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Introducing Nautilus Issue 55: The Rebel Issue!
Learn about the rebels who challenged the status quo and changed the world, featuring artwork from
@okchickadee
, and groundbreaking science journalism you don't want to miss.
Subscribe:
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"If black holes truly had no entropy, then any time an object fell into a black hole, its entropy would effectively be deleted, reducing the entropy of the universe and violating the second law of thermodynamics."
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“One cannot intend whatever one wants to intend any more than one can believe whatever one wants to believe. As our beliefs are constrained by our evidence, so our intentions are constrained by our reasons for action.”
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This illusion, created by the artist Victoria Skye, was one of the top entries in the 2017 Best Illusion of the Year Contest. Believe it or not, the horizontal lines are all perfectly parallel.
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It's here: Cormac McCarthy's first published work of non-fiction.
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"Plants do have intelligence. They have all the structures. They have all the functions. They have the behaviors."
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Science creates jobs.
Science creates solutions.
Science creates dreams.
How can science be under attack?
Because science is about facts.
Because science is about reason.
Because science can tell you what you don’t want to hear.
It’s time to say enough.
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As it turns out, doctors, like everyone else, are terrible at understanding probability.
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"In most cultures, boys are taught not to be aggressive, but in all cultures, boys and men are more aggressive anyway."
@SteveStuWill
explains why.
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Cormac McCarthy died today, June 13, at his home in Santa Fe, NM. Nautilus couldn’t have been more flattered when the great novelist published his first work of nonfiction, “The Kekule Problem,” with us in 2016.
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"The social sciences and the humanities are still very influenced by religion. They have this whole mindset that humans are absolutely special. But the average biologist believes that everything is continuous."
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For Einstein's 70th birthday, Gödel presented him with a calculation showing that relativity allows for time travel.
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The brain may use conceptual spaces to organize even abstract knowledge using the hippocampus' "inner GPS."
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For Philip Pullman, the mysterious substance of Dust, in his novels, is an expression of his fascination with panpsychism, the philosophical idea that matter is imbued with phenomenal experience.
Read
@atomseden
's interview with the author.
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"When I define someone as an idiot, it’s not an insult. It’s a diagnosis I offer for free."
Outspoken Italian virologist Robert Burioni sat down with
@EricTopol
to explain how to conquer COVID-19 amid a confederacy of dunces.
#covid
#vaccine
#vaccination
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New evidence, from brain science, supports the strange geometry of thought:
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"To be a part of the universe that gets to spin for a time, and to create a unique pocket of meaning: That is indeed something to be grateful for..."
Just as
@philipcball
uncovered a new way to understand life, he received some news about his own:
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If multiple universes exist, do they have a common clock?
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Should we start teaching our kids philosophy and physics at a younger age?
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The second key mutation allowed the coronavirus to grow a protein dagger that can slice through other proteins to make the virus bind tightly to throat and lung cells. This is what made the COVID-19 virus so infectious and deadly to humans.
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Would you like science to help you be a savvier holiday shopper?
READ THIS FREE EBOOK.
Topics like the psychology of decision making, how to make sense of online reviews, and why you should skip coffee when browsing Amazon.
Like & reply "shop" and we'll DM you the link.
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"Each neuron in your head is mind-bogglingly complex and you’ve got 86 billion of them," says
@davideagleman
. "When we say you’re just a bunch of neurons, we’re sweeping all that under the rug. In fact, you are a whole cosmos of your inner life in there.”
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"...when we use data of the physical world to explain phenomena that cannot be reduced to physical facts, or when we extend incomplete data to draw general conclusions, we are telling stories."
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"If you were to ask yourself what’s the greatest problem facing the world today, I would say it would be stupidity. So we should have professors of stupidity—it would just be embarrassing to be called the stupid professor.”
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"Stars, of course, not only sustain life, by showering planet Earth in photons, but also can contain, in their protostellar (or very young) form, a precursor material of life: a molecule called glycolonitrile."
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Theoretical physicists have known since the 1930s that quantum gravity is necessary to bring order into the laws of nature, writes
@skdh
, but 80 years on, a solution isn’t anywhere in sight.
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Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.
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Octopus behavior suggests that they have the ability to learn, remember, know, think, consider, and act based on their intelligence.
Cephalopod brains are nothing like ours—yet we have much in common.
@jamesbridle
explains:
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Bertrand Russell, who died OTD in 1970, prefigured the scientific discovery of the Dunning–Kruger effect in one of his most famous remarks, made in “The Triumph of Stupidity.”
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"We are becoming irrelevant. To a large extent, this fear is justified. Many people will become irrelevant to the economy, to the political system. So they are trying to use their political power before it’s too late."
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In this illusion, the circles in the image are all the same color. The only thing that differs is the color of the lines around them—a vivid demonstration of the fact that we don’t directly perceive the colors of objects in the world.
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A precise new method of measuring gravitational waves is re-opening the book on general relativity.
@Dr_CMingarelli
and Melize Ferrus explain:
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How massive parallelism lifts the brain’s performance above that of AI.
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One potential measure of the self is how much you’re able to stay true to your principles despite what the world throws at you. It’s an ancient idea.
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To what degree are we consciously capable of changing our minds?
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1 million seconds is nearly 12 days, whereas 1 billion seconds is almost 32 years.
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Play is so important that nature invented it long before it invented us.
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Breathe in. Breathe out. Now, remember that you live on a speck of dust flickering in the void. Feel better?
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Language contributes massively to the way we experience the world, in particular to our sense of the self as our narrative center in the past and present. But our basic experience of the world does not depend on it.
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Clinical neuroscientists and neurologists have identified the brain networks responsible for the sense of free will. There seems to be two: the network governing the desire to act, and the network governing the feeling of responsibility for acting.
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Studying time “is like holding a snowflake in your hands: gradually, as you study it, it melts between your fingers and vanishes.”
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Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish histologist and anatomist known today as the father of modern neuroscience, was also a committed psychologist who believed psychoanalysis and the dream theory of Sigmund Freud—who was born OTD—were “collective lies.”
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Oscar Wilde called language “the parent, and not the child, of thought.” Ludwig Wittgenstein said language limits limit his world. Bertrand Russell stated that the role of language is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.”
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"Children, who are just learning the basic expectations of their society, are in ways outside of culture. Their attraction to dinosaurs suggests that the giant creatures appeal to something innate, or at least very elemental, in the human psyche."
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Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.
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Researchers found that for some people, scientific ideas stir spiritual feelings of wonder and connection, which can offer psychological benefits similar to religious spirituality, like an increased sense of well-being and life satisfaction:
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"How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me."
– W.H. Auden
#NationalPoetryMonth
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While speaking a second language, people act more rationally and less impulsively.
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Believe it or not, these horizontal lines are all perfectly parallel. To prove it, just squint at the image or look at it from the side. (via
@victoria1skye
)
View 11 more mind-bending optical illusions at Nautilus:
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Richard Feynman, who was born OTD in 1918, was not only a brilliant scientist but also a memorable mentor. Physicist Paul Steinhardt wrote about what it was like learning from an icon of joyful curiosity.
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"Feynman would just write down the solutions without ever writing the equations. It seemed like a sort of magic."
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Why are so many people wedded to the idea that humans are special?
"I sometimes think it’s because our religions arose in a desert environment in which there were no primates, so you have people who lived with camels, goats, snakes, and scorpions."
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The philosopher who thinks humans are able to do things that today’s powerful computers can’t do because we, unlike our computers, represent information in geometrical space.
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The difference between chimps and us?
"...probably language. But like all capacities, once you break them down into pieces, you are going to find some of these parts in other species."
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It’s the age-old question … Is consciousness more like chess or the weather?
Our minds seem both physical and intangible, and that paradox has gripped
@anilkseth
since childhood.
Read on for a discussion with the neuroscientist:
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Neurological evidence for chaos in the nervous system is growing.
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Are you freaked out by the idea of infinite universes, some containing alternate versions of YOU? You're not alone.
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“Moments, ideas, a single poem in a collection—a work of genius, no matter how individually wrought—is never the product of a single individual. We should stop thinking of genius as an attribute and instead start to think of it as a...circumstance.”
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Behavioral scientist Nick Chater argues our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world.
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If a headless worm can grow a memory, then where is the memory stored? And, if it’s not in the head but in the body, could you transfer it?
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Psychologists studying reasoning extensively rely on logic and philosophy, and neglect psychology’s more natural ally: biology.
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Is the human brain “the most complex object in the known universe?"
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“We’re constantly bouncing off other people and looking at other people as a mirror of us. Our very sense of who we are is intertwined with what we see when we see other people look at us.”
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Your brain is 10 million times slower than a computer—so why are you smarter?
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"Science does not study all physical phenomena. Rather, science studies predictable physical phenomena. It is almost a tautology: science predicts predictable phenomena."
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Roman concrete, as opposed to our modern material, thrives in open chemical exchange with seawater, becoming more durable and strong the longer it's submerged. “It’s a very rare occurrence in nature.”
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The
@doellerlab
is advancing how we understand the nature of thought. The brain looks like it's storing "a mental map,"
@jacobbellmund
says, "regardless of whether we are thinking about a real space or the space between dimensions of our thoughts.”
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Einstein was a pantheist, who professed awe @ the “sublimity and marvelous order” of the universe. He was not alone.
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The rise and fall of the claustrum epitomizes the hunt for consciousness in the brain.
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After a few minutes, Richard Feynman had worked out the process of spontaneous emission, which is what Stephen Hawking became famous for a year later.
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That song stuck in your head? It is your brain doing its work.
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“Of all obstacles to a thoroughly penetrating account of existence, none looms up more dismayingly than ‘time,’” John Wheeler wrote. “Explain time? Not without explaining existence. Explain existence? Not without explaining time.”
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The problem with physics is the theories—they have steered us into a dead-end many do not want to acknowledge.
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Deep in the ocean abyss, xenophyophores—single-celled organisms that can grow as large as basketballs and resemble carnations, roses, or lattices—are worlds unto themselves.
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What are some underrated science accounts everyone should follow?
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Did humans need belief in a God-like being—who knows everything, is everywhere, and wields impossible power—to have the big societies we have today, where we live relatively peaceably among strangers we could easily exploit?
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There's no conceptual distinction between past and future. Time doesn't "flow." It just IS.
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"Nikolaas Tinbergen, the founder of behavioral ecology, famously stated that ethology is the art of interviewing animals in their own language. This principle is simple but powerful. And there is no reason why it should not be applied to humans."
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Superdeterminism, a long-abandoned idea, may help us overcome the current crisis in physics, writes
@skdh
and Tim Palmer.
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Decades ago, the noted computational neuroscientist David Marr observed that “trying to understand perception by understanding neurons is like trying to understand a bird’s flight by understanding only feathers.”
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What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics? We don't know. All we can observe is what matter *does*, not what it *is* in itself—the “software” of the universe but not its ultimate “hardware.”
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These days, futurologists are predicting that alien life may be so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t even recognize it
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"The Standard Model may be physicists’ best shot at the structure of fundamental matter, but it leaves them wanting," writes
@skdh
. "Many particle physicists think it is simply too ugly to be nature’s last word."
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Glycolonitrile is one of the key precursors towards adenine formation—adenine being one of the four nucleobases comprising DNA—and it was just detected lurking near a protostar.
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Scientific insights emerge from Dennis Carroll with a sting, whether he’s talking about the biology of viruses or the stagnant response to the outbreak from the White House. He knew coronavirus was coming but isn't callous about it.
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"If you rewind to when Einstein came up with special relativity, you would find people like Lorentz and Minkowski had already written down a lot of the math. But Einstein was the guy who managed to figure out what it was going to feel like."
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"The adult liver—the epitome of efficient organ regeneration—has no stem cells; instead, its differentiated cells can act like stem cells when needed."
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In 1858, Lincoln referred to Euclidean logic in a presidential debate. It's hard to imagine such a thing now.
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It’s striking that water can illustrate and elucidate a martial arts philosophy while also being, to this day, the “least understood material on Earth,” as researchers reported recently.
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