Home > Work > This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress
41 " It’s an illusion to believe that you can be happy when no one else is. Or that other people will not be affected by your unhappiness. "
― John Brockman , This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress
42 " We can speak, think, refer to ourselves as agents, and so build up the false idea of a persisting self that has consciousness and free will. "
43 " Economics graduate students are far more likely to free-ride than other students. "
44 " The universe has been around for 13.8 billion years and "
45 " is likely to survive for another 100 billion years or more. "
46 " Plus, where would the universe retire to? Florida isn’t big enough. "
47 " Computers are fine, but it’s time to return to the mind itself and stop pretending we have computers for brains. "
48 " We’d be unfeeling, unconscious zombies if we did. "
49 " psychologists are too polite with one another’s ideas. "
50 " Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its life span. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.ad "
51 " What is the universe, anyway? To test your knowledge of the universe, please complete the following sentence. The universe (a) consists of all things visible and invisible—what is, has been, and will be. (b) began 13.8 billion years ago in a giant explosion called the Big Bang and encompasses all planets, stars, galaxies, space, and time. (c) was licked out of the salty rim of the primordial fiery pit by the tongue of a giant cow. (d) All of the above. (Correct answer below.) "
52 " As a final insult to unity, the laws of quantum mechanics indicate that the universe is continually splitting into multiple histories, or “many worlds,” out of which the world we experience is only one. The other worlds contain the events that didn’t happen in our world. "
53 " When Max Planck began studying physics at the University of Munich in 1874, his teacher, Philipp von Jolly, warned him that it was already a mature field, with little more to learn. "
54 " In 1900, Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist, put it clearly: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement. "
55 " A patient can have as many diagnoses as [she] damn well pleases. "
56 " you’re more likely to die while horseback riding (one serious adverse event every 350 or so exposures) than from taking Ecstasy (one serious adverse event every 10,000 or so exposures). "
57 " People are sheep—cowardly, deplorable sheep. "
58 " an individual’s moral obligation in the situation is to ‘call it as he sees it’ without consideration of what others say. "
59 " (This is the tome that guides haruspication—I mean, psychiatry.) "
60 " commitment to spooky, nonempirical entities ranging from human rights to the Word of God to the coming proletarian Utopia. "