The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged) Quotes

“Fritz Zwicky két dologról híres: először is az 1930-as években végzett úttörő kozmológiai munkájáról, amelynek keretében a gravitációt, az ősrobbanást, a sötét anyagot és a neutroncsillagokat tanulmányozta; másodszor pedig arról, hogy goromba seggfej volt. Kozmoszrengető fizikája mellett Zwicky találta ki a "gömbölyű rohadék" sértést azon kollégáira, akiket nem kedvelt, mivel bármelyik irányból nézte is őket, mindig rohadéknak látszottak.”
― Hannah Fry, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

“Hunyjuk be a szemünket!”
― Hannah Fry, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

“The real guide to reality It’s not that pigeons are stupid. Well, they are, but that’s not the point. This gulf between how we see the world and how a pigeon sees the same world reveals something fundamental about our relationship with reality, and how we understand our place in the cosmos. Our eyes powerfully illustrate the fact that our experience is a heavily edited version of reality. Evolution has found a way for us to harvest, process and interpret elementary packets of light in the dark cavities of our skulls. Our minds navigate the many constraints of anatomy to make it work—frame rates, blind spots, faulty cones, colorless peripheral vision. We don’t even notice the limits of our eyes as we construct our subjective world view in our heads. Like all creatures on Earth, our bodies are carefully tuned to ensure our continued survival. But it would be a pointless waste of ego to think that they make us capable of experiencing reality as it really is. We are each locked into our own umwelt, profoundly limited by our senses, constrained by our biology, shackled by the inescapable bounds of our evolutionary history. We’re hopelessly tethered to what we can uncover while stuck on (or perhaps near) this planet, a speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos. We see only the merest sliver of reality. We’re peering at the universe through a keyhole.”
― Adam Rutherford, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

“The reason why we can’t see our eyes moving with our own eyes is because our brains edit out the bits between the saccades—a process called saccadic suppression. Without it, we’d look at an object and it would be a blurry mess. What we perceive as vision is the director’s cut of a film, with your brain as the director, seamlessly stitching together the raw footage to make a coherent reality. Perception is the brain’s best guess at what the world actually looks like. Immense though the computing power of that fleshy mass sitting in the darkness of our skulls is, if we were to take in all the information in front of our eyes, our brains would surely explode.** Instead, our eyes sample bits and pieces of the world, and we fill in the blanks in our heads. This fact is fundamental to the way that cinema works. A film is typically 24 static images run together every second, which our brain sees as continuous fluid movement—that’s why it’s called a movie. The illusion of movement actually happens at more like 16 frames per second. At that speed, a film projection is indistinguishable from the real world, at least to us. It was the introduction of sound that set the standard of 24 frames per second with The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first film to have synchronized dialogue. The company”
― Adam Rutherford, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

“Many flying insects see in the ultraviolet. And flowers, which need insects to pollinate them, know this well; their pretty petals often have ultraviolet runways pointing down toward their juicy nectar, and the all-important sexual organs. Honeybees see in the UV very well, though not in the red part of the spectrum like we do. Their eyes, which have a higher flicker threshold and can also perceive iridescence, are superbly evolved to spot flowers while hurtling along on the wing. Just as long as they’re not red.”
― Adam Rutherford, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

“In the current technological era we are more vulnerable to manipulation via confirmation bias than ever. Take the YouTube algorithm. It recommends videos to you on the basis of those you’ve already watched by analyzing the viewing habits of people who clicked on the same video. It predicts that you are more likely to enjoy their favorite content than a completely random selection of videos, which turns out to be a fair assumption. The trouble is, there are concerns that it can have the effect of plunging the viewer into a confirmation bias odyssey. If you watched a video about aliens visiting rural America and intrusively probing local farmhands, then you are fairly likely to be interested in other bonkers conspiracy theories, such as that the Earth is flat, and that vaccines cause autism. Before long, you may find yourself presented with videos of people telling you that school shootings in the US were faked, and that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers were perpetrated by the US government. People who believe such things are more likely to distrust the government anyway, and to be on the political right. In the run-up to the US presidential election in 2016, virulently anti-Hillary Clinton videos were viewed six times more than anti-Donald Trump videos.”
― Adam Rutherford, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science

“Warren Buffett puts it all rather well: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”
― Adam Rutherford, The Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged): Adventures in Math and Science