Quotes from David Christian

Knowledge is like a sphere; the greater its volume, the larger its contact with the unknown.

As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.

For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.

Like human lovers, electrons are unpredictable, fickle, and always open to better offers.

All knowledge systems, from modern science to those embedded in the most ancient of creation myths, can be thought of as maps of reality. They are never just true or false. Perfect descriptions of reality are unattainable, unnecessary, and too costly for learning organisms, including humans.

Human knowledge, by its nature, has limits, so some questions must remain mysteries. Some religions treat such mysteries as secrets that the gods choose to hide from humans; others, such as Buddhism, treat them as ultimate riddles that are not worth pursuing.

About 250 million years ago, most of the continental plates were joined into a supercontinent, which Wegener had christened "Pangaea." It was surrounded by a single, large sea, known as Panthalassa.

Quantum physics shows that it is in the nature of reality to be unpredictable.

As Seth Lloyd puts it: "To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information."3

So, as networks expand in size, their potential intellectual synergy increases much faster: "larger and denser populations equal faster technological advance.

Like the origin stories of Confucianism or early Buddhism, the modern story is about a universe that just is. Any sense of meaning comes not from the universe, but from us humans. "What's the meaning of the universe?" asked Joseph Campbell, a scholar of myth and religion. "What's the meaning of a flea? It's just there, that's it, and your own meaning is that you're there."3

Both animal and human slaves could be controlled best if kept economically and psychically dependent on their owners.

Trying to look at the whole of the past is, it seems to me, like using a map of the world. No geographer would try to teach exclusively from street maps. Yet most historians teach about the past of particular nations, or even of agrarian civilizations, without ever asking what the whole of the past looks like.

Entropy is the loyal servant of the second law of thermodynamics. So, if we think of entropy as a character in our story, we should imagine it as dissolute, lurking, careless of others' pain and suffering, not interested in looking you in the eye. Entropy is also very, very dangerous, and in the end it will get us all.

That allowed them to model important features of the external world and even to model possible futures. No brainy creature (not even you or I) is in direct contact with its environment. Instead, we all live in a rich virtual reality constructed by our brains. Our brains generate and constantly update maps of the most salient features of our bodies and our surroundings, just as climate scientists model changing environments today.17 Those maps enable us to maintain homeostasis.

Unlike water, which prefers to lie flat as it accumulates, material wealth in complex societies likes to pile itself up into huge pyramids.

Some species are so disdainful of brains that they treat them as an expendable luxury. There are species of sea slugs that have mini-brains when they are young. They use them as they voyage through the seas looking for a perch from which they can sieve food. But once they've found their perch they no longer need such an expensive piece of equipment, so they eat their brains. Some have joked, cruelly, that this is a bit like tenured academics.

Stars form durable structures because they are the result of a negotiated compromise between gravity, which crushes matter together, and the explosive force of fusion reactions, which forces matter apart.

loss of faith helps explain the pervasive anomie, the feeling of aimlessness, meaninglessness, and sometimes even despair that shaped so much literature, art, philosophy, and scholarship in the twentieth century.

The modern world is ruled by larger and more impersonal forces, from faceless bureaucracies to abstractions such as "inflation," or "the rule of law." Where abstract forces take over the work of coercion from the landlord, the executioner, and the overseer, it is not surprising that there should emerge cosmologies ruled by equally abstract forces.

despite the absence of a real state monopoly on violence, early states were much more formidable structures than chiefdoms. And everywhere they appear, they are associated with the same cluster of features. These include new forms of specialization and an extensive division of labor, bureaucracies, systems of accounting and writing, armies, and fiscal systems.

contain into new, durable configurations, which can handle huge energy flows without disintegrating. This, we will see, is the characteristic pattern of all such thresholds. New configurations emerge quite suddenly as once independent entities are drawn into new and more ordered patterns, held together by an increasing throughput of free energy (see chapter 4).

what we can see may constitute no more than 10 percent, and perhaps as little as 1 percent, of the matter in the universe.

Big History is the story of how you and I came to be.