John Brockman > Quotes

“Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody.”
― John Brockman

“Every aspect of life is an experiment that can be better understood if it is perceived in that way.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“By undercutting fundamentalism and intolerance, education would curtail violence and war. By empowering women, it would curb poverty and the population explosion.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“The universe consists primarily of dark matter. We can’t see it, but it has an enormous gravitational force. The conscious mind—much like the visible aspect of the universe—is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Creativity is a fragile flower, but perhaps it can be fertilized with systematic doses of serendipity.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“it is difficult to discern where “you” end and the remainder of the world begins.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“It’s natural to worry about physical stuff like weaponry and resources. What we should really worry about is psychological stuff like ideologies and norms. As the UNESCO slogan puts it, “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”
― John Brockman, What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night – Essays on Hidden Threats and Preventing Catastrophe

“In science the credit goes to the man who convinced the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“After several decades of empirical study, Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. We all have a natural time horizon we are comfortable with: what Jaques called “time span of discretion,” or the length of the longest task an individual can successfully undertake.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Change is the law. Stability and consistency are illusions, temporary in any case, a heroic achievement of human will and persistence at best. When we want things to stay the same, we'll always wind up playing catch-up.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Mischel refers to this skill as the “strategic allocation of attention,” and he argues that it’s the skill underlying self-control. Too often, we assume that willpower is about having strong moral fiber. But that’s wrong. Willpower is really about properly directing the spotlight of attention, learning how to control that short list of thoughts in working memory. It’s about realizing that if we’re thinking about the marshmallow, we’re going to eat it, which is why we need to look away.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Uncertainty is intrinsic to the process of finding out what you don’t know, not a weakness to avoid.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“As a theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) noted, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." In other words, science advances by a series of funerals.”
― John Brockman (Ed.), This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress

“Sometimes science fiction does become scientific discovery.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Happy brains are all alike; every unhappy brain is unhappy in its own way.”
― John Brockman, What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night – Essays on Hidden Threats and Preventing Catastrophe

“Children need practice dealing with other people. With people, practice never leads to perfect. But perfect isn’t the goal. Perfect is the goal only in a simulation. Children become fearful of not being in control in a domain where control is not the point. Beyond this, children use conversations with one another to learn how to have conversations with themselves. For children growing up, the capacity for self-reflection is the bedrock of development. I worry that the holding power of the screen does not encourage this. It jams that inner voice by offering continual interactivity or continual connection. Unlike time with a book, where one’s mind can wander and there is no constraint on time out for self-reflection, “apps” bring children back to the task at hand just when a child’s mind should be allowed to wander. So in addition to taking children away from conversation with other children, too much time with screens can take children away from themselves. It is one thing for adults to choose distraction over self-reflection. But children need to learn to hear their own voices.”
― John Brockman, What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night – Essays on Hidden Threats and Preventing Catastrophe

“Defeasible beliefs provide the provisional certainty necessary to navigate an uncertain world.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Science itself is learning how to better exploit negative results.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection—natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Consider the world we could live in if all of our local and global leaders, if all of our personal and professional friends and foes, recognized the defeasibility of their beliefs and acted accordingly. That sure sounds like progress to me. But of course I could be wrong.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another’s company.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“when a person’s commitment to evidence and logic grows dangerously thin or simply snaps under the burden of fear, wishful thinking, tribalism, or ecstasy, we recognize that he’s being “religious.”
― John Brockman, This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress – A Groundbreaking Anthology of Essays from 175 Brilliant Minds

“Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out. It”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“delight in good ideas.”
― John Brockman, What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night – Essays on Hidden Threats and Preventing Catastrophe

“Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little.”
― John Brockman, This Explains Everything: 150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

“Wicked problems demand people who are creative, pragmatic, flexible, and collaborative. They never invest too much in their ideas, because they know they will have to alter them. They know there’s no right place to start, so they simply start somewhere and see what happens. They accept the fact that they’re more likely to understand the problem after it’s solved than before. They don’t expect to get a good solution; they keep working until they’ve found something that’s good enough. They’re never convinced they know enough to solve the problem, so they’re constantly testing their ideas on different stakeholders.”
― John Brockman, This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

“Choice is simply a fanciful shorthand for biological processes we do not yet apprehend.”
― John Brockman, Know This: Today's Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments – Pulitzer and Nobel Prize Winners from Edge.org