Physics Lab Quotes

What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.

What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.

We'd already talked in the stacks, and I knew you were different from any other girl I'd met. And you told me that your parents were dead, and I thought that you were so . . . lost and vulnerable. So when I saw you in the physics lab . . . and I saw you try and take care of someone that you thought who had been through what you'd been through; could be that . . . well, generous, and thoughtfull . . ." Guy said. "But you hardly knew me." said Willow "I know . . . I didn't know that we'd even talk again, or that if we did, if we'd get along, or maybe you were seeing someone else . . . I just knew that the way you tried to protect someone's life that, especially given your situation . . . I just . . . I though that you had to be the most special girl I would ever meet . . .

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and...

One of the first things we teach medical students is to listen to the patient by taking a careful medical history. Ninety percent of the time, you can arrive at an uncannily accurate diagnosis by paying close attention, using physical examination and sophisticated lab test to confirm your hunch (and to increase the bill to the insurance company).

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.

What are you doing here?" He takes a deep breath. "I came for you." "And how on EARTH did you know I was up here?" "I saw you." He pauses. "I came to make another wish,and I was standing on Point Zero when I saw you enter the tower. I called your name,and you looked around,but you didn't see me." "So you decided to just...come up?" I'm doubtful,despite the evidence in front of me.It must have taken superhuman strength for him to make it past the first flight of stairs alone. "I had to.I couldn't wait for you to come down,I couldn't wait any longer. I had to see you now.I have to know-" He breaks off,and my pulse races. What what what? "Why did you lie to me?" The question startles me.Not what I was expecting.Nor hoping.He's still on the ground,but he stares up at me.His brown eyes are huge and heartbroken. I'm confused. "I'm sorry, I don't know what-" "November.At the creperie. I asked you if we'd talked about anything strange that night I was drunk in your room.If I had said anything about our relationship,or my relationship with Ellie.And you said no." Oh my God. "How did you know?" "Josh told me." "When?" "November." I'm stunned. "I...I..." My throat is dry. "If you'd seen the look on your face that day.In the restaurant. How could I possibly tell you? With your mother-" "But if you had,I wouldn't have wasted all of these months.I thought you were turning me down.I thought you weren't interested." "But you were drunk! You had a girlfriend! What was I supposed to do? God,St. Clair,I didn't even know if you meant it." "Of course I meant it." He stands,and his legs falter. "Careful!" Step.Step.Step. He toddles toward me,and I reach for his hand to guide him.We're so close to the edge. He sits next to me and grips my hand harder. "I meant it,Anna.I mean it." "I don't under-" He's exasperated. "I'm saying I'm in love with you! I've been in love with you this whole bleeding year!" My mind spins. "But Ellie-" "I cheated on her every day.In my mind, I thought of you in ways I shouldn't have,again and again. She was nothing compared to you.I've never felt this way about anybody before-" "But-" "The first day of school." He scoots closer. "We weren't physics partners by accident.I saw Professeur Wakefield assigning lab partners based on where people were sitting,so I leaned forward to borrow a pencil from you at just the right moment so he'd think we were next to each other.Anna,I wanted to be your partner the first day." "But..." I can't think straight. "I doubt you love poetry! 'I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly,between the shadow and the soul.'" I blink at him. "Neruda.I starred the passage.God," he moans. "Why didn't you open it?" "Because you said it was for school." "I said you were beautiful.I slept in your bed!" "You never mave a move! You had a girlfriend!" "No matter what a terrible boyfriend I was,I wouldn't actually cheat on her. But I thought you'd know.With me being there,I thought you'd know." We're going in circles. "How could I know if you never said anything?" "How could I know if you never said anyting?" "You had Ellie!" "You had Toph! And Dave!

Much as I admired the elegance of physical theories, which at that time geology wholly lacked, I preferred a life in the woods to one in the laboratory.

Here," I said, the morning after the lazy, stupid Derek incident, as I intercepted Camden on his way to his locker shortly before the first-period bell and dragged him into an empty physics lab. I handed him three problem sets with the words PECKER and BALLS written all over them in multicolored highlighters, plus pictures of stick-figure people having sex in different positions. "This is to force your douche-bag friends to copy over the stuff in their own handwriting before they hand it in. There's no way I'm letting us get caught just because our clients get lazy." I crossed my arms and stared at him, daring him to get mad. He didn't. He just looked at the papers, surprised, then looked at me. "That's actually a really good idea," he said, sounding impressed. "I know," I said. "And these pictures you drew are weirdly hot." "I don't disagree," I said. "By the way, I'm charging you for the highlighters I bought." I think he might've said "I love you" as I walked out of the classroom, but the hallway was noisy, so I couldn't be sure.

It is well known that theoretical physicists cannot handle experimental equipment; it breaks whenever they touch it. Pauli was such a good theoretical physicist that something usually broke in the lab whenever he merely stepped across the threshold.

since I know for a fact that her class had been in the physics labs when Mr. Fibs got attacked by the bees he thought he’d genetically modified to obey commands from a whistle. (Turns out they only respond to the voice of James Earl Jones.)

I am very excited about Quantum Forgiveness. The pioneers of quantum physics overturned and transcended Newtonian physics and the scientific method. Quantum physicists worked down to the smallest units and realized that everything they thought they knew about the world was not true. The world is about potentiality. In superposition, for example, things appear where we believe they will appear. And that is exciting because it is a science discovery that does not have to stay in the lab. It actually has everything to do with who we are. It is the gateway to our experience of being one with Source!

Things happen. Things that physics and math and crap that gets measured in a lab can't explain. People aren't just laws and rules, Claire. They're... sparks. Sparks of something beautiful and huge. And some sparks glow brighter

The conscious events that we are aware of are physical events in their own right, just as much as the brain events observed in the lab by researchers. If we allow the mental its own existence as a category disjoint from the physical, we will never be able to get it back in.

It's a physical sickness. Étienne. How much I love him. I love Étienne. I love it when he cocks an eyebrow whenever I say something he finds clever or amusing. I love listening to his boots clomp across my bedroom ceiling. I love that the accent over his first name is called an acute accent, and that he has a cute accent. I love that. I love sitting beside him in physics. Brushing against him during labs. His messy handwriting on our worksheets. I love handing him his backpack when class is over, because then my fingers smell like him for the next ten minutes. And when Amanda says something lame, and he seeks me out to exchange an eye roll — I love that, too. I love his boyish laugh and his wrinkled shirts and his ridiculous knitted hat. I love his large brown eyes, and the way he bites his nails, and I love his hair so much I could die. There's only one thing I don't love about him. Her.

All except the Hooloovoo were resplendent in their multicolored ceremonial lab coats; the Hooloovoo had been temporarily refracted into a free-standing prism for the occasion. There was a mood of immense excitement thrilling through all of them. Together and between them they had gone to and beyond the furthest limits of physical laws, restructured the fundamental fabric of matter, strained, twisted and broken the laws of possibility and impossibility, but still the greatest excitement of all seemed to be to meet a man with an orange sash round his neck.

Physics made me sick the whole time I learned it. What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers...I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all of the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

Whereas a physician used to do house calls, sit at the bedside, and touch the patient, we now offer 13-minute patient visits in a sterile white room where lab tests may take the place of a thorough patient history and radiological studies may even replace the hands-on physical exam. Without the healing power of listening, loving touch, nurturing care, and healing intention, what are we offering patients beyond straight technology?

Part 2 Etienne: I cheated on her every day. In my mind, I thought of you in ways I shouldn’t have, again and again. She was nothing compared to you. I’ve never felt this way about anybody before… Anna: But… Etienne: The first day of school. We weren’t physics partners by accident. I saw Professeur Wakefield assigning lab parnters based on where people were sitting, so I leaned forward to borrow a pencil form you at just the right moment so he’dt think we were next to each other. Anna, I wanted to be your partner the first day. Anna: But … Etienne: I bought you love poetry! „I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.“ Neruda. I starred the pasasge. God. Why didn’t you open it? Anna: Because you said it was for school Etienne: I said you were beautiful. I slept in your bed! Anna: You never made a move! You had a girlfriend! Etienne: No matter what a terrible boyfriend I was, I wouldn’t actually cheat on her. But I thought you’d know. With me being there, I thought you’d know. Anna: How could I know if you never said anything? Etienne: How could I know if you never said anything? Anna: You had Ellie! Etienne: You had Toph! And Dave! Anna. I’m sorry for what happened in Luxembourg Gardens. Not because of the kiss – I’ve never had a kiss like that in my life – but because I didn’t tell you why I was running away. I chased after Meredith because of you. All I could think about was what that bastard did to you last Christmas. Toph never tired to explain or apologize. How could I do that to Mer? And I ought to have called you before I went to Ellie’s, but I was so anxious to just end it, once and for all, that i wasn’t thinking straight.

helped me to make my superstorm as plausible as possible. Lydia Chilton helped me create a realistic AI. Mike Swirsky was a huge help with the Siberian drilling project, and Dr. Dave Goldberg helped a lot with the weird physics. I also learned a lot from the Cornell Bird Lab. Lightninglouie gave the book its epigraph. And my father helped me a lot with the book’s philosophical conundrums, while my mother helped me think about how

It would be a perfect degree for Sara, since she had to balance her work in her family’s forests with her studies. The program was online-based with only a handful of physical classes—labs—each term. After three years of education in close partnership with industry organizations, students had to produce a dissertation and would receive a BA. A graduate from this program would be an academically educated forest owner who could take over a profitable family business.

Gell-Mann and Ne'eman discovered that one such simple Lie group, called "special unitary group of degree 3," or SU(3), was particularly well suited for the "eightfold way"-the family structure the particles were found to obey. The beaty of the SU(3) symmetry was revealed in full glory via its predictive power. Gell-Mann and Ne'eman showed that if the theory were to hold true, a previously unknown tenth member of a particular family of nine particles had to be found. The extensive hunt for the missing particle was conducted in an accelerator experiment in 1964 at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island. Yuval Ne'eman told me some years later that, upon hearing that half of the data had already been scrutinized without discovering the anticipated particle, he was contemplating leaving physics altogether. Symmetry triumphed at the end-the missing particle (called the omega minus) was found, and it had precisely the properties predicted by the theory.

One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.

The prevailing mood of the painting is stoicism: one man enduring for the sake of science, the other for subsistence. Given the painting’s intent—the glorification of medicine (and Beaumont and Wyeth labs)—it’s fair to assume the emotional content has been given a whitewash. It can’t have been a hoot for either. At least once in his notes, Beaumont mentions St. Martin’s “anger and impatience.” The procedure was not merely tedious; it was physically unpleasant. The extraction of the gastric juices, Beaumont wrote, “is generally attended by that peculiar sensation at the pit of the stomach, termed sinking, with some degree of faintness, which renders it necessary to stop the operation.

THE WORKOUT Warm up with some light physical activity for 3 minutes at an easy pace. Blast through a 20-second sprint at an all-out pace. Rest with some light activity at intensity 1 for 2 minutes. Blast through another 20-second sprint. Repeat the cycle until you’ve completed 3 sprints. End with a 2-minute cool-down for a total duration of 10 minutes. Feel free to customize the sprint activity to any full-body movement that significantly elevates your heart rate—such as the stair climbing I mentioned earlier in this chapter. Note that the protocol we tested in the lab featured different warm-up and cool-down times. To bring this workout in line with the others in this book, I’ve used a 3-minute warm-up and a 2-minute cool-down.

A century ago, Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of space, time, energy and matter. We are still finding awesome confirmations of his predictions, like the gravitational waves observed in 2016 by the LIGO experiment. When I think about ingenuity, Einstein springs to mind. Where did his ingenious ideas come from? A blend of qualities, perhaps: intuition, originality, brilliance. Einstein had the ability to look beyond the surface to reveal the underlying structure. He was undaunted by common sense, the idea that things must be the way they seemed. He had the courage to pursue ideas that seemed absurd to others. And this set him free to be ingenious, a genius of his time and every other. A key element for Einstein was imagination. Many of his discoveries came from his ability to reimagine the universe through thought experiments. At the age of sixteen, when he visualised riding on a beam of light, he realised that from this vantage light would appear as a frozen wave. That image ultimately led to the theory of special relativity. One hundred years later, physicists know far more about the universe than Einstein did. Now we have greater tools for discovery, such as particle accelerators, supercomputers, space telescopes and experiments such as the LIGO lab’s work on gravitational waves. Yet imagination remains our most powerful attribute. With it, we can roam anywhere in space and time. We can witness nature’s most exotic phenomena while driving in a car, snoozing in bed or pretending to listen to someone boring at a party.

In the mid-twentieth century, the subfield of cosmology—not to be confused with cosmetology—didn’t have much data. And where data are sparse, competing ideas abound that are clever and wishful. The existence of the CMB was predicted by the Russian-born American physicist George Gamow and colleagues during the 1940s. The foundation of these ideas came from the 1927 work of the Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaître, who is generally recognized as the “father” of big bang cosmology. But it was American physicists Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman who, in 1948, first estimated what the temperature of the cosmic background ought to be. They based their calculations on three pillars: 1) Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity; 2) Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the universe is expanding; and 3) atomic physics developed in laboratories before and during the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bombs of World War II. Herman and Alpher calculated and proposed a temperature of 5 degrees Kelvin for the universe. Well, that’s just plain wrong. The precisely measured temperature of these microwaves is 2.725 degrees, sometimes written as simply 2.7 degrees, and if you’re numerically lazy, nobody will fault you for rounding the temperature of the universe to 3 degrees. Let’s pause for a moment. Herman and Alpher used atomic physics freshly gleaned in a lab, and applied it to hypothesized conditions in the early universe. From this, they extrapolated billions of years forward, calculating what temperature the universe should be today. That their prediction even remotely approximated the right answer is a stunning triumph of human insight.

Even if I could accept, just for an instant, that I have the power to change physical matter with my mind, and literally manifest all that I desire . . . I’m afraid I see nothing in my life to make me believe I have such power.” She shrugged. “Then you’re not looking hard enough.” “Come on, I want a real answer. That’s the answer of a priest. I want the answer of a scientist.” “You want a real answer? Here it is. If I hand you a violin and say you have the capability to use it to make incredible music, I am not lying. You do have the capability, but you’ll need enormous amounts of practice to manifest it. This is no different from learning to use your mind, Robert. Well-directed thought is a learned skill. To manifest an intention requires laserlike focus, full sensory visualization, and a profound belief. We have proven this in a lab. And just like playing a violin, there are people who exhibit greater natural ability than others. Look to history. Look to the stories of those enlightened minds who performed miraculous feats.

Our speed-dating lab study of the sexual over-perception bias led to several fascinating findings. We had women and men who had never met interact with each other for five minutes and then evaluate the other on their sexual interest in them and report on the level of their own sexual interest. Then interaction partners rotated, chatted with a new person, and did the ratings again. Each person interacted with a total of five members of the other sex. Our first finding confirmed the sexual over-perception bias—men over-inferred a woman’s sexual interest in them compared with women’s reports of their actual interest. Not all men, however, are equally vulnerable to the bias. Some proved to be accurate at inferring women’s interest or lack thereof. Men who scored high on narcissism and who indicated a preference for short-term mating were exceptionally prone to this bias—an inferential error that presumably promotes many sexual advances, even if many of them are not reciprocated. Narcissistic men apparently think they are hot, even when they’re not. Not all women were equally likely to be victims of the male bias. Rather, women judged to be physically attractive by the experimenters were especially prone to evoke men’s sexual over-perception. The irony is that attractive women, because they receive a larger volume of male sexual attention, are precisely the women who, on average, are least likely to reciprocate men’s sexual interest.

CRACKING A WHIP MADE OF SMALL ROBOTS JOINED END TO END into a long, flexible chain was neither an especially bad nor an especially good way of engaging a foe in ambot-based combat. Extensive studies conducted within Blue military research labs had concluded that, on average, it was somewhat less effective than the more obvious procedure of just shooting individual ambots out of katapults. A dissenting opinion held that such studies were flawed because they failed to take into account two factors that were important in actual battle: One, the psychological impact on a defender who knew that the attack might literally whip around and come at him from any direction, including around corners or over barricades. Two, the element of skill, which was difficult to measure scientifically; the test subjects wielding those things in the lab were unlikely to have the same knack for it as Neoanders who had grown up using them and who had access to an ancient body of lore—a martial art, in effect—that they were disinclined to share with anyone else. If the whip was allowed to dissociate in midcrack, then its component ambots would be flung toward the target at supersonic velocity, which was as good as could be achieved by shooting the same objects out of a katapult. If it made contact with the target, direct physical damage would be inflicted and the ambots that had inflicted it could decouple themselves and carry out their usual programs. And if the whipcrack was off target, the chain could be recovered in full with no waste of ammunition. All the ambots came back for another attempt: something that certainly could not be said of ones that had been fired out of kats.

The Company We Keep So now we have seen that our cells are in relationship with our thoughts, feelings, and each other. How do they factor into our relationships with others? Listening and communicating clearly play an important part in healthy relationships. Can relationships play an essential role in our own health? More than fifty years ago there was a seminal finding when the social and health habits of more than 4,500 men and women were followed for a period of ten years. This epidemiological study led researchers to a groundbreaking discovery: people who had few or no social contacts died earlier than those who lived richer social lives. Social connections, we learned, had a profound influence on physical health.9 Further evidence for this fascinating finding came from the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania. Epidemiologists were interested in Roseto because of its extremely low rate of coronary artery disease and death caused by heart disease compared to the rest of the United States. What were the town’s residents doing differently that protected them from the number one killer in the United States? On close examination, it seemed to defy common sense: health nuts, these townspeople were not. They didn’t get much exercise, many were overweight, they smoked, and they relished high-fat diets. They had all the risk factors for heart disease. Their health secret, effective despite questionable lifestyle choices, turned out to be strong communal, cultural, and familial ties. A few years later, as the younger generation started leaving town, they faced a rude awakening. Even when they had improved their health behaviors—stopped smoking, started exercising, changed their diets—their rate of heart disease rose dramatically. Why? Because they had lost the extraordinarily close connection they enjoyed with neighbors and family.10 From studies such as these, we learn that social isolation is almost as great a precursor of heart disease as elevated cholesterol or smoking. People connection is as important as cellular connections. Since the initial large population studies, scientists in the field of psychoneuroimmunology have demonstrated that having a support system helps in recovery from illness, prevention of viral infections, and maintaining healthier hearts.11 For example, in the 1990s researchers began laboratory studies with healthy volunteers to uncover biological links to social and psychological behavior. Infected experimentally with cold viruses, volunteers were kept in isolation and monitored for symptoms and evidence of infection. All showed immunological evidence of a viral infection, yet only some developed symptoms of a cold. Guess which ones got sick: those who reported the most stress and the fewest social interactions in their “real life” outside the lab setting.12 We Share the Single Cell’s Fate Community is part of our healing network, all the way down to the level of our cells. A single cell left alone in a petri dish will not survive. In fact, cells actually program themselves to die if they are isolated! Neurons in the developing brain that fail to connect to other cells also program themselves to die—more evidence of the life-saving need for connection; no cell thrives alone. What we see in the microcosm is reflected in the larger organism: just as our cells need to stay connected to stay alive, we, too, need regular contact with family, friends, and community. Personal relationships nourish our cells,

I was headed into the final fitting of my leg. I’d gone through the test socket phase and my leg was finally ready. I was so excited! I walked into the physical therapy lab and shouted, “Man, I cannot wait to put this leg on and walk!” My physical therapist, Bob, and the prosthetist exchanged nervous glances. My right leg was still pretty weak and by all normal standards, I should not be able to walk right away. But then, of course, I never like to be like everyone else. They had me wheel over to the parallel bars to attach my new leg. “We’re just going to have you stand for now,” said Bob. “Nah, I’m walking.” I offered up my best shit-eating grin. “Let’s just see how it feels,” Bob replied with some firmness. I stood up and said, “I feel good. I feel really good.” Bob relented and they let me try to walk. They put a belt around me so that Bob could hold on to me as I walked the parallel bars. Most guys can use the parallel bars for support. I only have one arm so that only helped me so much. Good thing I didn’t really need them. I started walking without faltering right away. “Yeah, this feels good. I feel good. You can back up,” I told them. They backed up and I started walking by myself, holding on with one hand. Then, feeling bolder, I lifted my hand off the bar. I took a step. And then another step. I was walking without any help. I walked up and down those parallel bars the very first day I put on my leg. I did all this with an audience. Dad and Uncle Johnny were right there with me, watching and cheering me on. They were so excited. Uncle Johnny snapped a picture and sent it to my mom back home in Alabama. And as any proud mom would do, she sent that picture to everyone she knew. That picture went the pre-viral version of viral! It was a triumphant snapshot. I was walking again. And not only that, I was wearing those shiny new New Balance shoes the nice ladies had given me. As the picture made the rounds through my mom’s friends and friends of her friends and friends of friends of friends, somehow it ended up with people at New Balance. They reached out to my mom to ask what sizes of shoe Colston and I wore. She told them and then soon after that, Colston and I had matching sneakers.

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.

One study group in particular, informally led by William Shockley at the West Street labs, and often joined by Brattain, Fisk, Townes, and Woolridge, among others, met on Thursday afternoons. The men were interested in a particular branch of physics that would later take on the name “solid-state physics.

one of FerroKin’s most important solutions to the cost problem is to have no physical office, instead relying on wireless phones and home internet connections to coordinate an intensive round of pre-clinical investigations and regulatory filings. “We wanted to do this from our homes,” he says, because putting a premium on being in the same physical location every day and attending endless meetings unnecessarily constrains whom you can hire and what work skills you pay for in an employee. Sensitive medical information can be secured digitally even as it is shared among distributed team members and the outsourced labs and clinics that are performing the work. As a result, digital reduces the barriers to focusing on the job at hand.

Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg researched the diaries of young women around the turn of the century and found that the girls’ primary concerns for self-improvement in the 1890s focused on character.51 They wrote about striving to be kinder and more concerned for others, working harder in school, and rejecting frivolity. One hundred years later, Brumberg found, the same age group focused its self-improvement on physical appearance, and that the means by which to achieve it almost always involved buying things.

Exercise: Yellow Square for Your Physical Health. CHAPTER FOUR—Clairvoyance in the Lab Our thoughts, emotions, drives, and perceptions, both sensory and extrasensory, are all interrelated and converge at all levels of consciousness to take us from where we are now to where and what we want to be. By interacting with these inner components

Kirk Erickson and colleagues in Art Kramer’s lab hypothesized that the well-documented shrinkage of the brain with age would be reduced by exercise. They used structural scans to measure hippocampal volume in 165 healthy older people who varied in their level of physical fitness. The hippocampus is a structure deep in the temporal lobes long known to be critical for forming new memories. They found that people who showed higher aerobic fitness had larger hippocampi bilaterally. Moreover, the fitter group also showed better spatial memory performance than the less fit group.

Around the lab I heard that publicity was measured in an absolute unit, the "kan". That unit was too large for ordinary application and a practical unit one one-thousandth of the size served in its place, the "millikan".

Marc Goodman is a cyber crime specialist with an impressive résumé. He has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department, Interpol, NATO, and the State Department. He is the chief cyber criminologist at the Cybercrime Research Institute, founder of the Future Crime Institute, and now head of the policy, law, and ethics track at SU. When breaking down this threat, Goodman sees four main categories of concern. The first issue is personal. “In many nations,” he says, “humanity is fully dependent on the Internet. Attacks against banks could destroy all records. Someone’s life savings could vanish in an instant. Hacking into hospitals could cost hundreds of lives if blood types were changed. And there are already 60,000 implantable medical devices connected to the Internet. As the integration of biology and information technology proceeds, pacemakers, cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, and so on, will all become the target of cyber attacks.” Equally alarming are threats against physical infrastructures that are now hooked up to the net and vulnerable to hackers (as was recently demonstrated with Iran’s Stuxnet incident), among them bridges, tunnels, air traffic control, and energy pipelines. We are heavily dependent on these systems, but Goodman feels that the technology being employed to manage them is no longer up to date, and the entire network is riddled with security threats. Robots are the next issue. In the not-too-distant future, these machines will be both commonplace and connected to the Internet. They will have superior strength and speed and may even be armed (as is the case with today’s military robots). But their Internet connection makes them vulnerable to attack, and very few security procedures have been implemented to prevent such incidents. Goodman’s last area of concern is that technology is constantly coming between us and reality. “We believe what the computer tells us,” says Goodman. “We read our email through computer screens; we speak to friends and family on Facebook; doctors administer medicines based upon what a computer tells them the medical lab results are; traffic tickets are issued based upon what cameras tell us a license plate says; we pay for items at stores based upon a total provided by a computer; we elect governments as a result of electronic voting systems. But the problem with all this intermediated life is that it can be spoofed. It’s really easy to falsify what is seen on our computer screens. The more we disconnect from the physical and drive toward the digital, the more we lose the ability to tell the real from the fake. Ultimately, bad actors (whether criminals, terrorists, or rogue governments) will have the ability to exploit this trust.

Your astral form is a mental projection of your self image combined with your physical attributes based on your mental attributes, which means you can always have awesome hair.

Human organs can self-correct themselves and thus virtually go back in time and connect to each other.

The message. This was the leap of faith Vittoria was still struggling to accept. Had God actually communicated with the camerlengo? Vittoria’s gut said no, and yet hers was the science of entanglement physics—the study of interconnectedness. She witnessed miraculous communications every day—twin sea-turtle eggs separated and placed in labs thousands of miles apart hatching at the same instant . . . acres of jellyfish pulsating in perfect rhythm as if of a single mind. There are invisible lines of communication everywhere, she thought. But between God and man? Vittoria wished her father were there to give her faith. He had once explained divine communication to her in scientific terms, and he had made her believe. She still remembered the day she had seen him praying and asked him, “Father, why do you bother to pray? God cannot answer you.” Leonardo Vetra had looked up from his meditations with a paternal smile. “My daughter the skeptic. So you don’t believe God speaks to man? Let me put it in your language.” He took a model of the human brain down from a shelf and set it in front of her. “As you probably know, Vittoria, human beings normally use a very small percentage of their brain power. However, if you put them in emotionally charged situations—like physical trauma, extreme joy or fear, deep meditation—all of a sudden their neurons start firing like crazy, resulting in massively enhanced mental clarity.” “So what?” Vittoria said. “Just because you think clearly doesn’t mean you talk to God.” “Aha!” Vetra exclaimed. “And yet remarkable solutions to seemingly impossible problems often occur in these moments of clarity. It’s what gurus call higher consciousness. Biologists call it altered states. Psychologists call it super-sentience.” He paused. “And Christians call it answered prayer.” Smiling broadly, he added, “Sometimes, divine revelation simply means adjusting your brain to hear what your heart already knows.” Now, as she dashed down, headlong into the dark, Vittoria sensed perhaps her father was right. Was it so hard to believe that the camerlengo’s trauma had put his mind in a state where he had simply “realized” the antimatter’s location? Each of us is a God, Buddha had said. Each of us knows all. We need only open our minds to hear our own wisdom.

I did not throw up," Kahurangi said, at dinner that night, as he recounted the day's events to Aparna and Niamh. He and I had just gotten out of an hours-long meeting with Brynn MacDonald, her Blue Team counterpart, Jeneba Danso, Tom Stevens, and the leads of the biology and physics labs, going over everything from our helicopter ride. Martin Satie had been excused to tend to his helicopter. Apparently, he would be going out again soon. "No, you just got enough radiation passing through your body to spontaneously turn into a tumor," Niamh said. "I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that," Kahurangi replied. "That's just what a person who has spontaneously turned into a tumor would say." Kahurangi turned to Aparna. "You're the biologist here. Help me." "I'm not saying you are a sentient tumor," Aparna said. "But I would have to run some tests to be sure." Kahurangi pointed at me. «Jamie was in the same helicopter! Where are the tumor accusations there?" “I am definitely mostly tumor at this point," I admitted. "I thought we were friends," Kahurangi said, narrowing his eyes at me. "Tumors have no friends," I replied.

To innovate, Kelly would agree, an institute of creative technology required the best people, Shockleys and Shannons, for instance—and it needed a lot of them, so many, as the people at the Labs used to say (borrowing a catchphrase from nuclear physics), that departments could have a “critical mass” to foster explosive ideas.

An experimental physics lab is probably unlike any other room you’ve been in before. The lighting is harsh, of course, aggressively bright and beyond the reach of aesthetic concerns. There are sounds of machines, a harmonic hum, sometimes just from fans on computer equipment as opposed to any motorized parts. There’s never any bespoke sound absorbers, so the machines have a sonic clarity that seems intentional, cranked up for some postindustrial experimental orchestra.

It is possible to identify numerous ways that students with disabilities are controlled and taught their place: (1) labeling; (2) symbols (e.g., white lab coats, “Handicapped Room” signs); (3) structure (pull-out programs, segregated classrooms, “special” schools, inaccessible areas); (4) curricula especially designed for students with disabilities (behavior modification for emotionally disturbed kids, training skills without knowledge instruction for significantly mentally retarded students and students with autistic behavior) or having significant implications for these students; (5) testing and evaluation biased toward the functional needs of the dominant culture (Stanford-Binet and Wexler tests); (6) body language and disposition of school culture (teachers almost never look into the eyes of students with disabilities and practice even greater patterns of superiority and paternalism than they do with other students); and (7) discipline (physical restraints, isolation/time-out rooms with locked doors, use of Haldol and other sedatives).11

so many scientists from Los Alamos [science and technology labs] have returned to Chinese universities and research institutes that people have dubbed them the “Los Alamos club”’.73 Although the Thousand Talents Plan was only established in 2008, the systematic transfer of technology from the West has been under way for much longer. When China began to open up under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a program was developed to send technically talented young Chinese to the West. Many of the brightest students were sent to Germany and the United States to obtain PhDs in physics; some stayed on and achieved senior positions at top universities, from where they could send information to China.

throughout my life, using skills or talents or a person’s raw physical power to help them rise to the top of their society came and went. In the beginning, it was the strength in their arms to swing their swords. Then the tongue to sway large groups to accomplish something together. It became those who developed the sciences, and then—to a degree—it was those again who had physical prowess and could run or shoot a ball into a hoop. Yet, it was those who produced the food, built the homes, protected society, or taught the children or young adults who often weren’t supported. They would do their jobs, punch their time cards, and do what needed to get done to keep society going. My suggestion is to consider all work—if done well—equal. Government needs to be in place, but we’ll require some form of service as your debt to society. Perhaps you are a musician but can test into working with an R&D lab in the future. Can that be your service?” “That,” Bethany Anne replied, “could be a nightmare. Just think about the ongoing effort for some of Jean Dukes’ stuff. There’s no way we could place a person into a project for two weeks and then they leave.” Michael tapped a finger on the table. “I understand. However, let me give you a quote from a worker to Jack Welch.” “Who?” Peter interrupted. Stephen answered, “Jack Welch. He was the CEO of General Electric—GE—back on Earth in the twentieth century.” Michael continued, “He was talking to the assembly line workers at one of their businesses and one of the men spoke up, telling Welch that ‘for twenty-five years you paid for my hands when you could have had my brain as well for nothing.’” The table was quiet a moment, thinking about that. Peter was the first to break it. “Makes sense. We use that concept in the Guardians all the time. Everyone has a role to play, but if you have ideas you need to speak up.” “It would,” Addix added, “allow those interacting to bring new ways of thinking to perhaps old and worn-out strategies.” “What about those who truly hated the notion?” Stephen asked. “I can think of a few.” “I’m tempted to say ‘fuck ‘em.’” Bethany Anne snorted. “However, I know people, and they might fuck up the works. What about a ten-percent charge of their annual wealth if they wish to forego service?” “Two weeks,” Michael interjected, “is at best four percent of their time.” “Right,” Bethany Anne agreed, “so I’d suggest they do the two weeks. But if they want to they can lose ten percent of their annual wealth—which is not their annual income, because that shit can be hidden.” The Admiral asked, “So a billionaire who technically made nothing during the year would owe a hundred million to get out of two weeks’ service?” “Right,” Bethany Anne agreed. “And someone with fifty thousand owes five thousand.” “Where does the money go?” Peter asked. Admiral Thomas grinned. “I suggest the military.” “Education?” Peter asked. “It’s just a suggestion, because that is what we are talking about.” Stephen scratched his chin. “I can imagine large corporations putting income packages together for their upper-level executives to pay for this.” “I suggest,” Bethany Anne added, “putting the names of those who opt out on a public list so everyone knows who isn’t working.” “What about sickness, or a family illness they need to deal with?” Stephen countered. “With Pod-docs we shouldn’t have that issue, but there would have to be some sort of schedule. Further, we will always have public projects. There are always roads to be built, gardens to be tended, or military

Undependable people, in contrast, provide erratically and inflict heavy costs on their mates. In a study of newlywed couples, my lab found that emotionally unstable men were especially costly to women. They tended to be self-centered, to monopolize shared resources, and to be possessive, monopolizing much of the time of their wives. These men showed higher-than-average sexual jealousy, becoming enraged when their wives even talked with someone else, as well as dependency: they would insist that their mates provide for all of their needs. With a tendency to being abusive, both verbally and physically, they also displayed inconsiderateness, such as by failing to show up on time. Emotionally unstable men were also moodier than their more stable counterparts, sometimes crying after minor setbacks. Suggesting a further diversion of their time and resources was their tendency to have more affairs than average.34 All of these costs indicate that emotionally unstable mates will absorb their partner’s time and resources, divert their own time and resources elsewhere, and fail to channel resources consistently over time. Dependability and stability are personal qualities that signal increased likelihood that a woman’s resources will not be drained by the man.

I am close to being the first and only woman ever awarded tenure in this hundred-year-old ivy-draped department at Hopkins, and I instinctively know that I should hide any physical weakness that accompanies my pregnant state.

And there was, finally, another place on West Street where new ideas could now spread. Attendance was allowed by invitation only. Some of the Labs’ newest arrivals after the Depression had decided to further educate themselves through study groups where they would make their way through scientific textbooks, one chapter a week, and take turns lecturing one another on the newest advances in theoretical and experimental physics. One study group in particular, informally led by William Shockley at the West Street labs, and often joined by Brattain, Fisk, Townes, and Wooldridge, among others, met on Thursday afternoons. The men were interested in a particular branch of physics that would later take on the name “solid-state physics.” It explored the properties of solids (their magnetism and conductivity, for instance) in terms of what happens on their surfaces as well as deep in their atomic structure. And the men were especially interested in the motions of electrons as they travel through the crystalline lattice of metals. “What had happened, I think, is that these young Ph.D.’s were introducing what is essentially an academic concept into this industrial laboratory,” one member of the group, Addison White, would tell the physics historian Lillian Hoddeson some years later.

once compared Noetic Scientists to the early explorers who were mocked for embracing the heretical notion of a spherical earth. Almost overnight, these explorers went from fools to heroes, discovering uncharted worlds and expanding the horizons of everyone on the planet. Peter thinks you will do this as well. He has very high hopes for your work. After all, every great philosophical shift in history began with a single bold idea.” Galloway knew, of course, that one needn’t go to a lab to witness proof of this bold new idea, this proposal of man’s untapped potential. This very cathedral held healing prayer circles for the sick, and repeatedly had witnessed truly miraculous results, medically documented physical transformations. The question was not whether God had imbued man with great powers . . . but rather how we liberate those powers.

The most amazing part,” Katherine said, “is that as soon as we humans begin to harness our true power, we will have enormous control over our world. We will be able to design reality rather than merely react to it.” Langdon lowered his gaze. “That sounds . . . dangerous.” Katherine looked startled . . . and impressed. “Yes, exactly! If thoughts affect the world, then we must be very careful how we think. Destructive thoughts have influence, too, and we all know it’s far easier to destroy than it is to create.” Langdon thought of all the lore about needing to protect the ancient wisdom from the unworthy and share it only with the enlightened. He thought of the Invisible College, and the great scientist Isaac Newton’s request to Robert Boyle to keep “high silence” about their secret research. It cannot be communicated, Newton wrote in 1676, without immense damage to the world. “There’s an interesting twist here,” Katherine said. “The great irony is that all the religions of the world, for centuries, have been urging their followers to embrace the concepts of faith and belief. Now science, which for centuries has derided religion as superstition, must admit that its next big frontier is quite literally the science of faith and belief . . . the power of focused conviction and intention. The same science that eroded our faith in the miraculous is now building a bridge back across the chasm it created.” Langdon considered her words for a long time. Slowly he raised his eyes again to the Apotheosis. “I have a question,” he said, looking back at Katherine. “Even if I could accept, just for an instant, that I have the power to change physical matter with my mind, and literally manifest all that I desire . . . I’m afraid I see nothing in my life to make me believe I have such power.” She shrugged. “Then you’re not looking hard enough.” “Come on, I want a real answer. That’s the answer of a priest. I want the answer of a scientist.” “You want a real answer? Here it is. If I hand you a violin and say you have the capability to use it to make incredible music, I am not lying. You do have the capability, but you’ll need enormous amounts of practice to manifest it. This is no different from learning to use your mind, Robert. Well-directed thought is a learned skill. To manifest an intention requires laserlike focus, full sensory visualization, and a profound belief. We have proven this in a lab. And just like playing a violin, there are people who exhibit greater natural ability than others. Look to history. Look to the stories of those enlightened minds who performed miraculous feats.

The spread of semiconductors was enabled as much by clever manufacturing techniques as academic physics. Universities like MIT and Stanford played a crucial role in developing knowledge about semiconductors, but the chip industry only took off because graduates of these institutions spent years tweaking production processes to make mass manufacturing possible. It was engineering and intuition, as much as scientific theorizing, that turned a Bell Labs patent into a world-changing industry

Despite Noetic Science’s use of cutting-edge technologies, the discoveries themselves were far more mystical than the cold, high-tech machines that were producing them. The stuff of magic and myth was fast becoming reality as the shocking new data poured in, all of it supporting the basic ideology of Noetic Science—the untapped potential of the human mind. The overall thesis was simple: We have barely scratched the surface of our mental and spiritual capabilities. Experiments at facilities like the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in California and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab (PEAR) had categorically proven that human thought, if properly focused, had the ability to affect and change physical mass. Their experiments were no “spoon-bending” parlor tricks, but rather highly controlled inquiries that all produced the same extraordinary result: our thoughts actually interacted with the physical world, whether or not we knew it, effecting change all the way down to the subatomic realm. Mind over matter. In 2001, in the hours following the horrifying events of September 11, the field of Noetic Science made a quantum leap forward. Four scientists discovered that as the frightened world came together and focused in shared grief on this single tragedy, the outputs of thirty-seven different Random Event Generators around the world suddenly became significantly less random. Somehow, the oneness of this shared experience, the coalescing of millions of minds, had affected the randomizing function of these machines, organizing their outputs and bringing order from chaos. The shocking discovery, it seemed, paralleled the ancient spiritual belief in a “cosmic consciousness”—a vast coalescing of human intention that was actually capable of interacting with physical matter. Recently, studies in mass meditation and prayer had produced similar results in Random Event Generators, fueling the claim that human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body . . . a highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world. Katherine had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book The Intention Experiment, and her global, Web-based study—theintentionexperiment.com—aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world. A handful of other progressive texts had also piqued Katherine’s interest. From this foundation, Katherine Solomon’s research had vaulted forward, proving that “focused thought” could affect literally anything—the growth rate of plants, the direction that fish swam in a bowl, the manner in which cells divided in a petri dish, the synchronization of separately automated systems, and the chemical reactions in one’s own body. Even the crystalline structure of a newly forming solid was rendered mutable by one’s mind; Katherine had created beautifully symmetrical ice crystals by sending loving thoughts to a glass of water as it froze. Incredibly, the converse was also true: when she sent negative, polluting thoughts to the water, the ice crystals froze in chaotic, fractured forms. Human thought can literally transform the physical world.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. —Albert Einstein In previous chapters, we saw that the perceptual forms of psi are difficult to distinguish clearly in the laboratory. Telepathy in the lab, and in life, can be explained as a form of clairvoyance, and clairvoyance is difficult to localize precisely in time. Concepts like “retrocognition,” “real-time clairvoyance,” and “precognition” have arisen, blurring the usual concepts of perception and time. It seems that we must think of psi perception as a general ability to gain information from a distance, unbound by the usual limitations of both space and time.1 As long as we are interested in demonstrating the mere existence of perceptual psi, these conceptual distinctions do not matter. But when we try to understand how these effects are possible, the differences become critical. For example, it’s important when theorizing about psi to know if it’s actually possible to directly perceive someone’s thoughts. Likewise, it’s important to know if it’s possible to perceive objects at a distance in real time. Based on the experimental evidence, it is by no means clear that pure telepathy exists per se, nor is it certain that real-time clairvoyance exists. In stead, the vast majority of both anecdotal and empirical evidence for perceptual psi suggests that the evidence can all be accommodated by various forms of precognition. This may be surprising, given the temporal paradoxes presented by the notion of perception through time. But one simple way of thinking about virtually every form of perceptual psi is that we occasionally bump into our own future. That is, the only way that we personally know that something is psychic, as opposed to a pure fantasy, is because sometime in our future we get verification that our mental impressions were based on something that really did happen to us. This means that, in principle, the original psychic impression could have been a precognition from ourselves.

We obviously have physical chemistry. Well, like, ‘Oops, we accidentally blew up the school science lab’ chemistry.

What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are they not both saying: Hello?

Sometimes when I look back and analyze my past, I think the catalyst behind this story was my passion for science. I remember looking at seaweed and pond water microorganisms under a microscope during my Physical Science class my freshman year in high school and I felt exhilarated. My curiosity was awoken and I found myself instantly in love with the subject. Then, during my sophomore year in Biology, I single handedly dissected a cow’s eye and heart while my lab partner—and half the class—were busy passing out or vomiting in the bathroom, and that was it. The road ahead was clear. Set. I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life.

The popular image of a scientist is a disinterested and objective observer who dispassionately studies empirical data. But in reality, science is marked by fads, trends, paradigms, fashions, feuds, warring camps, petty jealousies, and die-hard beliefs. Conventional science usually reacts to new findings with disparagement. When confronted with the evidence for energy healing, one skeptic exclaimed, “I wouldn’t believe it, even if it were true!” Innovation faces daunting headwinds. The opposition to new therapies has unfortunate side effects. A group of distinguished colleagues and I analyzed US government reports on health-care innovation. We found that the average medical breakthrough takes 17 years to get from lab to patient. Even more startling, only 20% of new treatments jump this “translational gap.” The other 80% are lost forever. The result is that when we seek treatment, we are getting only one fifth of 17-year-old medicine. We would be outraged if we were forced to use a cell phone that was 17 years old, with 80% of its features disabled. But as a society, we treat this paradigm as perfectly reasonable when it comes to taking care of our precious and irreplaceable bodies. The neuroscience establishment fought the idea of neural plasticity tooth and nail. Yet eventually the evidence became too overwhelming to deny, and the weight of scientific opinion began to change. The rats that Marian Diamond studied had either an enriched or an impoverished environment. That changed their brain state. If you’re surrounded by a nurturing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual environment, you’re in one brain state. If you’re surrounded by danger, uncertainty, and hostility, you’re in a quite different brain state.

IS FATIGUE ALL IN YOUR HEAD? In the early 1990s, in a physiology lab at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, an exercise scientist named Tim Noakes, MD, unveiled a radical new way to think about fatigue. Until then, prevailing wisdom held that fatigue occurred in the body. At a certain intensity or duration of physical effort, the demands we put on our muscles become too great and, eventually, our muscles fail. Ask any athlete, from a marathon runner to a powerlifter, and they will be familiar with the feeling. It’s not a particularly comfortable one. What at first is a manageable burn becomes worse and worse until they can no longer bear it. The runner’s pace slows to a mere shuffle; the powerlifter can’t manage to hoist the barbell up for one last rep. Try as they might, they simply run out of gas and their muscles cease to contract. Noakes, however, wasn’t convinced that fatigue occurred in the body or that muscles actually ran out of gas. He questioned why so many athletes, seemingly overwhelmed by fatigue, were suddenly able to speed up during the final stretch of a race when the end was in sight. If the muscles were truly dead, Noakes hypothesized, these finish-line spurts would be impossible. To prove his point, Noakes attached electrical sensors to athletes and then instructed them to lift weights with their legs until they simply couldn’t lift any longer. (In exercise science, this is called “inducing muscle failure.”) When the weights slammed down and each participant tapped out, reporting they could no longer contract their muscles, Noakes ran an electrical current through the sensor. Much to the surprise of everyone—especially to the participants whose legs were dead—their muscles contracted. Although the participants could not contract their muscles on their own, Noakes proved that their muscles actually had more to give. The participants felt drained, but empirically, their muscles were not. Noakes repeated similar versions of this experiment and observed the same result. Although participants reported being totally depleted and unable to contract their muscles after exercising to what they thought was failure, when electrical stimulation was applied, without fail, their muscles produced additional force. This led Noakes to conclude that contrary to popular belief, physical fatigue occurs not in the body, but in the brain. It’s not that our muscles wear out; rather, it is our brain that shuts them down when they still have a few more percentage points to give. Noakes speculates this is an innately programmed way of protecting ourselves. Physiologically, we could push our bodies to true failure (i.e., injury and organ failure), but the brain comes in and creates a perception of failure before we actually harm ourselves. The brain, Noakes remarked, is our “central governor” of fatigue. It’s our “ego” shutting us down when confronted by fear and threat. In other words, we are hardwired to retreat when the going gets tough. But like Boyle and Strecher demonstrated, it is possible to override the central governor.

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She might simply have done what Tekla did, and created versions of herself modified for certain traits associated with athleticism. Instead, having become fascinated by the odd detail in her genetic report, she had embarked on a program to reawaken the Neanderthal DNA that, or so she imagined, had been slumbering in her and her ancestors’ nuclei for tens of thousands of years. It was a somewhat insane idea, and in any case she didn’t have enough Neanderthal in her to make it feasible, but she did produce a race of people with vaguely Neanderthal-like features, and in later centuries the processes of Caricaturization, Isolation, and Enhancement—which had affected all the races to some extent—had wrought especially pronounced changes on this subrace. Gene sequences taken from the toe of an actual Neanderthal skeleton, found on Old Earth and sequenced before Zero, were put to use. Old Earth paleontology journals had been data-mined for stats on bone length and muscle attachment so that those could be hard-coded into the Neoander wetware. The man sitting at the end of the table was the artificial product of breeding and of genetic engineering, but, had he been sent back in time to prehistoric Europe, he would have been indistinguishable, at least in his outward appearance, from genuine Neanderthals. The creation of the new race had happened incrementally, over centuries. By the time Neoanders existed it was too late to bother with the trifling ethical question of whether it was really a good thing to have created them. During their slow differentiation from the other races they had developed a history and a culture of their own, of which they were as proud as any other ethnic group. Not surprisingly, much of that history was about their relationship with Teklans, which was, as foreordained, largely combative. At its most simple-minded and stupidly reductionist bones, the Teklan side of the story was that Neoanders were dangerous ape-men brought into existence by a crazy Eve as a curse upon the other six races. The Neoander side had it that Teklans were what Hitler would have produced if he’d had genetic engineering labs, and that it was a damned good thing that Eve Aïda had had the foresight to produce a countervailing force of earthy, warm, but immensely strong and dangerous protectors. Much of this combative relationship had become irrelevant as the tactical landscape had become dominated by katapults and ambots, and physical strength had become less important to the outcome of fights. But the old primordial animus remained, and explained why Beled’s immediate response, upon entering a room that contained a Neoander, was to make himself ready for hand-to-hand combat. Doc chose to ignore this. If he even notices, Kath Two thought, but she was pretty sure Doc noticed everything. “Beled, Kath, I do not believe you have met Langobard.” It was a fairly common Aïdan name. “Bard for short,” Langobard offered. “Langobard, may I present Beled Tomov and Kath Amalthova Two.

We think that we’re the highest-functioning organism on the planet and that our mind has complete control over our behavior, but in the hands of a simple single-celled organism, we are essentially nothing more than a giant lab rat.

Other research establishes the ability of one person to affect another through these fields. For instance, studies at the Institute of HeartMath in California have shown that one person’s electrocardiograph (heart) signal can be registered in another person’s electroencephalogram (EEG, measuring brain activity) and elsewhere on the other person’s body. An individual’s cardiac signal can also be registered in another’s EEG recording when two people sit quietly opposite one another.89 This interconnectivity of fields and intention is a marriage of subtle energy theory and quantum physics. As Dr. Benor pointed out, Albert Einstein has already proven that matter and energy are interchangeable. For centuries, healers have been reporting the existence of interpenetrating, subtle energy fields around the physical body. Hierarchical in organization (and vibration), these fields affect every aspect of the human being.90 Studies show that healing states invoke at least the subtle biomagnetic fields. For example, one study employed a magnetometer to quantify biomagnetic fields coming from the hands of meditators and yoga and Qigong practitioners. These fields were a thousand times stronger than the strongest human biomagnetic field and were located in the same range as those being used in medical research labs for speeding the healing of biological tissues—even wounds that had not healed in forty years.91 Yet another study involving a superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) showcased large frequency-pulsing biomagnetic fields emanating from the hands of therapeutic touch professionals during treatments

DoppelLab,” a digital platform for combining and visually representing sensor data.15 The idea is to transform any physical space, from the interior of an office building to an entire city, into a “browse-able environment” where you can see and hear everything going on in that space as it flows from thousands or billions or trillions of sensors.

Grace leaned forward, studying him up close, able to make out some of his facial features in the clay mask: strong brow, broad cheekbones, prominent jawline and chin. As a flavorist, she was familiar with kaolin clay, a virtually tasteless edible mineral often used as an anti-caking agent in processed foods, various toothpastes, and originally kaopectate. But she'd never encountered the raw product out of the lab, and certainly not like this. She leaned closer to him. He smelled of sediment and mostly sweat, a decidedly masculine note, the precise replication of which one could base an entire career, and then some. Even the most skilled perfumers in the world, experts in the animal secrets of civet and ambergris, couldn't get it just right. It was a human thing. And she'd studied it, androstadienone and most of the known male pheromones, and she knew the effects certain concentrates could have on certain women. She'd written the reports and seen the CT scans of activity in women's brains. Still, knowing about it intellectually and rationally did not in any way lessen what it was doing to her right now, the effect it was having on her senses and her body. 'Can he tell?' she wondered. Lean and broad-shouldered, he had the build of a man who spent his days using his body in labor. She could see it in the way the mud set into the ridged musculature of his forearms, like the russeting across a firm apple. Still, the inner details of him escaped her. His hair was caked with dry clay, and she thought of the figures she'd seen artists craft in their hillside studios in Montmartre, with the Sacre-Coeur church on the summit above and the bawdy Moulin Rouge crowds teeming below. He looked like that, an unglazed unfinished sculpture of a man, but for his eyes, vast and deep, and very much alive, as if he were trapped inside his statued body.

Lab Report Sheet The Principle: The 101 Dalmatians Principle The Theory: You are connected to everything and everyone else in the universe. The Question: Can I send a message to someone without being in that person’s presence? The Hypothesis: If during the next two days, I telepathically send a specific message to a specific person, I will get evidence that he or she received it. Time Required: 48 hours The Approach: Okay, FP, I’m hearing the melody from The Twilight Zone playing in the background, but I’m willing to suspend judgment just this once to see if this might be one of those mysterious aspects of quantum physics. What say you? Today’s Date:__________ Time:__________ Research Notes:______________________________________ ____________________________________________________

Truth in the world resides only in mathematical proofs and physics labs. Everywhere else, it’s really a matter of opinion, and if it manages to become group opinion, it’s undeservedly crowned as capital-T Truth.

Writing, I reminded them, can’t be taught or learned in a vacuum. We must say to students in every area of knowledge: “This is how other people have written about this subject. Read it; study it; think about it. You can do it too.” In many subjects, students don’t even know that a literature exists—that mathematics, for instance, consists of more than right and wrong answers, that physics consists of more than right or wrong lab reports. I

Truth in the world resides only in mathematical proofs and physics labs. Everywhere else it's really matter of opinion, and if it manages to become group opinion, it's undeservedly crowned as capital-T truth. And so you need to determine whatever the local version of truth is you're inhabiting.

Bargaining is another stage that Caldwell doesn’t linger over. She doesn’t believe in God, or the gods, or fate, or any higher or lower power that has dominion over her. There’s no one to bargain with. But she agrees–even in a deterministic world governed by impartial physical forces–that if the lab is found to be intact and a rescue team from Beacon returns her notes and samples to her in good order, she will light a candle to nobody at all in recognition for the universe having (en passant, by something indistinguishable from chance) been kind to her. When

DEFENDING A RAPIST What is the character of a person who becomes a sexual enabler? We get an early glimpse into this question from 1975, when Hillary Clinton defended a man, Thomas Alfred Taylor, who was accused of beating and raping a twelve-year-old girl. A virgin prior to the attack, she spent five days in a coma, several months recovering from her injuries, and years in therapy. Even people who are accused of heinous crimes deserve criminal representation. Hillary’s strategy in defending Taylor, however, was to blame the teenage victim. According to an affidavit filed by Hillary, children who come from “disorganized families such as the complainant” sometimes “exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences.” Hillary suggested the girl was “emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing.” Here Hillary seems to be echoing what Bernie Sanders wrote in his rape fantasy essay. In this case, however, the girl certainly didn’t dream up the assault and rape. There was physical evidence that showed she had been violated, and she was beaten so badly she was in a coma. Prosecutors had in their possession a bloodied pair of Taylor’s underwear. But fortunately for Hillary and her client, the forensic lab mishandled the way that evidence was preserved. At the time of trial, the state merely had a pair of Taylor’s underwear with a hole cut in it. Hillary plea bargained on behalf of Taylor and got him released without having to do any additional time. A tape unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon has Hillary celebrating the outcome. “Got him off with time served in the county jail,” she says. Did Hillary believe that, in this case, justice was done? Certainly not. On the tape, Hillary admits she never trusted her client. “Course he claimed he didn’t, and all this stuff.” So she decided to verify his story. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” Clearly Hillary knows her client is guilty, and this fact doesn’t bother her. The most chilling aspect of Hillary’s voice is her indifference—even bemusement—at getting a man off after he raped a twelve-year-old. The episode is a revealing look into the soul of an enabler. In fact, it reminds me of Alinsky protesting to Frank Nitti about the wasted expense of importing an out-of-town-killer. Hillary, like Alinsky, seems to be a woman without a conscience.9

For example, AT&T—not known for innovation in the past twenty years—recently created five labs (AT&T calls them “foundries”), each employing forty to fifty interdisciplinary experts. Their task: testing new insights generated inside and outside AT&T. The foundries house marketing experts from the business units, experts in telecommunications technologies, and experts in design thinking. What’s more, AT&T has invited start-ups and established companies from many industries to participate in rapidly developing and experimenting with new technologies. Each new idea is run through a twelve-week project, where a team applies the kinds of tools we describe in this book to produce virtual or physical prototypes.

In 1967, Zuse suggested that the universe itself was running on a cellu- lar automaton or a similar computational structure, a metaphysical position known today as digital physics, a subject Ed Fredkin had himself taken up before becoming acquainted with the work of Zuse. Excited to discover this work, Fredkin invited Zuse to Cambridge, MA. The translation of Rechnen- der Raum reproduced here, from a German (published) version of Zuse’s ideas, was in fact commissioned during Ed Fredkin’s tenure as Director of MIT’s Project MAC10 (the AI lab that was a precursor of the current MIT AI labs)

It happened in 2006 when the company’s COO and soon-to-be CEO, Randall Stephenson, quietly struck a deal with Steve Jobs for AT&T to be the exclusive service provider in the United States for this new thing called the iPhone. Stephenson knew that this deal would stretch the capacity of AT&T’s networks, but he didn’t know the half of it. The iPhone came on so fast, and the need for capacity exploded so massively with the apps revolution, that AT&T found itself facing a monumental challenge. It had to enlarge its capacity, practically overnight, using the same basic line and wireless infrastructure it had in place. Otherwise, everyone who bought an iPhone was going to start experiencing dropped calls. AT&T’s reputation was on the line—and Jobs would not have been a happy camper if his beautiful phone kept dropping calls. To handle the problem, Stephenson turned to his chief of strategy, John Donovan, and Donovan enlisted Krish Prabhu, now president of AT&T Labs. Donovan picks up the story: “It’s 2006, and Apple is negotiating the service contracts for the iPhone. No one had even seen one. We decided to bet on Steve Jobs. When the phone first came out [in 2007] it had only Apple apps, and it was on a 2G network. So it had a very small straw, but it worked because people only wanted to do a few apps that came with the phone.” But then Jobs decided to open up the iPhone, as the venture capitalist John Doerr had suggested, to app developers everywhere. Hello, AT&T! Can you hear me now? “In 2008 and 2009, as the app store came on stream, the demand for data and voice just exploded—and we had the exclusive contract” to provide the bandwidth, said Donovan, “and no one anticipated the scale. Demand exploded a hundred thousand percent [over the next several years]. Imagine the Bay Bridge getting a hundred thousand percent more traffic. So we had a problem. We had a small straw that went from feeding a mouse to feeding an elephant and from a novelty device to a necessity” for everyone on the planet. Stephenson insisted AT&T offer unlimited data, text, and voice. The Europeans went the other way with more restrictive offerings. Bad move. They were left as roadkill by the stampede for unlimited data, text, and voice. Stephenson was right, but AT&T just had one problem—how to deliver on that promise of unlimited capacity without vastly expanding its infrastructure overnight, which was physically impossible. “Randall’s view was ‘never get in the way of demand,’” said Donovan. Accept it, embrace it, but figure out how to satisfy it fast before the brand gets killed by dropped calls. No one in the public knew this was going on, but it was a bet-the-business moment for AT&T, and Jobs was watching every step from Apple headquarters.

There is no proof that the groups of mankind differ in their innate mental characteristics or intellectual capacity or that there is any connection between the physical and mental characteristics of human beings.

Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.' The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development. [...] The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.

The scientific (not to mention philosophical and metaphysical) implications are astounding. Let's say some of the atoms in your body originally formed in an entangled manner with other particles soon after the big bang. Since then, both have been flying apart, and now they are separated by billions of light-years. Your atoms make up pieces of your brain, which is physically located in Peoria. Those other particles have become of an alien on a planet in the fashionable Aldebaran system. Right now, some creature there is observing your twin's atoms in a lab. Bingo, they collapse to exhibit specific properties. Instantly, with no delay whatsoever, your own brain's atoms know this is happening five billion light-years away, and they, too, collapse into complementary objects. The effect is sudden and alters your thought processes, and you make a snap decision. You show up at your boss's party wearing an embarrassing, polka-dot tuxedo. You can't explain why you acted so oddly, but your life is ruined. This seems like science fiction, but EPR correlations are real. First it means that the entire universe is a single entity in some fundamental way. It means there are no secrets between locations here and those far away, no matter how distant–and that the information "exchange" happens simultaneously, at infinite speed.

People will tell you that you have to know math to be a scientist, or physics or chemistry. They’re wrong. That’s like saying you have to know how to knit to be a housewife, or that you have to know Latin to study the Bible. Sure, it helps, but there will be time for that. What comes first is a question, and you’re already there. It’s not nearly as involved as people make it out to be.

And everything we know about time, everything we can know about time, comes from the study of clocks. Time, Clocks and Relativity   There are many popular books attempting to explain Relativity. In general, they take the same approach that we do with university undergraduates, revisiting the angst of physicists in the late 19th century as they struggled with the idea that the speed of light would remain constant even for a moving observer. Stripped of the math, for the benefit of the lay reader, the arguments become rather hollow. Instead, we will look at relativity as it is today: the practical engineering of transferring time signals from clocks on the lab bench, to clocks in GPS satellites and spacecraft

ARE YOU GETTING ENOUGH SUNSHINE?” my doctor asked. He may have noticed my I-work-at-my-desk-all-day pallor. “I work at my desk all day,” I told him. “But I take vitamin D supplements.” He looked at my lab results. “Your calcium is on the low side of normal. Are you eating enough dark greens?” “Not to worry, Doctor. I’ll take a calcium supplement, or two.” This is how the appointment progressed in my mind as I prepared for my annual physical. I was compiling the list of medications and supplements, conscious that I was supplementing much of what the human body can normally get from a healthy diet and ten minutes of fresh air a day. How often do we try to do the same with our spiritual health? We depend on supplements—someone else’s insights, Sunday’s sermon, a brief nugget heard on the radio—as our entire spiritual intake for the week. We lean on supplements rather than a rich diet of daily Bible reading, prayer time, and reflection with Jesus. Jesus no doubt carried on a perpetual internal conversation with His Father, but He still stole away by Himself for extended times of prayer. He said we should “abide” in Him (John 15:7, NKJV), which seems more like a meal than a quick snack, doesn’t it? —CYNTHIA RUCHTI

EXPERIMENT 4. In our fourth experiment, we tested a “nonlocal” aspect of the consciousness collapse interpretation. This is a bit tricky to grasp at first, because it invokes the timeless nature of the quantum world. I’ll go through this slowly. The idea that the quantum wave function collapses due to observation implies that the collapse occurs only when observation occurs, and not when the data are generated.295 That is, unlike events in the everyday world, where actions occur in particular locations and unfold in ordinary clock time, events in the quantum domain do not occur in time as we normally experience it. This is what is meant by the spooky “nonlocal” nature of quantum mechanics—events are connected across the usual limitations of space and time. When an elementary quantum object is not being observed, it remains in what’s called an “indeterminate state.” In that unobserved condition, the object has no definite properties yet—no size, shape, location, polarization, spin, or any other property that we ascribe to ordinary real objects. The consciousness collapse idea further proposes that when, and only when, an object is consciously observed does it take on real properties. To repeat—because this concept may make your brain hurt the first time you encounter it—if you take measurements of a quantum system using an inanimate recording device, like a camera, then that system will remain in an indeterminate state until it is observed. This ridiculous-sounding idea has been tested in conventional physics labs and it has definitely been shown to exist. That type of study is called the delayed-choice experiment.154, 324 We tested this idea in the present context by using a time-reversed version of our double-slit experiment, somewhat like the studies that Daryl Bem conducted, as discussed earlier in the chapter on precognition. This test also provided a more rigorous way for us to test the effect of participants being located within a few meters of the optical system, because all the data in this study were generated and recorded with the apparatus located by itself inside the shielded chamber, and with no one else present in the laboratory.

Human organs can self-correct themselves and thus virtually go back in time and connect themselves.

Double diffusion made possible, for the first time, the mass production of precise, high-performance transistors. The technique promised to be highly profitable for any organization that could master its technical intricacies. Shockley therefore quit Bell Labs and, with financial backing from Arnold Beckman, president of a prestigious maker of scientific instruments, started a company to produce double-diffusion transistors. The inventor recruited the best young minds he could find, including Noyce; Gordon Moore, a physical chemist from Johns Hopkins; and Jean Hoerni, a Swiss-born physicist whose strength was in theory. Already thinking about human intelligence, Shockley made each of his recruits take a battery of psychological tests. The results described Noyce as an introvert, a conclusion so ludicrous that it should have told Shockley something about the value of such tests. Early in 1956, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories opened for business in the sunny valley south of Palo Alto. It was the first electronics firm in what was to become Silicon Valley.

One day my colleague, David Buss and I were chatting and I said to him, "Nobody's ever looked at why people have sex," says Cindy Meston, psychologist at UTexas Austin and author of the book, 'Why Women Have Sex.' She and Buss rectified that. 1,549 undergraduates settled on 237 reasons for sex. Women listed as their top 10 reasons, (1) I was attracted to the person, (2) I wanted to experience the physical pleasure, (3) It feels good, (4) I wanted to show my affection for the person, (5) I wanted to express my love for the person, (6) I was sexually aroused and wanted the release, (7) It's fun, (8) I was horny, (9) I realized I was in love, and (10) I was in the heat of the moment. Men had the same top three, with numbers 2 and 3 switched. Lower in the top 10, men mix in - I wanted to achieve orgasm, and, I wanted to please my partner.

For years Bell Labs had been operating small satellite facilities at far-flung locations around New Jersey—near the shore in the towns of Holmdel and Deal, for instance, and in the forested hills near the North Jersey town of Whippany. Long-wave and shortwave radio researchers at those outposts needed distance from the interference of New York City (and from one another) to do proper research and measurements. Murray Hill was put in a similar context: A move to the suburbs would allow the physics, chemistry, and acoustics staff to conduct research in a location unaffected by the dirt, noise, vibrations, and general disturbances of New York City.

By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point. Walking down that impossibly long tiled corridor, a scientist on his way to lunch in the Murray Hill cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.

The eight traitors — a metallurgist, Sheldon Roberts; three physicists, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last and Robert Noyce; an electrical engineer, Victor Grinich; an industrial engineer, Eugene Kleiner; a mechanical engineer, Julius Blank and Gordon Moore, a physical chemist — formed Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild became enormously successful. Shockley Labs closed in 1968.

Physical proximity, in Kelly’s view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn’t do.

Likewise, in men a careful assessment of clinical symptoms, physical examination, lifestyle factors, and biochemical lab data are all necessary not only to determine if you are a candidate for HOT with true testosterone deficiency, but also to rule out any important red flags that would require a deeper investigation and may lead to alternative therapeutic options.

At the lab my professor suggested that, since it was such an amazing day, perhaps I could take the exam outside in the wetland wilderness reserve that surrounded the lab. The view of the swamp was stunning! Somehow it had never seemed beautiful to me before. She asked that I take my notebook and pencil out. “Please draw for me the complete development of the chick from fertilization to hatching. That is the only question.” I gasped, “But that is the entire course!” “Yes, I suppose it is, but make-up exams are supposed to be harder than the original, aren’t they?” I couldn’t imagine being able to regurgitate the entire course. As I sat there despondently, I closed my eyes and was flooded with grief. Then I noticed that my inner visual field was undulating like a blanket that was being shaken at one end. I began to see a movie of fertilization! When I opened my eyes a few minutes later, I realized that the movie could be run forward and back and was clear as a bell in my mind’s eye, even with my physical eyes open. Hesitantly, I drew the formation of the blastula, a hollow ball of cells that develops out of the zygote (fertilized egg). As I carefully drew frame after frame of my inner movie, it was her turn to gape! The tiny heart blossomed. The formation of the notochord, the neural groove, and the beginnings of the nervous system were flowing out of my enhanced imagery and onto the pages. A stupendous event—the animated wonder of embryonic growth and the differentiation of cells—continued at a rapid pace. I drew as quickly as I could. To my utter amazement, I was able to carefully and completely replicate the content of the entire course, drawing after drawing, like the frames of animation that I was seeing as a completed film! It took me about an hour and a quarter drawing as fast as I could to reproduce the twenty-one-day miracle of chick formation. Clearly impressed, my now suddenly lovely professor smiled and said, “Well, I suppose you deserve an A!” The sunlight twinkled on the water, the cattails waved in the gentle breeze, and the gentle wonder of life was everywhere. Reports:

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within.

To see the future of science, take a peek inside a lab at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, where a robot by the name of Adam is hard at work figuring out which genes encode which enzymes in yeast. Adam has a model of yeast metabolism and general knowledge of genes and proteins. It makes hypotheses, designs experiments to test them, physically carries them out, analyzes the results, and comes up with new hypotheses until it’s satisfied. Today, human scientists still independently check Adam’s conclusions before they believe them, but tomorrow they’ll leave it to robot scientists to check each other’s hypotheses.

boils.” Terrin didn’t jump at the interruption of his thoughts, but only because he’d come to expect it. The voice was perky and upbeat and annoying as all hell. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathered his patience and turned to face Petty Officer Third Class Francesca Hayden, apparently the most cheerful and effervescent computer technician in the whole Spartan Navy. Even when she was standing still, she gave the impression of constantly bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Pardon?” he said, the actual content of her words lost in his irritation. “It’s just a saying my great grandmother used to tell me,” she clarified, still grinning brightly, her teeth almost painfully white in the glare of the temporary lighting they’d set up in the auxiliary control center down on the third level of the Terminus facility. There’d been too much damage to the primary control center from the fight with Starkad, and this one had come with actual, physical input terminals instead of haptic holograms. “If you watch a pot of water on the stove, it seems like it takes forever to boil, you know.” “I don’t believe I’ve ever had the occasion to boil water on a stove,” he admitted. He winced, realizing it made him sound like a privileged douchebag, and he amended the statement. “I mean, in college, I made my own meals sometimes, and in the lab at the university, but those were all just ready-made heat-n-eat bowls.” He shrugged, trailing off. Why did she always have this effect on him? She was no different than any other tech. Okay, maybe she was cute, if you were into the whole pixie look, with her bobbed brown hair and upturned nose and the impish grin. She certainly did nice things to a set of blue Navy utility fatigues but that could have been the effect of months away from civilians. He glanced around the control room to see if any of the other technicians had noticed his embarrassment, but the only two he could see looked to be absorbed in their work. “I love a home-cooked meal,” she went on as if he hadn’t

So, to recap, we seem to have light vacillating between a parti-clelike existence and a wavelike one. As a particle, the light is emitted and detected. As a wave, it goes through both slits at once. Lest you discount this as just some weird property of light and not of matter, consider this: the identical experiment can be done with electrons. They, too, depart the source (an electron microscope, in work by a team at Hitachi research labs and Gakushuin University in Tokyo) as particles. They land on the detector—a scintillation plate, like the front of a television screen, which records each electron arrival as a minuscule dot—as particles. But in between they act as waves, producing an interference pattern almost identical to that drawn by the photons. Dark stripes alternate with bright ones. Again, the only way single electrons can produce an interference pattern is by acting as waves, passing through both slits at once just as the photons apparently did. Electrons—a form of matter—can behave as waves. A single electron can take two different paths from source to detector and interfere with itself: during its travels it can be in two places at once. The same experiments have been performed with larger particles, such as ions, with the identical results. And ions, as we saw back in Chapter 3, are the currency of the brain, the particles whose movements are the basis for the action potential by which neurons communicate. They are also, in the case of calcium ions, the key to triggering neurotransmitter release. This is a crucial point: ions are subject to all of the counterintuitive rules of quantum physics.

One of the office machines there was an elaborate electric typewriter that could do minimal text formatting through the application of a complicated sequence of keystrokes. No one ever utilized the beastly device’s capability except Merry, who was caught at it one day by Alan Kay. “You’re a programmer!” he exclaimed. “No kidding,” she said. Impressed by the natural skills of this secretary smuggled over from the physics lab, Kay gave her a few hours of rudimentary training. After that it was a relatively simple matter to get her assigned to his group.

A secret lab is considered by many to be the physical manifestation of a spark’s mind. Thus they tend to be rather individualistic. Some are spotlessly clean; some are filled with dangerous trash. Some are ruthlessly efficient; some are filled with suicidal deathtraps. Needless to say, sparks are usually vocally dismissive of the labs of others, while surreptitiously making notes about things they’d wished they’d thought of themselves.

Science teachers have discovered they can use Minecraft to teach geology, physics, and biology.