Quotes from John Brockman

Nobody knows and you can't find out

The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another's company.

William James speculated that subjective time was measured in novel experiences, which become rarer as you get older.

Krebs cycle, discovered in 1937 by Hans Krebs but invented over millions of years of evolution at the dawn of life. It is the eight-stroke chemical reaction that turns fuel into energy in the process of metabolism that is essential to all life, from bacteria to redwoods.

Space, time, and objects might just be aspects of a sensory desktop specific to Homo sapiens. They might not be deep insights into objective truths, just convenient conventions that have evolved to allow us to survive in our niche.

From my informal surveys, it is very uncommon knowledge that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it.

when a person's commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he's being "religious.

the threat to good collective outcomes doesn't come only from free riders and predators, as mainstream social sciences teach us, but also from well-organized norms of kakonomics, which regulate exchanges for the worse.

If everyone had the same education, the inequality of income would be reduced by less than 10 percent.

Psychological well-being is not determined by the presence of one type of emotion but by a diversity of emotions, both positive and negative. Whether or not an emotion is "good" or "bad" seems to have surprisingly little to do with the emotion itself but rather with how mindfully we ride the ebbing and flowing tides of our rich emotional life.

Microbes make up 80 percent of all biomass, says microbiologist Carl Woese. In one-fifth of a teaspoon of seawater, there are a million bacteria (and 10 million viruses), Craig Venter says, adding, "If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet. This is the planet of the bacteria

The only value comes if you have something positive to do, and it's important to match both your own interests and abilities to what you decide to work on. I

When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up. Better to go with the flow.

Hustle to keep your kids on or off the Internet, eating organic or local or nothing at all. Take these actions, or none. Just don't worry about them. There is nothing to worry about, and there never was.

Publication bias is the tendency to not publish "negative," or nonconfirmatory, results.

Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little.

If, by contrast, you think that uncovering your mistakes is one of the best ways to revise and improve your understanding of the world, then this is actually a highly optimistic insight.

Our conscious experience arises out of the laws of nature, the states of our brain, and our entanglement with the world.

us measure progress not by what is discovered but rather by the growing list of mysteries that remind us of how little we really know.

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.

WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples make up most nonclinical neuroimaging studies as well.

After all, there have never been loonies carrying signs saying, "The End is Not Near.

Science, then, is the reliable acquisition of knowledge about anything, whether it be the vagaries of human nature, the role of great figures in history, or the origins of life itself.

Stephen Hawking has estimated: "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years. By that time we should have spread out into space, . . .