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God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
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Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
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The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a challenge and opportunity beyond imagination.
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Stuart G. Walesh
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So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to be psychologically defended at all costs. We’re trapped in a story that sees ourselves as independent, isolated agents acting in the world. But that self is an illusion. It can be a useful illusion, when you’re swinging through the trees or escaping from a cheetah or trying to do your taxes. But at the systems level, there is no truth to it. You can take any number of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes, vehicles for passing on DNA; that we’re social creatures through and through, unable to survive alone; that we’re organisms in an ecosystem, linked together on this planet floating in the middle of nowhere. Wherever you look, you see that the level of interconnectedness is truly amazing, and yet we insist on thinking of ourselves as individual agents.” Albert Einstein called the modern human’s sense of separateness “a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
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Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
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It took the mind of Albert Einstein, the twentieth century’s most brilliant and influential, to show that we can more accurately describe gravity’s action-at-a-distance as a warp in the fabric of space-time, produced by any combination of matter and energy.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution)
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Some gifted people have all five and some less. Every gifted person tends to lead with one. As I read this list for the first time I was struck by the similarities between Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities and the traits of Sensitive Intuitives. Read the list for yourself and see what you identify with: Psychomotor This manifests as a strong pull toward movement. People with this overexcitability tend to talk rapidly and/or move nervously when they become interested or passionate about something. They have a lot of physical energy and may run their hands through their hair, snap their fingers, pace back and forth, or display other signs of physical agitation when concentrating or thinking something out. They come across as physically intense and can move in an impatient, jerky manner when excited. Other people might find them overwhelming and they’re routinely diagnosed as ADHD. Sensual This overexcitability comes in the form of an extreme sensitivity to sounds, smells, bright lights, textures and temperature. Perfume and scented soaps and lotions are bothersome to people with this overexcitability, and they might also have aversive reactions to strong food smells and cleaning products. For me personally, if I’m watching a movie in which a strobe light effect is used, I’m done. I have to shut my eyes or I’ll come down with a headache after only a few seconds. Loud, jarring or intrusive sounds also short circuit my wiring. Intellectual This is an incessant thirst for knowledge. People with this overexcitability can’t ever learn enough. They zoom in on a few topics of interest and drink up every bit of information on those topics they can find. Their only real goal is learning for learning’s sake. They’re not trying to learn something to make money or get any other external reward. They just happened to have discovered the history of the Ming Dynasty or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and now it’s all they can think about. People with this overexcitability have intellectual interests that are passionate and wide-ranging and they study many areas simultaneously. Imaginative INFJ and INFP writers, this is you. This is ALL you. Making up stories, creating imaginary friends, believing in Santa Claus way past the ordinary age, becoming attached to fairies, elves, monsters and unicorns, these are the trademarks of the gifted child with imaginative overexcitability. These individuals appear dreamy, scattered, lost in their own worlds, and constantly have their heads in the clouds. They also routinely blend fiction with reality. They are practically the definition of the Sensitive Intuitive writer at work. Emotional Gifted individuals with emotional overexcitability are highly empathetic (and empathic, I might add), compassionate, and can become deeply attached to people, animals, and even inanimate objects, in a short period of time. They also have intense emotional reactions to things and might not be able to stomach horror movies or violence on the evening news. They have most likely been told throughout their life that they’re “too sensitive” or that they’re “overreacting” when in truth, they are expressing exactly how they feel to the most accurate degree.
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Lauren Sapala (The INFJ Writer: Cracking the Creative Genius of the World's Rarest Type)
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even aeroplanes and nuclear bombs were invented by ancient sages in the Indian subcontinent long before Confucius or Plato, not to mention Einstein and the Wright brothers. Did you know, for example, that it was Maharishi Bhardwaj who invented rockets and aeroplanes, that Vishwamitra not only invented but also used missiles, that Acharya Kanad was the father of atomic theory, and that the Mahabharata accurately describes nuclear
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Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
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At some very low level, we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature, however conscious some, as against others, may become of the fictive quality of these fictions.
It seems to follow that we shall learn more concerning the sense-making paradigms, relative to time, from experimental psychologists than from scientists or philosophers, and more from St. Augustine than from Kant or Einstein because St. Augustine studies time as the soul's necessary self-extension before and after the critical moment upon which he reflects. We shall learn more from Piaget, from studies of such disorders as déjà vu, eidetic imagery, the Korsakoff syndrome, than from the learned investigators of time's arrow, or, on the other hand, from the mythic archetypes.
Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only when it is organized. It can be shown by experiment that subjects who listen to rhythmic structures such as tick-tock, repeated identically, 'can reproduce the intervals within the structure accurately, but they cannot grasp spontaneously the interval between the rhythmic groups,' that is, between tock and tick, even when this remains constant. The first interval is organized and limited, the second not. According to Paul Fraisse the tock-tick gap is analogous to the role of the 'ground' in spatial perception; each is characterized by a lack of form, against which the illusory organizations of shape and rhythm are perceived in the spatial or temporal object. The fact that we call the second of the two related sounds tock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure. The interval between the two sounds, between tick and tock is now charged with significant duration. The clock's tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the interval between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time of the sort that we need to humanize. Later I shall be asking whether, when tick-tock seems altogether too easily fictional, we do not produce plots containing a good deal of tock-tick; such a plot is that of Ulysses.
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Frank Kermode
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Albert Einstein observed, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.” As we look around us and within us and recognize the problems created as we live and interact within the Personality Ethic, we begin to realize that these are deep, fundamental problems that cannot be solved on the superficial level on which they were created. We need a new level, a deeper level of thinking—a paradigm based on the principles that accurately describe the territory of effective human being and interacting—to solve these deep concerns.
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Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
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So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to be psychologically defended at all costs. We’re trapped in a story that sees ourselves as independent, isolated agents acting in the world. But that self is an illusion. It can be a useful illusion, when you’re swinging through the trees or escaping from a cheetah or trying to do your taxes. But at the systems level, there is no truth to it. You can take any number of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes, vehicles for passing on DNA; that we’re social creatures through and through, unable to survive alone; that we’re organisms in an ecosystem, linked together on this planet floating in the middle of nowhere. Wherever you look, you see that the level of interconnectedness is truly amazing, and yet we insist on thinking of ourselves as individual agents.” Albert Einstein called the modern human’s sense of separateness “a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”*
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Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
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During an individual's immersion in a domain, the locus of flow experiences shifts: what was once too challenging becomes attainable and even pleasurable, while what has long since become attainable no longer proves engaging. Thus, the journeyman musical performer gains flow from the accurate performance of familiar pieces in the repertoire; the youthful master wishes to tackle the most challenging pieces, ones most difficult to execute in a technical sense; the seasoned master may develop highly personal interpretations of familiar pieces, or, alternatively, return to those deceptively simple pieces that may actually prove difficult to execute convincingly and powerfully. Such an analysis helps explain why creative individuals continue to engage in the area of their expertise despite its frustrations, and why so many of them continue to raise the ante, posing ever-greater challenges for themselves, even at the risk of sacrificing the customary rewards.
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Howard Gardner (Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi)
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Peter Galison provides a thought-provoking study of the technological ethos in his book Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps. Clock coordination was in the air at the time. Bern had inaugurated an urban time network of electrically synchronized clocks in 1890, and a decade later, by the time Einstein had arrived, finding ways to make them more accurate and coordinate them with clocks in other cities became a Swiss passion. In addition, Einstein’s chief duty at the patent office, in partnership with Besso, was evaluating electromechanical devices. This included a flood of applications for ways to synchronize clocks by using electric signals. From 1901 to 1904, Galison notes, there were twenty-eight such patents issued in Bern. One of them, for example, was called “Installation with Central Clock for Indicating the Time Simultaneously in Several Places Separated from One Another.” A similar application arrived on April 25, just three weeks before Einstein had his breakthrough conversation with Besso; it involved a clock with an electromagnetically controlled pendulum that could be coordinated with another such clock through an electric signal. What these applications had in common was that they used signals that traveled at the speed of light.
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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If they’re not practicing deliberately, even experts can see their skills backslide. Ericsson shared with me an incredible example of this. Even though you might be inclined to trust the advice of a silver-haired doctor over one fresh out of medical school, it’s been found that in a few fields of medicine, doctors’ skills don’t improve the longer they’ve been practicing. The diagnostic accuracy of professional mammographers, for example, doesn’t get more accurate over the years. Why would that be? For most mammographers, practicing medicine is not deliberate practice, according to Ericsson. It’s more like putting into a tin cup than working with a coach. That’s because mammographers usually only find out if they missed a tumor months or years later, if at all, at which point they’ve probably forgotten the details of the case and can no longer learn from their successes and mistakes. One field of medicine in which this is definitively not the case is surgery. Unlike mammographers, surgeons tend to get better with time. What makes surgeons different from mammographers, according to Ericsson, is that the outcome of most surgeries is usually immediately apparent—the patient either gets better or doesn’t—which means that surgeons are constantly receiving feedback on their performance. They’re always learning what works and what doesn’t, always getting better. This finding leads to a practical application of expertise theory: Ericsson suggests that mammographers regularly be asked to evaluate old cases for which the outcome is already known. That way they can get immediate feedback on their performance.
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Joshua Foer (Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)
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Newton had bequeathed to Einstein a universe in which time had an absolute existence that tick-tocked along independent of objects and observers, and in which space likewise had an absolute existence. Gravity was thought to be a force that masses exerted on one another rather mysteriously across empty space. Within this framework, objects obeyed mechanical laws that had proved remarkably accurate—almost perfect—in explaining everything from the orbits of the planets, to the diffusion of gases, to the jiggling of molecules, to the propagation of sound (though not light) waves. With his special theory of relativity, Einstein had shown that space and time did not have independent existences, but instead formed a fabric of spacetime. Now, with his general version of the theory, this fabric of spacetime became not merely a container for objects and events. Instead, it had its own dynamics that were determined by, and in turn helped to determine, the motion of objects within it—just as the fabric of a trampoline will curve and ripple as a bowling ball and some billiard balls roll across it, and in turn the dynamic curving and rippling of the trampoline fabric will determine the path of the rolling balls and cause the billiard balls to move toward the bowling ball. The curving and rippling fabric of spacetime explained gravity, its equivalence to acceleration, and, Einstein asserted, the general relativity of all forms of motion.92 In the opinion of Paul Dirac, the Nobel laureate pioneer of quantum mechanics, it was “probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made.” Another of the great giants of twentieth-century physics, Max Born, called it “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition and mathematical skill.
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Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
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As someone once said (and no, it wasn’t Einstein), “Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.” Let us never confuse the two.
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Tom Asacker (The Business of Belief: How the World's Best Marketers, Designers, Salespeople, Coaches, Fundraisers, Educators, Entrepreneurs and Other Leaders Get Us to Believe)
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Ludwig Boltzmann had used statistics to explain how heat disperses as atoms and molecules collide. Planck found that only by applying the same statistics to oscillating electrons in the cavity resonator’s walls could he derive an equation that accurately matched what was observed.
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Paul Sen (Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe)
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Spookier still, Bell's theorem has now been proven time after time after time. It took a few years to create lab equipment sensitive enough and accurate enough to make the necessary measurements, and they ultimately used photons rather than electrons for the experiments, but since the 1970s physicists have repeatedly confirmed the theory's predictions in the laboratory. Einstein and company was wrong; the Copenhagen gang was right. We create reality.
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William H. Keith Jr. (The Science of the Craft: Modern Realities in the Ancient Art of Witchcraft)
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Unfortunately, treatment with modern medicine is still under the suppressive dictatorship of Newton’s science. We need a SHIFT!! In the next chapter we’ll review the new physics, namely quantum field theory, and a new paradigm to consider in the health and healing of your body, mind and spirit. The dark ages of allopathic medicine are OVER! It’s time to usher in a new science of energy medicine with PEMF therapy and natural and holistic healing at the forefront. It’s also time to take action and take responsibility for your OWN health. The transition to the new physics is Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. These ideas radically changed the landscape of space/time, as well as matter being merely a form of energy. Keep in mind however that Einstein’s relativity is still a CLASSICAL model with some of the aforementioned flaws. It’s just a much more accurate one! Einstein’s ideas further paved the way for a paradigm shift in physics at the beginning of the 20th century; coupled with the advent of quantum mechanics, for which Einstein was an important contributor with his Nobel Prize winning paper on the photoelectric effect. Newton Under Fire - Special and General Relativity Theory In 1905, Albert Einstein changed the prevailing worldview of Newtonian physics for good with the introduction of his special relativity theory, followed in 1915 by general relativity. He proved Newtonian laws of physics are by no means static, but
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Bryant A. Meyers (PEMF - The Fifth Element of Health: Learn Why Pulsed Electromagnetic Field (PEMF) Therapy Supercharges Your Health Like Nothing Else!)
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Einstein wished to hell that he’d called it the theory of invariance, which is to say, he wished he’d given it a name whose meaning was exactly the opposite of relativity and which, he said, would have been just as accurate.
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Zia Haider Rahman (In the Light of What We Know)
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There are strong reasons for suspecting that the modification of quantum theory that will be needed, if some form of R is to be made into a real physical process, must involve the effects of gravity in a serious way. Some of these reasons have to do with the fact that the very framework of standard quantum theory fits most uncomfortably with the curved-space notions that Einstein's theory of gravity demands. Even such concepts as energy and time-basic to the very procedures of quantum theory-cannot, in a completely general gravitational context, be precisely defined consistently with the normal requirements of standard quantum theory. Recall, also, the light-cone 'tilting' effect (4.4) that is unique the physical phenomenon of gravity. One might expect, accordingly, that some modification of the basic principles of quantum theory might arise as a feature of its (eventual) appropriate union with Einstein's general relativity.
Yet most physicists seem reluctant to accept the possibility that it might be the quantum theory that requires modification for such a union to be successful. Instead, they argue, Einstein's theory itself should be modified. They may point, quite correctly, to the fact that classical general relativity has its own problems, since it leads to space-time singularities, such as are encountered in black holes and the big bang, where curvatures mount to infinity and the very notions of space and time cease to have validity (see ENM, Chapter 7). I do not myself doubt that general relativity must itself be modified when it is appropriately unified with quantum theory. And this will indeed be important for the understanding of what actually takes place in those regions that we presently describe as 'singularities'. But it does not absolve quantum theory from a need for change. We saw in 4.5 taht general relativity is an extraordinarily accurate theory-no less accurate than is quantum theory itself. Most of the physical insights that underlie Einstein's theory will surely survive, not less than will most of those of quantum theory, when the appropriate union that moulds these two great theories together is finally found.
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Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
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However, in other circumstances, such as with PSR 1913 + 16, the situation is very different, and gravitational radiation from the system indeed has a significant role to play. Here, Einstein's theory provides a firm prediction of the detailed nature of the gravitational radiation that the system ought to be emitting, and of the energy that should be carried away. This loss of energy should result in a slow spiralling inwards of the two neutron stars, and a corresponding speeding up of their orbital rotation period. Joseph Taylor and Russell Hulse first observed this binary pulsar at the enormous Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974. Since that time, the rotation period has been closely monitored by Taylor and his colleagues, and the speed-up is in precise agreement with the expectations of general relativity (cf. Fig. 4.11). For this work, Hulse and Taylor were awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics. In fact, as the years have rolled by, the accumulation of data from this system has provided a stronger and stronger confirmation of Einstein's theory. Indeed, if we now take the system as a whole and compare it with the behaviour that is computed from Einstein's theory as a whole-from the Newtonian aspects of the orbits, through the corrections to these orbits from standard general relativity effects, right up to the effects on the orbits due to loss of energy in gravitational radiation-we find that the theory is confirmed overall to an error of no more than about 10^-14. This makes Einstein's general relativity, in this particular sense, the most accurately tested theory known to science!
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Roger Penrose (Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness)
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The pulsar is like a lighthouse beam spinning at high speed. Every time it comes around to face us we see a flash. Its rotation can be very accurately monitored by timing observations of its periodic pulses. Twenty years of observations have shown that the pulsing of the binary pulsar is slowing at exactly the rate predicted if the system is losing energy by radiating gravitational waves at the rate predicted by Einstein's theory.
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John D. Barrow (The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe)
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Groups with diverse backgrounds and skills are usually far superior to any single expert in evaluating solutions. Each person’s strengths, weaknesses, and biases average out into opinions that are surprisingly accurate.
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Scott Thorpe (How to Think Like Einstein: Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius)
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If different physics is ‘all’ you want, you can look (say) to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, in which motion and gravity slow time and bend space. That’s not easy to imagine, but I reckon you can do it. You just need to imagine time passing more slowly, distances contracting: distortions of your grid references. You can put those ideas into words. In quantum theory, words are blunt tools. We give names to things and processes, but those are just labels for concepts that cannot be properly, accurately expressed in any terms but their own.
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Philip Ball (Beyond Weird)