This Explains Everything

150 Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works

John Brockman

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780062230171
• eBook ISBN: 9780062230188
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History of Art
• Index: Psychology

Drawn from the cutting-edge frontiers of science, This Explains Everything will revolutionize your understanding of the world.

What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation? This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org ("The world's smartest website"—The Guardian), posed to the world's most influential minds. Flowing from the horizons of physics, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and more, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most surprising and brilliant theories of the way of our minds, societies, and universe work.

Jared Diamond on biological electricity • Nassim Nicholas Taleb on positive stress • Steven Pinker on the deep genetic roots of human conflict • Richard Dawkins on pattern recognition • Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on simplicity • Lisa Randall on the Higgs mechanism • BRIAN Eno on the limits of intuition • Richard Thaler on the power of commitment • V. S. Ramachandran on the "neural code" of consciousness • Nobel Prize winner ERIC KANDEL on the power of psychotherapy • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on "Lord Acton's Dictum" • Lawrence M. Krauss on the unification of electricity and magnetism • plus contributions by Martin J. Rees • Kevin Kelly • Clay Shirky • Daniel C. Dennett • Sherry Turkle • Philip Zimbardo • Lee Smolin • Rebecca Newberger Goldstein • Seth Lloyd • Stewart Brand • George Dyson • Matt Ridley

INDEX

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

absurdity, 9–12

Acton, Lord, 376

Adams, Douglas, 384

adaptation, 6–7, 43, 122–24, 157–58

adolescence, 320–23

aging process, 181

alcohol, 352, 353

Alexander, Richard, 43

Alfvén waves, 70

altruism, 44

amphetamines, 329

amputation, 57

amygdala, 92, 266, 300

animation, 269–70

ant colonies, 97–98

anticipatory salivation, 324–27

antifragility, 350

apathy, 283–84

apparent motion, 269–72

Aristotle, 13–14, 22, 178, 198–200, 218, 259, 261, 305, 356

Arrhenius, Svante, 247–48

arthropods, 163–65

artificial intelligence, 93, 94–95, 122–23

art-music connections, 227–29

athletic contests, 47–49

Atiyah, Michael, 145

atomic theory, 31–32, 84, 196–200

attention, 92

Attneave, Fred, 6

attraction, 98

auditory cortex, 97

autism, 301

Avery, Oswald, 88

Axelrod, Robert, 104–5

Bacon, Roger, 305

Bakker, Robert, 202

Barlow, Horace, 5–8

Baudrillard, Jean, 315–16

Baxter, Lewis, 295

Bayes, Thomas, 57

Bayes’ Law, 372–75

beauty, 25–27, 30–33, 36–37, 37, 38–39, 106

Beck, Aaron, 292–95

bees, 328

behaviorism, 22, 106–7, 324–27

belief desire psychology, 121

Bell Laboratories, 170, 171

Bem, Daryl, 354–55

Berkeley, George, 215

Bernstein, Julius, 389–90

Big Bang, 59, 66, 70, 71–74, 240

birds, 157, 158, 183, 201–3

Bishop, Bill, 50–51

black holes, 78, 143, 197

black markets, 353

blank slate, 182

Blech, Ilan, 32

Bode, Johann, 75

Bohr, Niels, 81, 259–60

Boltzmann, Ludwig, 19–21, 61–62

Bonner, John Tyler, 172–73

Born, Max, 80

Boscovich, Roger, 198–99

bounded rationality, 94–95

Bourke, Andrew, 155

brain

fetal testosterone, 265–68

hemispheres, 92–93

language acquisition, 99–101

modular mind theory, 106–7, 108–11

orderly map, 91–93

brain imaging, 343–44

Brooks, Frederick, 225–26

Brownian motion, 372–73

Buddhism, 175–76

Bush, Vannevar, 170

Cage, John, 227–29

Cahn, John, 32

Cameron, David, 333

Campbell, Fergus, 204

Cantor, Georg, 234–35, 365

causation, 13–14, 149–51

cell division, 71–74, 153–55

chance, 356–58, 377–80

Chang, Edward, 217

change, sensory adaptation to, 6–7

Charlier, Carl Vilhelm Ludvig, 70

China, 250, 313

chordates, 163–65

Christiansen, Morten, 395

chromosomes, 87–88

claustrum, 89–90

climate change, 247–51

cocaine, 102–3, 329

cognition, perception in, 57–58

cognitive behavioral therapy, 292–95

cognitive revolution, 215–17

cognitivism, 15–16

Cohn, Martin J., 268

coincidence, 287–88

Coleman, Sidney, 230

Collingridge dilemma, 255

commitment, 102–3

compact disk, 171

competition, 1–2, 9–12, 42, 44–45, 241, 243

complexity theory, 35–37, 59–60, 176, 183, 239–41, 273–75, 29...

Table of contents

• Contents
• PREFACE: The Edge Question, by John Brockman
• Evolution by Means of Natural Selection
• Life Is a Digital Code
• Redundancy Reduction and Pattern Recognition
• The Power of Absurdity
• How Apparent Finality Can Emerge
• The Overdue Demise of Monogamy
• Boltzmann’s Explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
• The Dark Matter of the Mind
• “There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth . . . Than Are Dreamt of in Your Philosophy.”
• An Unresolved (and Therefore Unbeautiful) Reaction to the Edge Question
• Ptolemy’s Universe
• Quasi-Elegance
• Mathematical Object or Natural Object?
• Simplicity
• Simplicity Itself
• Einstein Explains Why Gravity Is Universal
• Evolutionary Genetics and the Conflicts of Human Social Life
• The Faurie-Raymond Hypothesis
• Group Polarization
• The Price Equation
• Unconscious Inferences
• Snowflakes and the Multiverse
• Einstein’s Photons
• Go Small
• Why Is Our World Comprehensible?
• Alfvén’s Cosmos
• Our Universe Grew Like a Baby
• Kepler et al. and the Nonexistent Problem
• How Incompatible Worldviews Can Coexist
• Impossible Inexactness
• The Next Level of Fundamental Matter?
• Observers Observing
• Genes, Claustrum, and Consciousness
• Overlapping Solutions
• Our Bounded Rationality
• Swarm Intelligence
• Language and Natural Selection
• Commitment
• Tit for Tat
• True or False: Beauty Is Truth
• Eratosthenes and the Modular Mind
• Dan Sperber’s Explanation of Culture
• Metarepresentations Explain Human Uniqueness
• Why the Human Mind May Seem to Have an Elegant Explanation Even If It Doesn’t
• Fitness Landscapes
• On Oceans and Airport Security
• Plate Tectonics Elegantly Validates Continental Drift
• Why Some Sea Turtles Migrate
• A Hot Young Earth: Unquestionably Beautiful and Stunningly Wrong
• Sexual-Conflict Theory
• The Seeds of Historical Dominance
• The Importance of Individuals
• Subjective Environment
• My Favorite Annoying Elegant Explanation: Quantum Theory
• Einstein’s Revenge: The New Geometric Quantum
• What Time Is It?
• Realism and Other Metaphysical Half-Truths
• All We Need Is Help
• In the Beginning Is the Theory
• Thompson on Development
• How Do You Get from a Lobster to a Cat?
• Germs Cause Disease
• Dirt Is Matter Out of Place
• Information Is the Resolution of Uncertainty
• Everything Is the Way It Is Because It Got That Way
• The Idea of Emergence
• Frames of Reference
• Epigenetics—the Missing Link
• Flocking Behavior in Birds
• Lemons Are Fast
• Falling into Place: Entropy and the Desperate Ingenuity of Life
• Why Things Happen
• Why We Feel Pressed for Time
• Why the Sun Still Shines
• Boscovich’s Explanation of Atomic Forces
• Birds Are the Direct Descendants of Dinosaurs
• Complexity Out of Simplicity
• Russell’s Theory of Descriptions
• Feynman’s Lifeguard
• The Limits of Intuition
• The Higgs Mechanism
• The Mind Thinks in Embodied Metaphors
• Metaphors Are in the Mind
• The Pigeonhole Principle
• Why Programs Have Bugs
• Cagepatterns
• The True Rotational Symmetry of Space
• The Pigeonhole Principle Revisited
• Moore’s Law
• Cosmic Complexity
• The Gaia Hypothesis
• The Continuity Equations
• Pascal’s Wager
• Evolutionarily Stable Strategies
• The Collingridge Dilemma
• Trusting Trust
• It Just Is?
• Subverting Biology
• Sex at Your Fingertips
• Why Do Movies Move?
• Would You Like Blue Cheese with It?
• Mother Nature’s Laws
• The Oklo Pyramid
• Kitty Genovese and Group Apathy
• The Wizard of I
• One Coincidence; Two Déjà Vus
• Occam’s Razor
• Deep Time
• Placing Psychotherapy on a Scientific Basis: Five Easy Lessons
• Transitional Objects
• Natural Selection Is Simple but the Systems It Shapes Are Unimaginably Complex
• How to Have a Good Idea
• Out of the Mouths of Babes
• The Beauty in a Sunrise
• The Origin of Money
• The Precession of the Simulacra
• Time Perspective Theory
• Developmental Timing Explains the Woes of Adolescence
• Implications of Ivan Pavlov’s Great Discovery
• Nature Is Cleverer Than We Are
• Imposing Randomness
• The Unification of Electricity and Magnetism
• Furry Rubber Bands
• The Principle of Inertia
• Seeing Is Believing: From Placebos to Movies in Our Brain
• The Discontinuity of Science and Culture
• Hormesis Is Redundancy
• The Beautiful Law of Unintended Consequences
• We Are What We Do
• Personality Differences: The Importance of Chance
• Metabolic Syndrome: Cell Energy Adaptations in a Toxic World?
• Death Is the Final Repayment
• Denumerable Infinities and Mental States
• Inverse Power Laws
• How the Leopard Got His Spots
• The Universal Algorithm for Human Decision Making
• Lord Acton’s Dilemma
• Fact, Fiction, and Our Probabilitic World
• Elegant = Complex
• Tinbergen’s Questions
• The Universal Turing Machine
• A Matter of Poetics
• The Origins of Biological Electricity
• Why the Greeks Painted Red People on Black Pots
• Language As an Adaptive System
• The Mechanism of Mediocrity
• The Principle of Empiricism, or See for Yourself
• We Are Stardust
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• An Excerpt from The Last Unknowns
• About the Author
• Books by John Brockman
• Back Ads
• Copyright
• About the Publisher