Quotes from John Brockman

For me, the laws that apply to animals apply to us. And in that view of life, there is grandeur enough.

What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science. THE POINTLESS UNIVERSE SEAN CARROLL Theoretical physicist, Caltech; author, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time THE WORLD CONSISTS of things, which obey rules.

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.

We all die. Nearly half of us die of cancer (38 percent of females, 45 percent of males).

Karl Popper famously suggested the criterion of "falsifiability": A theory is scientific if it makes clear predictions that can be unambiguously falsified.

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.

Nothing is more wonderful about human beings than their ability to abstract, infer, calculate, and produce rules, algorithms, and tables that enable them to work marvels.

Mark 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.

You may know that a prisoner's guilt is independent of whether you're hungry or not, but she'll still seem like a better parole candidate when you've recently had a snack.

yet cancer rates in New England are higher than in Colorado—an inverse effect.

A total synthesis of all human knowledge will not result in huge libraries filled with books, in fantastic amounts of data stored on servers. There's no value any more in amount, in quantity, in explanation. For a total synthesis of human knowledge, use the interrogative.

philosophers are premature ejaculators who decant too soon, spilling their seminal genius to no effect.

Are humans ever really capable of regarding others as ends in themselves?

Some places in the world, such as Ramsar, Iran, have a tenfold higher background radiation

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

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.

but no higher cancer rates have been discovered there.

There are two kinds of fools: one who says this is old and therefore good, and the other who says this is new and therefore better.

Since string theorists have failed to propose any way to confirm string theory experimentally, string theory should be retired

in case you're interested. (It was the Soviet attack on Japan that forced Hirohito to surrender to save his war-criminal's

If a system is to deal successfully with the diversity of challenges its environment produces, then it needs to have a repertoire of responses (at least) as nuanced as the problems thrown up by the environment. So a viable system is one that can handle the variability of its environment. Or, as Ashby put it, only variety can absorb variety.

to have beliefs different from ours.

Nikolaus Otto built and sold the first internal-combustion gasoline engine in 1861, and Rudolf Diesel built his engine in 1897

field linguists (they're like field biologists with really good microphones)