Quotes from John Brockman

One of my favorites is "If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research.

In the long term, Mars must be a stepping-stone to more distant destinations, because two adjacent planets could be simultaneously affected by the universe's more violent events, such as a nearby supernova.

consciousness is the way information feels when being processed in certain complex ways.

When you're facing in the wrong direction, progress means walking backward.

A recent study found that non-abused six- to fourteen-month-olds who showed disregard for others' distress were significantly more likely to be antisocial as adolescents.

Population thinking is itself a population of mental and public things. Philosophers' discussions of what population thinking really is are members of this population. So is the text you just read, and so is your reading of it.

If I offered to give you $20 today or $100 in a year, which would you choose?

We are entering the Age of Awareness, marked by machine intelligence everywhere.

As the French cognitive scientist Dan Sperber put it, cultures are epidemics of mental representations.

It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic."* The

In truth, much of human social life—our morality, our relationships—revolves around challenges posed by intertemporal choice.

The likelihood of being killed by terrorism is extremely low, yet we have instituted actions to counter terrorism that significantly reduce our quality of life. As a recent example, X-ray body scanners could increase the risk of cancer to a degree greater than the risk from terrorism—the same sort of counterproductive overreaction as the one to spiders. This does not imply that we should let spiders, or terrorists, crawl all over us—but the risks need to be managed rationally.

Just as you can't attribute the spin of a proton to any one of its constituents, you can't attribute an event in time to a single earlier cause. Complex systems have neither a useful notion of individuality nor a proper notion of causality.

Cancer will be understood properly only by positioning it within the great sweep of evolutionary history.

we may just have to come around to the notion that there's my universe and there's your universe—but there's no such thing as the universe.

Human achievement is based on collective intelligence—the nodes in the human neural network are people themselves. By each doing one thing and getting good at it, then sharing and combining the results through exchange, people become capable of doing things they do not even understand.

Can it be that all of physics—and, indeed, all of science—is based on creating all the matter in the universe from a dozen objects with totally random mass values, while no one has the faintest idea about their origin?

Human beings are impossibly complex tarballs of muscle, blood, bone, breath, and electrical pulses that travel through nerves and neurons; we are bundles of electrical pulses carrying payloads, pings hitting servers. And our identities are inextricably connected to our environments: No story can be told without a setting.

What's more, random events can mimic nonrandom ones. Even the most sophisticated scientists can have difficulty telling the difference between a real effect and a random fluke. Randomness can make placebos seem like miracle cures, or harmless compounds appear to be deadly poisons, and can even create subatomic particles out of nothing.

The most important scientific concept is that an assertion is often an empirical question, settled by collecting evidence. The plural of anecdote is not data, and the plural of opinion is not facts. Quality peer-reviewed scientific evidence accumulates into knowledge. People's stories are stories, and fiction keeps us going. But science should settle policy.

Contrary to what our brains are telling us, there's no mystical force that imbues a winner with a streak of luck, nor is there a cosmic sense of justice

it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

Twain said: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so.

In fact nobody died, nobody became ill, and nobody is expected to.