1) The Lucasian throne is the Lucasian Chair, a funded and highly honored academic position at Cambridge University that is famous, partly because it’s currently held by Stephen Hawking and partly because its first holder was Isaac Newton. 2) Who, as you know, invented/discovered the law of gravity. Translating that equation up there, the force […]
History/Philosophy
“If, for example, I say that ‘the train arrives here at 7 o’clock,’ that means, more or less, ‘the pointing of the small hand of my clock to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.’” […]
CELESTE: How long this time? LE GENTIL: How long will I be gone? Three years. I swear to you, Celeste, on everything that’s holy: three years, no more. CELESTE: What if you miss it? LE GENTIL: The transit? I won’t. CELESTE: You missed the last one. Venus (the small dark dot) crosses the Sun. That […]
Yesterday I confessed my fear of magicians. Today I confront that fear by going to the source: Alex Stone, a magician I met at a party who, at my prompting, was kind enough to perform an impromptu set that thrilled me but that also, on the walk home, left me feeling uneasy. I later learned […]
David Brooks has done it again. In his New York Times op-ed column last Monday, Brooks portrayed psychiatry as a “semi-science” suffering from “Physics Envy.” He pointed to the publication of the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—or DSM-5—as evidence that psychiatry misrepresents itself as hard science. The column opens, “We’re living in an empirical age,” and it goes […]
About ten years ago, doing research for a book, I asked Freeman Dyson about a study he’d helped do about whether we would have lost the war in Vietnam a little less if we’d used tactical nuclear weapons. Dyson and two colleagues, all members of a scientific advisory group called Jason, were doing this study […]
“Did they ever meet?” I got the question all the time. People would ask what I was working on, and I would say a book about Einstein and Freud, and then would come the question. Same thing with my next book. People would ask what I was working on, and I would say a book […]
Clenching your muscles increases self-control. So does having a loud super-ego, or at least some form of inner monologue. Isolation disrupts our will power, as does having too much dopamine in our systems, like ADHD sufferers chronically do. Sugar boosts self-control. So does a short burst of exercise. For smokers, the same restorative effect happens […]