This Explains Everything Quotes

“The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can’t see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind—much like the visible aspect of the universe—is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection—natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Los valores sagrados solo acostumbran adquirir una fuerte relevancia cuando son desafiados, de la misma manera que los alimentos adquieren un valor acuciante solo cuando no se tiene acceso a ellos.”
― Scott Atran, This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Illusions are a necessary consequence of intelligence. Cognition requires going beyond the information given, to make bets and therefore to risk errors. Would we be better off without visual illusions? We would in fact be worse off—like a person who never says anything to avoid making any mistakes. A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“When Planck introduced his quantum of action at the turn of the 20th century, he realized that this allowed for a new set of natural units. For example, the Planck time is the square root of Planck’s constant times the gravitational constant divided by the fifth power of the speed of light. It is the smallest unit of time anyone talks about, but is it a “time”? The problem is that these constants are just that. They are the same to a resting observer as to a moving one. But the time is not. I posed this as a “divinette” to my “coven,” and Freeman Dyson came up with a beautiful answer. He tried to construct a clock that would measure it. Using the quantum uncertainties, he showed that it would be consumed by a black hole of its own making. No measurement is possible. The Planck time ain’t a time—or it may be beyond time.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?”)”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Puedes tomar decisiones mejores tomando decisiones no tan buenas y luego corrigiéndolas.”
― Alison Gopnik, This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Cuando eres joven deseas cosas, cuando eres mayor deseas desearlas.”
― Alison Gopnik, This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Cuanto más materialmente inexplicables resultan la propia devoción y compromiso por una causa sagrada -es decir, cuanto más absurdas son-, mayor es la fe que otros depositan en ella y más compromiso genera esta fe por parte de ellos.”
― Scott Atran, This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“To have a good idea, stop having a bad one. The trick was to inhibit the easy, obvious, but ineffective attempts, permitting a better solution”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“human responses aren’t additive in the same way that objects are additive. Whereas four lightbulbs illuminate a room more effectively than three lightbulbs, and three loudspeakers fill a room with noise more effectively than two loudspeakers, two people are often less effective than a single person.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult, and time-consuming.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“drowning in two inches of water,”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“In Europe, the present is perceived as the endpoint of history. In America, the present is perceived as the beginning of the future.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“information available from the retina and other sensory organs is not sufficient to reconstruct the world. Size, distance, and other properties need to be inferred from uncertain cues, which in turn have to be learned by experience. Based on this experience, the brain draws unconscious inferences about what a sensation means. In other words, perception is a kind of bet about what’s really out there.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Can the fundamental insight—the destructive, creative virtue of simplicity—be transposed from the realm of scientific explanation into culture or onto the level of conscious experience? What kind of formal simplicity would make our culture a deeper, more beautiful culture? And what is an elegant mind?”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Description length is actually a measure of complexity,”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“The more materially inexplicable one’s devotion and commitment to a sacred cause—that is, the more absurd—the greater the trust others place in it and the more that trust generates commitment on their part.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“RIDLEY Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Humankind’s strongest social bonds and actions, including the capacities for cooperation and forgiveness, and for killing and allowing oneself to be killed, are born of commitment to causes and courses of action that are “ineffable”—that is, fundamentally immune to logical assessment for consistency and to empirical evaluation for costs and consequences.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“If sensory recognition worked on the grandmother principle, the number of specific-recognition neurons for all possible combinations of nerve impulses would exceed the number of atoms in the universe.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic.”* The”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“They fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism,” he”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“that’s the way of all good explanations. The better they are, the more questions they raise.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works