#science (32 quotes)
Think of it as an eight-dimensional onion.’ Justine straightened her back and gave her father an exasperated look. ‘Thanks, Dad. That’s helpful. I always think in those terms, it really helps a lot.
— , The Temporal Void We always want more, he thought, we always take our past successes for granted and assume they but point the way to future triumphs. But the universe does not have our own best interests at heart, and to assume for a moment that it does, ever did or ever might is to make the most calamitous and hubristic of mistakes.
— , Look to Windward And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.
— , Firefall Every level of complexity floats freely on the last, supported only by abstractions.
— , Schismatrix Plus When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
— , My First Summer in the Sierra Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.
— , The Candy House One of the great tragedies of science is that the increase in its complexity has made most scientists into little more than technicians, driving them into the tunnels of specialized disciplines. The further the scientist progresses down into the mine of knowledge, the less she can see the world into which that knowledge fits.
— , The Mountain in the Sea There is a baseline arrogance to all of us in the programme. Arrogance and impatience and, whatever else we might say, fear of a certain kind of complexity. That is why we take seriously the notion of transcending the world. Why understand something, when you can jump over it? Why put in the effort?
— , In Ascension Educators are people too, subject to the same cognitive limitations and biases as everyone else. The lack of scientific literacy, combined with deep faith in the validity of personal observation, creates vulnerability to claims that are intuitively appealing but unproved or untrue.
— , Language at the Speed of Sight No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.
— , The Peripheral Everything is only information, if you have sufficient capacity to encompass it.
— , Children of Time The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.
— , The Living Mountain From an evolutionary point of view, the purpose of consciousness seems to be this: an animal composed of a giant collection of zombie systems would be energy efficient but cognitively inflexible. It would have economical programs for doing particular, simple tasks, but it wouldn’t have rapid ways of switching between programs or setting goals to become expert in novel and unexpected tasks.
— , Incognito The great horizon for evidence-based medicine is finding new methods and tools for disseminating the evidence we already have, to doctors and other decision-makers. This will require innovative collaboration between coders, pharmacists, librarians, doctors and academics. At the simplest level, I’m always frustrated that I can’t press a button, when reading a systematic review, to say ‘notify me when this summary is updated with new trial results’. In more elaborate terms, it’s clear that we should be moving medical knowledge and trial results into structured databases; and perhaps embedding high-quality contextual advice into a doctor’s routine workflow, as they sit at the computer in their office.
— , Bad Pharma This is what I want to learn: to notice, but not to analyse. To still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘My god, what’s that? A stork, a crane, an ibis? – don’t be silly, its just a weird heron.’ Sometimes we have to hush the frantic inner voice that says ‘Don’t be stupid,’ and learn again to look, to listen. You can do the organising and redrafting, the diagnosing and identifying later, but right now, just be open to it, see how it’s tilting nervously into the wind, try to see the colour, the unchancy shape – hold it in your head, bring it home intact.
— , Findings Absolute scientific truth was like the speed of light, a value which could be approached but never reached.
— , In the Mouth of the Whale Nothing remained the same for ever. Every niche-clinging individual or species that stubbornly refused change invited extinction. Adaptability was the key to survival. The world was being revived, not remade or restored, and change was the engine of revival.
— , The Quiet War At last, however, we have begun to see that true sanity has nothing at all to do with norms or averages. This redefinition emerged only when some got around to asking the simplest of questions. “What are the most common traits of nearly all forms of mental illness?” The answer? Nearly all sufferers lack:
Flexibility—to be able to change your opinion or course of action, if shown clear evidence you were wrong.
Satiability—the ability to feel satisfaction if you actually get what you said you wanted, and to transfer your strivings to other goals.
Extrapolation—an ability to realistically assess the possible consequences of your actions and to empathize, or guess how another person might think or feel.
This answer crosses all boundaries of culture, age, and language. When a person is adaptable and satiable, capable of realistic planning and empathizing with his fellow beings, those problems that remain turn out to be mostly physiochemical or behavioral.
— , Earth Slowly, agonizingly, humans learned how the universe worked, abandoning most of the fanciful beliefs they carried through their long, dark loneliness. This included belief in—
- the divine right of egotistical kings, - the mental incapacity of women, - the idea that a wise state knows all, - the idea that the individual is always right, - the sick-sweet addiction that transforms a doctrine from a mere model of the world into something sacred, worth killing for.
— , Brightness Reef The separation of knowledge and place moves us slowly towards a society in which it is increasingly unnecessary for us to be aware of where we live, beyond the housekeeping of our own private zones. Once this awareness has lapsed, then landscapes beyond those private precincts become easier to manipulate for ill.
— , 4x4s are killing my planet It is harder to dispose of anything, or to act selfishly towards it, once one has paid attention to its details. This is an environmentalist’s truth, as well as a humanist’s.
— , Only connect One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes.
— , Mountains of the Mind There is an undertow to our yearning for wilderness that feels less comfortable. When you get to your wild place, who will you meet there? Whose hospitality will you call upon? Well, usually no one’s, because the point of much wilderness writing, it seems, is to celebrate a yearning not just for wild places, but for wild places without any people in them. Is there a misanthropic edge to our national passion for wilderness writing and wilderness travel? We would like to start a counter-movement. Rather than escaping to the forests of the Highlands, park your car at Matalan and have a walk around the edgelands woods. This has the added advantage that you won’t die of exposure if you take a wrong turn. And if we must visit mountains, let’s make sure there’s always a café near the summit, so we can have a drink and enjoy the company of our fellow travellers. Snowdon has already taken this bold step. Now all we need is a Premier Inn on the top of Ben Nevis and a Little Chef on Scafell Pike. Let the campaign begin.
— , Edgelands Space travel gave us the ability to see our own world from afar, revealing to us the fragility of our world and the insignificance of human existence when seen from a cosmic scale. Many astronauts describe being profoundly changed by seeing the “blue marble” for themselves. Perhaps these vertiginous experiences, these sudden shifts in perspective will occur more frequently with the advance of technology. Perhaps the opposite will occur and with the decline in mass media we will become increasingly insular and narcissistic. Perhaps our reaction to being able to see the sum of all human life will be to shield our eyes from it. We live in interesting times.
— , The Unbearable Triviality Of Social Networking Here’s an example to give you an idea of what it would take to get a SHA-1 collision. If all 6.5 billion humans on Earth were programming, and every second, each one was producing code that was the equivalent of the entire Linux kernel history (1 million Git objects) and pushing it into one enormous Git repository, it would take 5 years until that repository contained enough objects to have a 50% probability of a single SHA-1 object collision. A higher probability exists that every member of your programming team will be attacked and killed by wolves in unrelated incidents on the same night.
— , Pro Git 6.1 Git Tools Revision Selection