Category: quotes

https://flipboard.com/@flipboard/flip.it%2FEues15-want-to-come-up-with-a-groundbreaking-i/f-bb8ecb6958%2Finc.com

The truth is that important innovations are rarely created in weeks or months. It usually takes about 30 years.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe

http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/the-only-way-to-get-really-really-rich.html

If your friends and family think you were crazy for starting a business, show them this article. If you’ve been thinking about starting a business and people say you’re being foolish, show them this article.

http://gizmodo.com/breakthrough-quantum-cat-experiment-captured-on-camera-1786923180

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160726-the-mystery-of-why-you-cant-remember-being-a-baby

http://www.inc.com/tom-popomaronis/do-you-listen-to-music-while-working-heres-what-it-does-to-your-brain-and-its-pr.html

https://medium.com/pcmag-access/5-thought-experiments-that-will-melt-your-brain-bb5ab7c7fe3c#.ikhd2rsvq

1- the basic concept of the “Swampman” thought experiment posited by the philosopher Donald Davidson in the late-1980s. In this experiment a man is traveling through a swamp and killed by a bolt of lightning, but — by sheer chance — another bolt of lightning strikes a nearby swamp and rearranges all the organic particles to create an exact replica (including all the memories and such) of the man who was killed. The new Swampman wakes up and lives the rest of the deceased man’s life.

2- Achilles and the tortoise are racing at constant speeds: Very fast and very slow, respectively. At some point in the race, Achilles reaches the tortoise’s original starting point. But in the time it took Achilles to get there, the tortoise has moved forward. So, then Achilles’s next task would be to make up the new gap between himself and the tortoise, however by the time he did that, the tortoise would have again moved forward by some smaller amount. The process then repeats itself again and again. Achilles is always faced with a new (if smaller) gap to overcome. The takeaway: The great Achilles loses a race to a big dumb lumbering tortoise and no deficit is ever surmountable.

3- let’s say you just froze time at some point along an arrow’s trajectory . At that particular instant, the arrow is suspended in space in a single location. In any one instant of time, no motion is occurring. The arrow can only be in one place or the other and never in-between. So, how does it get from one instant to another if there is never a moment when it is in between the two places?

4- the question at hand is would a blind person who learned to distinguish basic shapes by touch be able to distinguish those objects when he suddenly received the power of sight? In other words, does information from one sensation translate to another, or do we associate them only in our minds?

https://news.psu.edu/story/141360/2006/04/17/research/probing-question-if-blind-person-gained-sight-could-they-recognize

5- You are on a bridge overlooking a set of trolley tracks and you notice that five people have been tied down to the tracks by a devious (and presumably moustache-twirling) villain. Then you see an out-of-control trolley barreling down the tracks that will certainly kill the unfortunate people unless someone intervenes. you realize that you are sharing your bridge with a gigantic fat man, who — if you were to push him in front of the trolley — would have enough girth to stop the trolley and save the five bound people, though he will certainly be killed.You are now faced with the following options: 1) Do nothing and the five people will die, or 2) Push the fat man in front of the trolley and sacrifice him for the five people. In either scenario, are you at all culpable in these innocent people’s deaths? Should the law make any distinction?
 

http://qz.com/608398/be-prepared-we-gotasked-10-ceos-to-tellgive-us-their-killer-interview-questions/

• “Would you rather be respected or feared?”
• “Why are you here today?”
• “What’s your biggest dream in life?”
• “I ask how they were treated.”
• “What is your favorite property in Monopoly, and why?”
• “Tell me about when you failed.”
• “Talk to me about when you were seven or eight. Who did you want to be?”

Why is that light is calculated as using the same speed independently from the medium?

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Speed_of_light Suppose a baseball pitcher is standing on a train moving at 90 miles per hour relative to the ground. The pitcher throws a 90 mile-per-hour fastball towards the back of the train. While the pitcher and anyone else on the train would measure the speed of the baseball as 90 miles per hour, an observer on the ground would measure the baseball’s speed as 0 miles per hour – the motion of the ball against the train cancels out as far as the observers on the ground are concerned. That is, the baseball would appear to hang in midair, until the back wall of the train caught up to it.

Similarly, if the pitcher threw the ball in the other direction, at the same speed, the people on the ground would see the ball travel at an impressive 180 miles per hour, as the ball would gather momentum from the train and the speeds would combine. However, if the pitcher shines a flashlight toward the back of the train, he would measure the speed of the light as c…and so would the observer on the ground.

Light can travel in a vacuum, and Maxwell’s equations simply say what the speed is, and are perplexingly silent on the “medium” that it is measured relative to. The speed of light is considered to be an ultimate speed limit–massive objects can obtain speeds arbitrarily close to the speed of light, but can never reach it.

Relativity predicts that an infinite amount of energy would be required to accelerate an object of any mass to the speed of light – particles without mass, however, can travel at the speed of light.

Suppose Alice observes a light beam. She must therefore be able to observe oscillating electric and magnetic fields, since that’s what light is. Now suppose that she notices Bob traveling at the speed of light alongside that light beam. Bob does not observe oscillating fields; since he’s traveling at the same speed as the oscillations, he would see static fields. Without oscillating fields, there is no light, so the light beam does not exist. But we have postulated that Alice sees a light beam, so it must exist. We therefore have a contradiction, and must abandon one of the following:

a.) Alice can observe light;

b.) Bob can travel at the speed of light. We can observe light, so we drop the idea that Bob can travel at the speed of light. Thus, travel at light speed is not possible.

The existence of some faster-than-light particles, such as tachyons, has been suggested. Tachyons, if they existed, would be confined to the “other side” of the light-speed barrier; they would be restricted to speeds faster than the speed of light

Gravitational waves are a prediction of the Theory of General Relativity It took decades to develop the technology to directly detect them They are ripples in the fabric of space and time produced by violent events Accelerating masses will produce waves that propagate at the speed of light Detectable sources ought to include merging black holes and neutron stars LIGO fires lasers into long, L-shaped tunnels; the waves disturb the light

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36540254

The Babel Fish is an invention of writer Douglas Adams, who used it in his series of books called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Douglas Adams was explicitly an atheist (Richard Dawkins refers to him as his “tallest convert”) and was quite a provocateur when it came to religion.

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe.

It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.   Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this:

“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

  “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

  “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

  “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

  Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

  Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/nov/04/relativity-quantum-mechanics-universe-physicists

At present physicists have two separate rulebooks explaining how nature works.
 
There is general relativity, which beautifully accounts for gravity and all of the things it dominates: orbiting planets, colliding galaxies, the dynamics of the expanding universe as a whole. That’s big.
 
Then there is quantum mechanics, which handles the other three forces – electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. Quantum theory is extremely adept at describing what happens when a uranium atom decays, or when individual particles of light hit a solar cell. That’s small.
 
Now for the problem: relativity and quantum mechanics are fundamentally different theories that have different formulations. It is not just a matter of scientific terminology; it is a clash of genuinely incompatible descriptions of reality.