until we measure it. And what we do in the present affects what happened in the past – in principle, all the way back to the origins of the universe. If he is right, then to all intents and purposes the universe didn’t exist until we and other conscious entities started observing it.

Different parts of the sun spin at different rates. So while a day at the equator lasts 25 days, regions close to the poles take a few days longer to make a complete rotation. This uneven spin leads to distortion in the sun’s magnetic field, which has knock-on effects.

As the sun’s magnetic field gets wound up by the spin ‘it starts to build tension and pressure, much like when you twist a rubber band and it knots up’, Young says. Something has to give, so the magnetic fields snap and release energy in the form of heat, either as solar flares or furious clouds of energy called coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

‘Progress is often made by asking the questions we think we already know the answer to,’ says Daniel Kaplan of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.

Everything, from human beings to weird low-temperature phenomena like liquids that defy gravity, stems from the fact that there are two kinds of particles: those that like to socialise, and those that don’t. Sound familiar? Perhaps the quantum world isn’t that different from us after all.

They described awe as the feeling we get when confronted with something vast, that transcends our frame of reference and that we struggle to understand. It’s an emotion that combines amazement with an edge of fear. Wonder, by contrast, is more intellectual – a cognitive state in which you are trying to understand the mysterious.