David Darling > Quotes

“No one, from pontiffs to professors, has a monopoly on the truth. In the end, we are all just travelers--not scientists or mystics or any one brand of thinker. By nature, we are scientists and mystics, reductionists and holists, left-brained and right-brained, mixed up creatures trying to catch an occasional glimpse of the truth. The best we can do is to be tolerant of both sides of our nature--knowing that these reflect the twin aspect of the universe--and learn from whatever wisdom is offered.”
― David Darling, Soul Search: A Scientist Explores the Afterlife

“It is one of the fundamental mysteries of nature, this dichotomy between what is given and what we, with our minds, create. We owe our very existence as a species to our ability to delineate patterns. We can even see patterns where none exist – the faces in a sun-lit curtain, the Greek heroes and monsters among the stars. What else might the human mind be recognizing that is not really there? And what, in any case, do we mean by "real"?”
― David Darling, Equations of Eternity, Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning, and the Mathematical Rules That Orchestrate the Cosmos

“Statistics can easily fool us if used incorrectly, or if we fail to take in the whole picture of what’s going on. The situation is even worse when data are presented in a way that’s deliberately misleading – as often happens in advertising and politics. Without resorting to outright lies, there are plenty of ways to distort data to create a false impression.”
― David Darling, Weirdest Maths: At the Frontiers of Reason

“Knowing too much about a subject can make us overly cautious. Having a lot of conventional wisdom may make us doubt our own hunches and intuition because we’re more likely to think that any seemingly good ideas that pop into our heads are wrong if they don’t square with what we’ve previously learned.”
― David Darling, Weirdest Maths: At the Frontiers of Reason

“Various factors, it seems, contribute to what we call genius and the forms it may take: speed of thought (at which von Neumann, by all accounts, was exceptional), depth of understanding (at which, according to Wigner, Einstein excelled), originality, creativity, and so forth. Sometimes, too, genius may be narrow in its focus – as in the case of Einstein or Ramanujan – while at other times, as illustrated by von Neumann, and to an even greater extent by some Renaissance figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, it can range over many subjects.”
― David Darling, Weirdest Maths: At the Frontiers of Reason

“Truth and beauty are closely related but not the same. You’re never sure that you have the truth. All you’re doing is striving towards better and better truths and the light that guides you is beauty.”
― David Darling, Weirdest Maths: At the Frontiers of Reason

“Mathematics, contrary to how it may sometimes seem, is an endless adventure into the weirdest and wildest places ever countenanced by the human intellect. It lures us into thinking that it’s ordinary and banal, because its roots are in the familiar – in simple numbers and shapes. It began as the tool of the merchant, the farmer, the builder of temples and pyramids, the early watchers of the seasons and the skies. But it’s anything but ordinary. It permeates every aspect of the reality in which we’re embedded, forming an invisible infrastructure behind the behaviour of everything around us, from the smallest particle to the universe as a whole.”
― David Darling, Weird Maths: At the Edge of Infinity and Beyond

“Instances of total, permanent amnesia challenge us to reevaluate our concept of death. For if we consider the most relevant aspect of death to be "what it feels like" (the subjective experience) rather than "what it looks like" (the objective view) then total memory loss does seem to qualify as an event remarkably similar – and, indeed, ontologically identical – to death as we normally understand it. If the experience of being a particular person, say person A, is contingent upon having a particular stock of memories, then if this stock is irretrievably lost the feeling of being person A must be lost as well. Person A, as a psychological entity, has effectively died – died, that is, as far as the victim and the victim's family and friends are concerned. Medically, genetically, legally – objectively – it is a different story, and someone whose memories have gone but who remains cortically alive is considered by society at large to be still the same person. However, to those who know the individual well, and, most importantly, as actually experienced by the victim of total memory loss, it is clear that there has been a radical, irreversible change.”
― David Darling, Zen Physics, The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation

“You’re more likely to die from a falling coconut than from a shark attack, and more likely to die on your birthday than any other day of the year. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes and, over a lifetime, spends twenty-five years sleeping. About 11 percent of the population are left-handed. The most typical human face on Earth is that of a 28-year-old Chinese man.”
― David Darling, Weirdest Maths: At the Frontiers of Reason

“The expression ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’ was popularised by Mark Twain and attributed by him, in his autobiography, to the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.”
― David Darling, Weirdest Maths: At the Frontiers of Reason

“There’s evidence, too, that being good at maths is tied to a more general capacity to spot hidden structures in data. This could explain why it’s common to find people who excel at both maths and music, and why training at chess can help improve maths scores – both music and chess have complex data structures at their heart.”
― David Darling, Weirdest Maths: At the Frontiers of Reason