Nobel Prize Winners Quotes

Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots

Nobel Prize winner Arthur Schawlow invented the laser in 1957 and, sure, lasers were used in the lunar landing and they have medical and military purposes, but I think we can all agree that their best application is laser pointers and laser tag.

Do not compare yourself with anybody. Compare yourself with yourself, for yourself and by yourself. We are all uniquely pottered and purposed by our creator!

There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down. She turned to me and said, "Oh! You're one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?" "In physics," I said. "Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can't talk about it." "On the contrary," I answered. "It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance--gold transfers we can't talk about, because those are understood--so it's the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about!" I don't know how they do it. There's a way of forming ice on the surface of the face, and she did it!

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. —Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner

A Nobel Prize winner was asked how he became a scientist. He said that every day after school, his mother would ask him not what he learned but whether he asked a good question today. That, he said, was how he became a scientist.

George W. Bush in Washington decided that Nobel Peace Prize winner and ex-president Nelson Mandela could probably be taken off the U.S. list of terrorists).

As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, no pop idol, no Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video. “Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,” Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp survivors to Washington, told me. “North Koreans have no one like that.

According to the pioneering work of Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow, technological innovation is the ultimate source of productivity and growth.22 It’s the only proven way for economies to consistently get ahead—especially innovation born by start-up companies.

Sick people grew to resent well people, and sometimes that was true of husbands and wives, or even of mothers and their children. Both

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. —André Gide; French author, Nobel Prize winner, fearless self-explorer

Nobel Prize winner Ivar Giaever reminds us that “in pseudoscience you begin with a hypothesis which is very appealing to you, and then you only look for things which confirm the hypothesis”.

Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love. … The smaller the thing, the greater must be our love.

Never “for the sake of peace and quiet” deny your own experience or convictions. —Dag Statesman and Nobel Peace Prize Winner

The whole world ends up in London somehow,

Literary award judges have the power to select a prize winner, granting them fame and potentially turning their book into a bestseller. However, determining the best book of the year remains a subjective endeavor. It is not surprising, then, that different panels consistently choose different winners from the same pool of submissions.

But a progressive policy needs more than just a bigger break with the economic and moral assumptions of the past 30 years. It needs a return to the conviction that economic growth and the affluence it brings is a means and not an end. The end is what it does to the lives, life-chances and hopes of people. Look at London. Of course it matters to all of us that London's economy flourishes. But the test of the enormous wealth generated in patches of the capital is not that it contributed 20%-30% to Britain's GDP but how it affects the lives of the millions who live and work there. What kind of lives are available to them? Can they afford to live there? If they can't, it is not compensation that London is also a paradise for the ultra-rich. Can they get decently paid jobs or jobs at all? If they can't, don't brag about all those Michelin-starred restaurants and their self-dramatising chefs. Or schooling for children? Inadequate schools are not offset by the fact that London universities could field a football team of Nobel prize winners.

Some have speculated that the way [Albert] Camus died made his theories on absurdity a self-fulfilling prophecy. Others would say it was the triumphant meaningful way he lived that allowed him to rise heroically above absurdity.

On my desk is an appeal from the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. It asks me to become a sponsor and donor of this soon-to-be-opened institution, while an accompanying leaflet has enticing photographs of Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Sandy Koufax, Irving Berlin, Estee Lauder, Barbra Streisand, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. There is something faintly kitsch about this, as there is in the habit of those Jewish papers that annually list Jewish prize-winners from the Nobel to the Oscars. (It is apparently true that the London Jewish Chronicle once reported the result of a footrace under the headline 'Goldstein Fifteenth.') However, I think I may send a contribution. Other small 'races' have come from unpromising and hazardous beginnings to achieve great things—no Roman would have believed that the brutish inhabitants of the British Isles could ever amount to much—and other small 'races,' too, like Gypsies and Armenians, have outlived determined attempts to eradicate and exterminate them. But there is something about the persistence, both of the Jews and their persecutors, that does seem to merit a museum of its own.

Takav je običaj, ljudi govore stvari bez razmišljanja, ne štede reči pa šta bude, i ne pada im na pamet da se zaustave i razmisle o posledicama.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. —NIELS BOHR, Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner

It’s better than anything either Laxness or Thórberger Thordarson write. We might be talking about a new Nobel Prize winner, Hekla.” “Has he had anything published?” “Not yet.

If you cannot explain something in simple terms, then you don’t understand it.” - Dr. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics

trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record.

Never interrupt a librarian mid-thought!” Ms. Bakadet had said. “She could be on the verge of locating a long-lost book that the next Nobel Prize winner needs to complete their master work!

Thoughts thoughts. Are they not mine? I think, I write, I type. Thoughts. Are they wise? Let truth be told in words, compiled together, create a page, a book. Thoughts. Are they master piece? Is it a prize winner?...An Alfred Nobel? Thoughts. Are they not mine? Gift of God? they are not mine.

Yasunari Kawabata, the Japanese Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1968, committed suicide in 1971. Two years earlier, in 1969, another great Japanese novelist, Yukio Mishima, ended his life in the same way. Since 1895 ,thirteen Japanese novelists and writers have committed suicide, including the author of the Rashomon, Ryunosuko Akutagawa, in 1927. That "continuous tragedy" of Japanese culture during 70 years coincides with the penetration of Western civilization and materialistic ideas into the traditional culture of Japan. Whatever it be, for the poets and the writers of tragedies, civilization will always have an inhuman face and be a threat to humanity. A year before his death, Kawabata wrote "men are separated from each other by a concrete wall that obstructs any circulation of love. Nature is smothered in the name of progress." In the novel The Snow Country, published in 1937 , Kawabata places man's loneliness and alienation in the modern world at the very focus of his reflections.

it is embarrassing for Coca-Cola to be located in a city that refuses to honor its Nobel Prize winner. We are an international business. The Coca-Cola Company does not need Atlanta. You all need to decide whether Atlanta needs the Coca-Cola Company.

There’s a wonderful story about a Nobel Prize winner…He was asked by some corporation to talk about time planning. He gets up in front of the group with a glass jar, and he says, “All I can tell you about time planning, I can show you in two minutes.” Then he takes out a bunch of big stones and puts them into the jar, filling it up to the top, then he takes out a pocketful of tiny stones and puts them in, then he pours some sand in, and then finally he pours some water into the jar—and that’s how it all fits.

I once interviewed Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics and a noted baseball enthusiast. I asked if it bothered him that he received less money for winning the Nobel Prize than Roger Clemens, who was pitching for the Red Sox at the time, earned in a single season. “No,” Solow said. “There are a lot of good economists, but there is only one Roger Clemens.” That is how economists think.

Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.

As far back as 1992, the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that humanity faced a stark choice between spending its resources on war and violence, or on preventing catastrophic environmental damage. The report was signed by 1,700 scientists, including the majority of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences.17 In 2017 the warning was reissued, and this time it was signed by more than 15,000 scientists: it concluded that the state of the world was even worse than before. The first UCS report attracted a good deal of attention; the second one passed almost unnoticed.

Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community. Then they were quickly silenced, but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.’ UMBERTO ECO

In a recent study comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study. But the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved in the arts than less accomplished scientists. Here’s

No,’ I said, ‘nothing like that. Just a lot of bits and pieces to sort out, bits of life.

professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even

But yes, you can imagine, you must try. Nothing stands between us and atrocities but words, so there is no choice but to try and imagine.

The world changed with her first sip. She felt mischievous, joyful, capable of anything, and beautified by the sacred mixture of music and gin.

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and microfinance pioneer, says, “All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed… finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became ‘labor’ because they stamped us, ‘You are labor.’ We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.

The students had, for example, a special ceremony in which they granted each Nobel-Prize-winner the special “Order of the Frog.” When you get this little frog, you have to make a frog noise.

Erwin Schrödinger, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933, summed up the basis of life: “What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy” (negative entropy or negentropy = free energy).

Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.

At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. “To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down,” writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.

At the risk of stating the obvious, it is literary works that last, not literary prizes. I doubt many can tell you who won the Akutagawa Prize two years ago, or the Nobel Prize winner three years back. Can you? Truly great works that have stood the test of time, on the other hand, are lodged in our memory forever. Was Ernest Hemingway a Nobel Prize winner? (He was.) How about Jorge Luis Borges? (Was he? Who gives a damn?) A literary prize can turn the spotlight on a particular work, but it can’t breathe life into it. It’s that simple.

College was an extension of the Nazi propaganda system that had engulfed Franka and her friends in high school. Intellectuals were on the same level as Jews and merited the same treatment. Hundreds of professors across Germany were dismissed for being too liberal, or Jewish. Among them were some of the greatest scholars in the country, and several Nobel Prize winners. “Culture” became a dirty word. The universities were transformed into vessels for the Propaganda Ministry. There were no student activities save for the Nazi-sponsored rallies and pep talks declaring the greatness of the regime.

Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the right conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.’ Arno Penzias, Physics Nobel Prize-winner

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest? How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world’s farmland to organic farming, we’d need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today. Combined, we’d need to chop down roughly half of the world’s remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today. That’s not a viable path.

There was a Princess Somebody of Denmark sitting at a table with a number of people around her, and I saw an empty chair at their table and sat down. She turned to me and said, “Oh! You’re one of the Nobel-Prize-winners. In what field did you do your work?” “In physics,” I said. “Oh. Well, nobody knows anything about that, so I guess we can’t talk about it.

One of the Project’s more enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic, and inspirational characters, Ernest Lawrence found it impossible to believe what the District Engineer was saying: Those high school girls they had pulled from rural Tennessee to operate his calutrons in Y-12 were doing it better than his own team of scientists. In Berkeley, only PhDs had been allowed to operate the panels controlling the electromagnetic separation units. When Tennessee Eastman suggested turning over the operation of Lawrence’s calutrons to a bunch of young women fresh off the farm with nothing more than a public school education, the Nobel Prize winner was skeptical. But it was decided Lawrence’s team would work out the kinks for the calutron units and then pass control to the female operators.

They're not just looking to be offended. They are hunting for opportunities to vilify people. These opportunistic attacks are impossible to anticipate because in many cases the target doesn't even know the SJW who complained to Human Resources or contacted the media, and even in the case of a public accusation on Twitter or a blog, he probably won't be aware of the attack until it has already blown up on social media because he doesn't follow his accuser. Sir Tim Hunt had probably made similar jokes about female scientists in laboratories before, but he had not made them in front of a status-seeking SJW like Connie St. Louis. Sensing an opportunity to make a name for herself by vilifying a Nobel Prize winner, she struck, and in doing so promptly put herself in front of the charge.

To understand the fundamental benefits of an immigrant population, imagine that you could divide the population into two groups: one consisting on the average of the youngest, healthiest, boldest, most risk-tolerant, most hard-working, ambitious, and innovative people; the other consisting of everyone else. Transplant the first group to another country, and leave the second group in their country of origin. That selective transplanting approximates the decision to emigrate and its successful accomplishment. Hence it comes as no surprise that more than one-third of American Nobel Prize winners are foreign-born, and over half are either immigrants themselves or else the children of immigrants. That's because Nobel Prize-winning research demands those same qualities of boldness, risk-tolerance, hard work, ambition, and innovativeness.

It was so odd seeing a stage full of black women tonight, all of the as dark or darker than her, a first, although rather than feel validated, she felt slightly embarrassed. If only the play was about the first black woman prime minister of Britain, or a Nobel prize-winner for science, or a self-made billionaire, someone who represented legitimate success at the highest levels, instead of lesbian warriors strutting around and falling for each other.

All the other passions were in me before; but they were idle and aimless—mere childish greedinesses and cruelties, curiosities and fancies, habits and superstitions, grotesque and ridiculous to the mature intelligence. When they suddenly began to shine like newly lit flames it was by no light of their own, but by the radiance of the dawning moral passion. That passion dignified them, gave them conscience and meaning, found them a mob of appetites and organized them into an army of purposes and principles. My soul was born of that passion. ANN.

She told me some of the problems they had had this particular year. One of them was, where should the Russian ambassador sit? The problem always is, at dinners like this, who sits nearer to the king. The Prize-winners normally sit closer to the king than the diplomatic corps does. And the order in which the diplomats sit is determined according to the length of time they have been in Sweden. Now at that time, the United States ambassador had been in Sweden longer than the Russian ambassador. But that year, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Mr. Sholokhov, a Russian, and the Russian ambassador wanted to be Mr. Sholokhov’s translator—and therefore to sit next to him. So the problem was how to let the Russian ambassador sit closer to the king without offending the United States ambassador and the rest of the diplomatic corps. She said, “You should have seen what a fuss they went through—letters back and forth, telephone calls, and so on—before I ever got permission to have the ambassador sit next to Mr. Sholokhov. It was finally agreed that the ambassador wouldn’t officially represent the embassy of the Soviet Union that evening; rather, he was to be only the translator for Mr. Sholokhov.

Where is Florence’s imagination? He identified the most common and most functional uses for bricks and blankets and simply stopped. Florence’s IQ is higher than Poole’s. But that means little, since both students are above the threshold. What is more interesting is that Poole’s mind can leap from violent imagery to sex to people jumping out of buildings without missing a beat, and Florence’s mind can’t. Now which of these two students do you think is better suited to do the kind of brilliant, imaginative work that wins Nobel Prizes? That’s the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard, because Harvard isn’t selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the “uses of a brick” test—and maybe “uses of a brick” is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability. It’s also the second reason Michigan Law School couldn’t find a difference between its affirmative action graduates and the rest of its alumni. Being a successful lawyer is about a lot more than IQ. It involves having the kind of fertile mind that Poole had. And just because Michigan’s minority students have lower scores on convergence tests doesn’t mean they don’t have that other critical trait in abundance.

social power is power over—the capacity to control others’ states and behaviors. Personal power is power to—the ability to control our own states and behaviors. This is the kind of power Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was referring to when he wrote, “Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.” Ideally, we want both kinds of power, but, as Wiesel suggests, personal power—the state of being in command of our most precious and authentic inner resources—is uniquely essential. Unless and until we feel personally powerful, we cannot achieve presence, and all the social power in the world won’t compensate for its absence.

Very strange, very wonderful, seemingly very improbable phenomena may yet appear which, when once established, will not astonish us more than we are now astonished at all that science has taught us during the last century,” Charles Robert Richet, Nobel Prize winner in physiology, has declared. “It is assumed that the phenomena which we now accept without surprise, do not excite our astonishment because they are understood. But this is not the case. If they do not surprise us, it is not because they are understood, it is because they are familiar; for if that which is not understood ought to surprise us, we should be surprised at everything—the fall of a stone thrown into the air, the acorn which becomes an oak, mercury which expands when it is heated, iron attracted by a magnet, phosphorus which burns when it is rubbed… The science of today is a light matter; the revolutions and evolutions which it will experience in a hundred thousand years will far exceed the most daring anticipations. The truths—those surprising, amazing, unforeseen truths—which our descendants will discover, are even now all around us, staring us in the eyes, so to speak, and yet we do not see them. But it is not enough to say that we do not see them; we do not wish to see them; for as soon as an unexpected and unfamiliar fact appears, we try to fit it into the framework of the commonplaces of acquired knowledge and we are indignant that anyone should dare to experiment further.

James Tour is a leading origin-of-life researcher with over 630 research publications and over 120 patents. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters in 2014, and named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine. Here is how he recently described the state of the field: We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex biological system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those that say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis. Those that say, “Oh this is well worked out,” they know nothing—nothing—about chemical synthesis—nothing. … From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system. That’s how clueless we are. I have asked all of my colleagues—National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners—I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, if your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they’re talking about.23

If water is bombarded with intense sound waves, under the right conditions, then air bubbles can form which quickly contract and then suddenly disappear in a flash of light. The conventional explanation of what is being seen here is that a shock wave, a little sonic boom, is created inside the bubble, which dumps its energy, causing the interior to be quickly heated to flash point. But a more dramatic possibility, first suggested by the Nobel prize-winner Julian Schwinger, has been entertained. Suppose the surface of the bubble is acting like a Casimir plate so that, as the bubble shrinks, it excludes more and more wavelengths of the zero point fluctuations from existing within it. They can't simply disappear into nothing; energy must be conserved, so they deposit their energy into light. At present, experimenters are still unconvinced that this is what is really happening, but it is remarkable that so fundamental a question about a highly visible phenomena is still unresolved.

Present at the first, in October 1927, were the three grand masters who had helped launch the new era of physics but were now skeptical of the weird realm of quantum mechanics it had spawned: Hendrik Lorentz, 74, just a few months from death, the winner of the Nobel for his work on electromagnetic radiation; Max Planck, 69, winner of the Nobel for his theory of the quantum; and Albert Einstein, 48, winner of the Nobel for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect. Of the remaining twenty-six attendees, more than half had won or would win Nobel Prizes as well. The boy wonders of the new quantum mechanics were all there, hoping to convert or conquer Einstein: Werner Heisenberg, 25; Paul Dirac, 25; Wolfgang Pauli, 27; Louis de Broglie, 35; and from America, Arthur Compton, 35. Also there was Erwin Schrödinger, 40, caught between the young Turks and the older skeptics. And, of course, there was the old Turk, Niels Bohr, 42, who had helped spawn quantum mechanics with his model of the atom and become the staunch defender of its counterintuitive ramifications.

The Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel had lived only for God during his childhood in Hungary; his life had been shaped by the disciplines of the Talmud, and he had hoped one day to be initiated into the mysteries of Kabbalah. As a boy, he was taken to Auschwitz and later to Buchenwald. During his first night in the death camp, watching the black smoke coiling to the sky from the crematorium where the bodies of his mother and sister were to be thrown, he knew that the flames had consumed his faith forever. He was in a world which was the objective correlative of the Godless world imagined by Nietzsche. “Never should I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live,” he wrote years later. “Never shall I forget these moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust.”33 One day the Gestapo hanged a child. Even the SS were disturbed by the prospect of hanging a young boy in front of thousands of spectators. The child who, Wiesel recalled, had the face of a “sad-eyed angel,” was silent, lividly pale and almost calm as he ascended the gallows. Behind Wiesel, one of the other prisoners asked: “Where is God? Where is He?” It took the child half an hour to die, while the prisoners were forced to look him in the face. The same man asked again: “Where is God now?” And Wiesel heard a voice within him make this answer: “Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.”34 Dostoevsky had said that the death of a single child could make God unacceptable, but even he, no stranger to inhumanity, had not imagined the death of a child in such circumstances. The horror of Auschwitz is a stark challenge to many of the more conventional ideas of God. The remote God of the philosophers, lost in a transcendent apatheia, becomes intolerable. Many Jews can no longer subscribe to the biblical idea of God who manifests himself in history, who, they say with Wiesel, died in Auschwitz. The idea of a personal God, like one of us writ large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster. Jews are not the only people who believe that the Holocaust put an end to conventional theology.

The quality of our thinking is largely influenced by the mental models in our heads. While we want accurate models, we also want a wide variety of models to uncover what’s really happening. The key here is variety. Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinary mindset that we need to accurately see a problem. And because we don’t have the right models to understand the situation, we overuse the models we do have and use them even when they don’t belong. You’ve likely experienced this first hand. An engineer will often think in terms of systems by default. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A business person might think in terms of opportunity cost and risk-reward. Through their disciplines, each of these people sees part of the situation, the part of the world that makes sense to them. None of them, however, see the entire situation unless they are thinking in a multidisciplinary way. In short, they have blind spots. Big blind spots. And they’re not aware of their blind spots. [...] Relying on only a few models is like having a 400-horsepower brain that’s only generating 50 horsepower of output. To increase your mental efficiency and reach your 400-horsepower potential, you need to use a latticework of mental models. Exactly the same sort of pattern that graces backyards everywhere, a lattice is a series of points that connect to and reinforce each other. The Great Models can be understood in the same way—models influence and interact with each other to create a structure that can be used to evaluate and understand ideas. [...] Without a latticework of the Great Models our decisions become harder, slower, and less creative. But by using a mental models approach, we can complement our specializations by being curious about how the rest of the world works. A quick glance at the Nobel Prize winners list show that many of them, obviously extreme specialists in something, had multidisciplinary interests that supported their achievements. [...] The more high-quality mental models you have in your mental toolbox, the more likely you will have the ones needed to understand the problem. And understanding is everything. The better you understand, the better the potential actions you can take. The better the potential actions, the fewer problems you’ll encounter down the road. Better models make better decisions.

Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned

NOBEL PRIZE–WINNER, British poet laureate, essayist, novelist, journalist, and short story writer Rudyard Kipling wrote for both children and adults, with many of his stories and poems focusing on British imperialism in India. His works were popular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though many deemed his political views too conservative. Born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, Kipling had a happy early childhood, but in 1871 he and his sister were sent to a boarding house called Lorne Lodge in Southsea, where he spent many disappointing years. He was accepted in 1877 to United Services College in the west of England. In 1882, he returned to his family in India, working as a journalist, associate editor, and correspondent for many publications, including Civil and Military Gazette, a publication in Lahore, Pakistan. He also wrote poetry. He found great success in writing after his 1889 return to England, where he was eventually appointed poet laureate. Some of his most famous writings, including The Jungle Book, Kim, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies, saw publication in the 1890s and 1900s. It was during this period that he married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend and publishing colleague. The couple settled in Vermont, where their two daughters were born. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law and grumblings from his American neighbors about his controversial political views, Kipling and his family returned to England. There, Caroline gave birth to a son in 1896. Tragically, their eldest daughter died in 1899. Later, Kipling’s son perished in battle during World War I. In 1907 Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died on January 18, 1936, and his ashes are buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Growth was so rapid that it took in generations of Westerners, not just Lincoln Steffens. It took in the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States. It even took in the Soviet Union’s own leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev, who famously boasted in a speech to Western diplomats in 1956 that “we will bury you [the West].” As late as 1977, a leading academic textbook by an English economist argued that Soviet-style economies were superior to capitalist ones in terms of economic growth, providing full employment and price stability and even in producing people with altruistic motivation. Poor old Western capitalism did better only at providing political freedom. Indeed, the most widely used university textbook in economics, written by Nobel Prize–winner Paul Samuelson, repeatedly predicted the coming economic dominance of the Soviet Union. In the 1961 edition, Samuelson predicted that Soviet national income would overtake that of the United States possibly by 1984, but probably by 1997. In the 1980 edition there was little change in the analysis, though the two dates were delayed to 2002 and 2012. Though the policies of Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders could produce rapid economic growth, they could not do so in a sustained way. By the 1970s, economic growth had all but stopped. The most important lesson is that extractive institutions cannot generate sustained technological change for two reasons: the lack of economic incentives and resistance by the elites. In addition, once all the very inefficiently used resources had been reallocated to industry, there were few economic gains to be had by fiat. Then the Soviet system hit a roadblock, with lack of innovation and poor economic incentives preventing any further progress. The only area in which the Soviets did manage to sustain some innovation was through enormous efforts in military and aerospace technology. As a result they managed to put the first dog, Leika, and the first man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. They also left the world the AK-47 as one of their legacies. Gosplan was the supposedly all-powerful planning agency in charge of the central planning of the Soviet economy. One of the benefits of the sequence of five-year plans written and administered by Gosplan was supposed to have been the long time horizon necessary for rational investment and innovation. In reality, what got implemented in Soviet industry had little to do with the five-year plans, which were frequently revised and rewritten or simply ignored. The development of industry took place on the basis of commands by Stalin and the Politburo, who changed their minds frequently and often completely revised their previous decisions. All plans were labeled “draft” or “preliminary.” Only one copy of a plan labeled “final”—that for light industry in 1939—has ever come to light. Stalin himself said in 1937 that “only bureaucrats can think that planning work ends with the creation of the plan. The creation of the plan is just the beginning. The real direction of the plan develops only after the putting together of the plan.” Stalin wanted to maximize his discretion to reward people or groups who were politically loyal, and punish those who were not. As for Gosplan, its main role was to provide Stalin with information so he could better monitor his friends and enemies. It actually tried to avoid making decisions. If you made a decision that turned out badly, you might get shot. Better to avoid all responsibility. An example of what could happen

It is not our level of prosperity that makes for happiness but the kinship of heart to heart and the way we look at the world. Both attitudes lie within our power, so that a man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and no one can stop him.

Arthur H. Compton “Science is the glimpse of God’s purpose in nature. The very existence of the amazing world of the atom and radiation points to a purposeful creation, to the idea that there is a God and an intelligent purpose back of everything . . . An orderly universe testifies to the greatest statement ever uttered: ‘In the beginning, God . . .’ ” Arthur H. Compton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics

That's the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard, because Harvard isn't selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the "uses of a brick" test—and maybe "uses of a brick" is a better predictor of Nobel Prize ability.

Then Jerome Friedmann, Nobel prize winner of 1990, thoughtfully declares, If the Higgs is discovered, it will be a great triumph for the standard model, if the Higgs is not discovered, it is practically certain that there is something in Nature that is equally interesting, maybe even more interesting that would create the symmetry breaking required by the standard model. And why do I say it’s required? Because the standard model is so good.

The reality is that we all tell ourselves false stories to avoid the truth. Even if you spend a lot of time studying behavioral economics, you can only improve your skills on the margin. You will always make mistakes. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, who has spent most of his professional life researching behavioral economics, has said: “Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy.”2 Even though you cannot be perfect, you can get marginally better at avoiding mistakes and have an edge in the market over people who do not understand Munger’s tendencies and other aspects of behavioral economics.

I've been thinking about this so much. When I say time I mean history, or... I think it's human to confuse history with time.” “That's for sure.” “No, listen. Other animals don't have time – they're simply part of the universe. But people– we get time and history. What if the world had continued on? Try to imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner of the year 3056, or postage stamps with spatulas on them because we ran out of anything else to put on stamps. Imagine the Miss Universe winner in the year 22,788. You can't Your brain can't do it. And now there are'nt any people. Without people, the universe is simply the universe. Time doesn't matter.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. —Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Several

Only John Steinbeck, who as both a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner in Literature, had the words to properly and beautifully describes helicopter pilots. In 1967 he wrote the following to Alicia Patterson, Newsday’s first editor and publisher after a chopper ride. “I wish I could tell you about these pilots. They make me sick with envy. They ride their vehicles the way a man controls a fine, well-trained quarter horse. They weave along stream beds, rise like swallows to clear trees, they turn and twist and dip like swifts in the evening. I watch their hands and feet on the controls, the delicacy of the coordination reminds me of the sure and seeming slow hands of (Pablo) Casals on the cello. They are truly musicians hands and they play their controls like music and they dance them like ballerinas and they make me jealous because I want so much to do it.

In a recent study comparing every Nobel Prize–winning scientist from 1901 to 2005 with typical scientists of the same era, both groups attained deep expertise in their respective fields of study. But the Nobel Prize winners were dramatically more likely to be involved

According to the Nobel Committee (the group of ultra-liberals in Norway who pick the prize winners), Obama was awarded the 2009 prize “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”8 Really? After less than a year in office? This was an award modeled after Seinfeld—it truly was about nothing, and meant nothing, at least in reality. Even the Obama administration had the good grace to be embarrassed by the award. Besides giving an abysmally naïve “speech to the Muslim world” in Cairo and talking about things like nuclear nonproliferation and climate change, the man had done squat in terms of forwarding world peace in the months he had been in office. He said so himself: “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize.”9 Though the administration was not quite embarrassed enough to show the good grace of declining the honor in favor of someone who actually deserved it. But here’s why this award matters—because it fits so perfectly with Leftist philosophy. Obama was a global rock star who had replaced the “evil” George W. Bush. He was also the first African American to lead the United States. And the Nobel Committee wanted to do what felt good. They wanted in on the action. Essentially, this once-prestigious organization decided to act like squealing teenagers at a Beatles concert; they got caught up in “Obamamania” and just couldn’t help themselves. It felt good, so it felt right. So they did it. And then this Nobel Laureate went on to spend eight years undermining world peace by kneecapping the one thing that keeps a lid on this bubbling cauldron of a world: the U.S. military. He also invaded and destabilized Libya, broke his promises on Syria, has been downright dismissive to Israel, kowtowed to China, and let Russian President Vladimir Putin walk all over him (and therefore us). This man has done more to destabilize the world than perhaps any American President, ever. And guess what? Even the Nobel Committee who scrambled to award him the prize came to regret their decision! The Nobel Institute’s director at the time told the media in September 2015 that they “thought it would strengthen Obama and it didn’t have this effect,” and “even many of Obama’s supporters thought that the prize was a mistake.”10 Oops.

In 2013 The New York Times, of all places, offered grotesque and embarrassing details of Bill Clinton’s quest to cash in on his public service. He was invited to speak at the ninetieth birthday party of his friend, fellow statesman, and Nobel Prize winner, the former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. It’s the kind of nice gesture one former leader usually makes toward another—except with the Clintons, there was a catch (there’s always a catch): Bill wanted $500,000 to show up and speak. What a mensch! Even the liberal New Yorker magazine recently posed the question: “How much more money does Bill Clinton need?”29 Remember Truman’s vow not to “commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the presidency”? Clearly that means about as much to Bill Clinton as being faithful to his wife.

China today is riven by contradictions. It is the world’s largest buyer of Louis Vuitton, second only to the United States in its purchases of Rolls-Royces and Lamborghinis, yet ruled by a Marxist-Leninist party that seeks to ban the word luxury from billboards. The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana. China has two of the world’s most valuable Internet companies, and more people online than the United States, even as it redoubles its investment in history’s largest effort to censor human expression. China has never been more pluralistic, urban, and prosperous, yet it is the only country in the world with a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in prison.

As Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel observes, “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”12

Some scientists are open to the idea that aliens brought the fundamental particles of life from outer space, but not to believe in an intelligent being, Who has given existence to fallible creatures like humans. The Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, along with Leslie Orgel proposed that life may have been purposely spread by an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization.

Nobel Prize–winner Joe Stiglitz pointed out many years ago, firms would not want to pay their workers the minimum the workers would accept, precisely to avoid being in the position captured by that old Soviet joke: “They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.

Camus and King were born, reared, and lived as a personal witness to the social and political ravages of their time and place. Neither man was willing to stand in the presence of the evils of oppression and do nothing. They entered the struggle as full participants, one an agnostic humanist and the other a seminary-trained Christian. Not surprisingly, it appears that there are parallels in their search for solutions to the most perplexing human problems of our times, such as tyranny, oppression, racism, exploitation, murder, and war. Both men were world leaders in their vocations and were Nobel Prize winners. What can we learn from them that will improve the civilization of our times as we move into the twenty-first century? What were they telling us to do?

Ronald Ross, the British Nobel Prize–winner who discovered the mosquito theory of malaria transmission, argued that malaria enslaves those it does not kill.

mind-bending drugs led to profound intellectual insights. Were it not for LSD, we might not know how to unravel the language of DNA with the ease we can today. Psychedelics may have also been integral to the quantum physics renaissance. Nobel Prize winners have attributed their discoveries to mind-bending psychedelics.

Yale economist and Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller argues that, when maintenance is accounted for, a house isn’t a much better investment than any other asset class. Still, we see our first home purchase as a sign of our progress and trajectory as adults, and it is a form of forced savings. The government has bought into this (see above: National Association of Realtors), and the interest on your mortgage is tax deductible. The mortgage tax deduction is one of the costliest tax breaks in America. Another?

Robert M. Solow,” they wrote, “the Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering work on the theory of economic growth, once said, ‘Everything reminds Milton [Friedman] of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.’ Well, Solow might have missed something economically significant by not linking sex with economic growth.

Yunus, now a famous Nobel Prize winner, was invited to meet with the CEO of Adidas, who wanted to understand the concept of social businesses, which Yunus described as a kind of business that is “built on the selfless part of human nature” and in which “everything is for the benefit of others and nothing is for the owners—except the pleasure of serving humanity.”5

It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. —André Gide; French author, Nobel Prize winner,

Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon postulated that people can be divided into two groups: Maximizers and Satisficers. Whether they’re choosing a restaurant, college, or spouse, maximizers are obsessed with always making the very best choice and trying to attain the very fullest happiness. Satisficers are happy with any sufficient option. You’d think Maximizers would be happier, since they spend so much time and energy on making the best possible choice. But they’re not. Even after they make their choice, they agonize that maybe it wasn’t the right one after all. Satisficers, meanwhile, have moved on with their life and are enjoying what they chose. Deciding is progress. Perfect is the enemy of good.

The intelligent altruists, though less altruistic than the unintelligent altruists, will be fitter than both unintelligent altruists and selfish individuals. —Herbert Simon, Nobel Prize winner in economics

The Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr defined an expert as follows: ‘An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made.

What's your name?" he asked. She'd turned to him with a deep frown, instantly terrifying him. About to turn to escape back into the bookshop, Walt was stopped by her shrug. "Cora." "That's a funny name." "It isn't, actually." Cora's frown deepened. She pulled herself up to her full height of four foot three inches. 'Officially my name is Cori, but Grandma calls me Cora. I'm named in honor of Gerty Cori, the first woman winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine. I bet you didn't know that." "No," Walt admitted, embarrassed. "I didn't." "What's your name?" "Walt," he offered quietly, expecting her to retort that his was an even sillier name, but she didn't. "After the scientist?" Walt frowned, thrown. "What scientist?" Cora shrugged. "Maybe Luis Walter Alvarez or Walter Reed, but... actually Walter Sutton is the most famous. He invented a theory about chromosomes and the Mendelian laws of inheritance." Cora let slip a little smile of satisfaction at the blank look on the boy's face. "Or maybe Walter Lewis-" "No," Walt interrupted, "I've never heard of any of them." "Oh." Cora folded her arms and tilted her nose upward. "Then who are you named after?" she asked, as if this was a given. "Walt Whitman," he retorted. "The poet.

If you made a country out of all the companies founded by Stanford alumni, it would have a GDP of roughly $ 2.7 trillion, putting it in the neighborhood of the tenth largest economy in the world. Companies started by Stanford alumni include Google, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, LinkedIn, and E* Trade. Many were started by undergraduates and graduate students while still on campus. Like the cast of Saturday Night Live, the greats who have gone on to massive career success are remembered, but everyone still keeps a watchful eye on the newcomers to see who might be the next big thing. With a $ 17 billion endowment, Stanford has the resources to provide students an incredible education inside the classroom, with accomplished scholars ranging from Nobel Prize winners to former secretaries of state teaching undergraduates. The Silicon Valley ecosystem ensures that students have ample opportunity outside the classroom as well. Mark Zuckerberg gives a guest lecture in the introductory computer science class. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey spoke on campus to convince students to join his companies. The guest speaker lineups at the myriad entrepreneurship and technology-related classes each quarter rival those of multithousand-dollar business conferences. Even geographically, Stanford is smack in the middle of Silicon Valley. Facebook sits just north of the school. Apple is a little farther south. Google is to the east. And just west, right next to campus, is Sand Hill Road, the Wall Street of venture capital.

They’re a family of American tycoons and philanthropists,” the paper reported. “Their international spectrum of friends includes Britain’s Princess Diana, Nobel Prize winners, influential entrepreneurs—in general, the upper crust of society . . . They’re not the Rockefellers. They’re the Sacklers.

In fact as the reputation of the newspaper grew and attracted the most famous and talented dialect poets and writers of his time, such as Pascarella, Trilussa, Di Giacomo, Fucini and others, Martoglio’s reputation as a poet also crossed the straits of Messina into the mainland, and grew to the point that Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian Nobel Prize winner for literature wrote: “Nessuno ha il diritto a dirsi letterato, che non conosca il linguaggio del Meli ed in esso linguaggio i sonetti del Martoglio.”8 (Nobody has the right consider himself a literary person if he does not know the language of Meli and in that language the sonnets of Martoglio.)

They increased the number of diseases from two to nearly thirty that could be classified as AIDS, and after that they started a global testing program of ‘vulnerable populations,’ which just coincidentally happen to be people not in a position to defend themselves easily. They started to find AIDS everywhere, including in Africa, but including in the United States—and wouldn’t you know, one of the communities they found was the African-American community, and they tested a lot of women and they found a lot of HIV-positive women, and they decided, well, let’s go forward.” —Kary Mullis, winner of 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Richard tells about how two of his other major mentors, Thomas Schelling and Kenneth Arrow (both Nobel Prize winners), sought simplicity. Schelling, for example, regularly employed everyday and easily grasped examples, such as a parent negotiating with a child, as an analogy to a much more complex situation, such as an international negotiation. A Schelling lecture often moved from a simple example, say a stop sign, to a riff on a dozen critical issues that involved a metaphorical stop sign. One element of Arrow’s genius was to see, and then distill, simple principles, where others saw only murky complexities.[11]

With these issues in mind, Dan has a unique way of tying exams into the learning process. After attending a workshop run by the Nobel Prize winner Carl Wieman, he was converted to the idea of two-stage exams. The first stage of the exam is the same as any other. The second stage brings the students together in groups of four, and gives them all a subset of the questions they just answered in the first stage. The students are encouraged to discuss their answers in their groups, and they all submit a second version. Groups who manage to improve upon the students’ individual scores get a small boost in the final outcome.

Human Resources Says, “Only Apply to Jobs If You Have 80% of the Requirements” HR says this because it reduces the number of applications they have to review. The 80% requirement sounds logical, until: • You read a job description, which is one continuous sentence and 15 lines long. • The hiring manager says he's so busy that he didn’t have time to create a job description. In fact, the description online is only a template, so it doesn't describe the actual job. • The hiring manager tells you that they haven’t fleshed out the responsibilities for the new role. • The job requirements appear as if they’re looking for a Nobel Prize winner. I’ve encountered all four situations. I've applied for positions where I didn't have 80% of the requirements. Because of the exposure I received during the interview, I was asked to interview for another role. That is where I work now, four years later. I know others who’ve done the same thing.

There is a skill to know when to listen and when to talk, for you can’t do both at the same time.

Richard Feynman said: "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Meaning for example that if Einstein had just trusted Newton he would never have heard of general relativity. I don't know a scientist who says: "Oh, so-and-so is such an eminent scientist, I'm just going to believe whatever they say.