Isaac Newton

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pages: 244 words: 68,223

Isaac Newton by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, Astronomia nova, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Richard Feynman, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

PUBLISHED WORKS OF NEWTON There is no such thing as The Collected Works of Isaac Newton. The Newton Project, at Imperial College, London, has long-term plans for the theological, alchemical, and Mint writings. Meanwhile two monuments of scholarship are the collected correspondence and the collected mathematical papers: Turnbull, Herbert W.; Scott, John F.; Hall, A. Rupert; and Tilling, Laura, eds. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton (cited as Corres). Seven volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77. Whiteside, D. T., ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (cited as Math). Eight volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967–80.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton’s Thought. Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Newton: Texts, Backgrounds, Commentaries. Edited by I. Bernard Cohen and Richard S. Westfall. New York: Norton, 1995. The Preliminary Manuscripts for Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia, 1684–85. Introduction by D. T. Whiteside. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. The Unpublished First Version of Isaac Newton’s Cambridge Lectures on Optics, 1670–1672.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 2001. Manuel, Frank. Isaac Newton, Historian. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. ———. A Portrait of Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. McGuire, J. E. Tradition and Innovation: Newton’s Metaphysics of Nature. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995. McGuire, J. E.; and Rattansi, Piyo M., “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan.’ ” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 21-2: 108–42 McKnight, Stephen A. ed. Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. McLachlan, H., ed. Sir Isaac Newton’s Theological Manuscripts.


pages: 439 words: 104,154

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI by Edward Dolnick

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, complexity theory, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Leo Hollis, lone genius, music of the spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

See Manuel, A Portrait of Isaac Newton, p. 24. 45 “When one . . . compares”: Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 12. 45 Frederick the Great declared: Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers, p. 414. 46 “I invariably took”: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 43. 46 His favorite wedding gift: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), p. 582. 46 slept in his clothes: Gale Christianson, Isaac Newton, p. 65. 46 seventeen portraits: Peter Ackroyd, Newton, p. 98. 46 so much time working with mercury: Milo Keynes, “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” p. 27. 46 “It’s so rare,” the Duchess: Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic, p. 12. 47 “a Machine for walking on water”: The drawing comes from a 1637 text by Daniel Schwenter, a German mathematician and inventor, titled Deliciae physico-mathematicae.

., p. 117, quoting Eike Hirsch. 319 “stone dolls”: Milo Keynes discusses Newton’s views on art and literature in “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” pp. 26–27. 319 “If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons”: from an interview with Huxley in J. W. N. Sullivan, Contemporary Mind (London: Toulmin, 1934), p. 143. 319 “The more I learned”: I interviewed Westfall in connection with an article marking the three hundredth anniversary of the Principia. See Edward Dolnick, “Sir Isaac Newton,” Boston Globe, July 27, 1987. Westfall used the same “wholly other” phrase in the preface to Never at Rest, p. x, where he discussed Newton’s uniqueness in a bit more detail. 320 “He cried out with admiration”: Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 473. 320 His fellow professors did not know: Ibid., p. 194.

Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. ———. “Newton and the Scientific Revolution.” In Stayer, ed., Newton’s Dream. ———. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. ———. “Short-Writing and the State of Newton’s Conscience, 1662 (1).” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 18, no. 1 (June 1963), pp. 10–16. White, Michael. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, MA: Perseus, 1997. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1925. Whiteside, D. T. “Isaac Newton: Birth of a Mathematician.”


pages: 495 words: 136,714

Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson

Albert Einstein, asset-backed security, bank run, British Empire, carried interest, clockwork universe, credit crunch, do well by doing good, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, experimental subject, failed state, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, income inequality, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land bank, market bubble, Money creation, open economy, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Republic of Letters, risk/return, side project, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine

THE TRICKS THAT SCHOOLMASTERS USED Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 132. THE “GENERATION OF FIGURES BY MOTION” Isaac Newton, in a document written as part of the conflict with Gottfried Leibniz on who first invented calculus, quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, 55n to chapter 4. THE “INFINITELY LITTLE LINES” Isaac Newton, Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, vol. 1, 1664–1666, D. T. Whiteside, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 382 et seq. AS HE TOLD THE STORY SIXTY YEARS LATER William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life (1752), MS/142, Royal Society Library, London, p. 15r. SUDDENLY, AN APPLE FELL No anecdotes about an apple survive from near the time Newton claims to have been inspired by its fall.

id=0AzP9WLLJLcC&pg=PA67&dq=zeno+achilles&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjFtcvXnurhAhVIwlkKHXQ3CocQ6AEINjAC#v=onepage&q=zeno%20achilles&f=false. BUT NEITHER PHILOSOPHICAL RIGOR NOR COMMON SENSE See Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 42. GALILEO KNEW THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING VITAL Quoted in Gleick, Isaac Newton, p. 41. NEWTON HIMSELF, IN HIS FIRST MONTHS AT WOOLSTHORPE Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 131. “THE CROOKEDNESS IN LINES” Isaac Newton, “Newton’s Waste Book,” http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/​view/​texts/​normalized/​NATP00221. BUT NEWTON’S THINKING IN THE LAST MONTHS OF 1665 The interplay between mechanical constructions of curves and Newton’s analytic approach is a gloss on Richard Westfall’s more technical exposition in Never at Rest, pp. 126–34.

I also consulted James Gleick’s treatment of the same material in Isaac Newton, pp. 54–59. My Newton and the Counterfeiter (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009) also discusses these events on pp. 15–20. HE “FOUND THEM ANSWER PRETTY NEARLY” Isaac Newton, draft of a letter to Pierre des Maiseaux, probably in the summer of 1718, quoted in I. Bernard Cohen, Introduction to Newton’s Principia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). Newton produced several drafts of this letter, many of which are cited in the notes to the version in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 6, 1713–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), document 1295 pp. 454–562.


pages: 407 words: 116,726

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method

., Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art (New York: Arno Press, 1980). 7. The Secret Fountain 167 Isaac Newton: For biographical information, see Gleick, Isaac Newton. See also Westfall, Never at Rest, and I. B. Cohen, “Isaac Newton,” in vol. 10 of Gillispie, Complete Dictionary, with amendments by G. E. Smith and W. Newman in vol. 23. For Newton’s mathematics, see Whiteside, The Mathematical Papers, vols. 1 and 2; Edwards, The Historical Development; Grattan-Guinness, From the Calculus; Rickey, “Isaac Newton”; Dunham, Journey Through Genius; Katz, History of Mathematics; Guicciardini, Reading the Principia; Dunham, The Calculus Gallery; Simmons, Calculus Gems; Guicciardini, Isaac Newton; Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History; and Burton, History of Mathematics. 168 “between straight and curved lines”: René Descartes, The Geometry of René Descartes: With a Facsimile of the First Edition, translated by David E.

Chapter 7 focuses on Hobbes as would-be geometer. 196 a “scab of symbols”: Quoted in Stillwell, Mathematics and Its History, 164. 196 “scurvy book”: Ibid. 196 not “worthy of public utterance”: Quoted in Guicciardini, Isaac Newton, 343. 196 “Our specious algebra”: Ibid. 8. Fictions of the Mind 199 “His name is Mr. Newton”: Letter from Isaac Barrow to John Collins, August 20, 1669, quoted in Gleick, Isaac Newton, 68. 199 “send me the proof”: Letter 158, from Leibniz to Oldenburg, May 2, 1676, in Turnbull, Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 4. For more on the Newton-Leibniz correspondence, see Mackinnon, “Newton’s Teaser.” Guicciardini, Isaac Newton, 354–61, offers a particularly clear and helpful analysis of the mathematical cat-and-mouse game taking place between Newton and Leibniz in the letters.

The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume 2, 1676–1687. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Wardhaugh, Benjamin. “Musical Logarithms in the Seventeenth Century: Descartes, Mercator, Newton.” Historia Mathematica 35 (2008): 19–36. Wasserman, Steven A., and Nicholas R. Cozzarelli. “Biochemical Topology: Applications to DNA Recombination and Replication.” Science 232, no. 4753 (1986): 951–60. Westfall, Richard S. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Whiteside, Derek T., ed. The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. ———.


pages: 1,199 words: 384,780

The system of the world by Neal Stephenson

bank run, British Empire, cellular automata, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, high net worth, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, land bank, large denomination, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, place-making, Snow Crash, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

MacDougall be found, I wonder?” “The Theater Royal, in Covent Garden, is getting ready to stage a new production entitled The Sack of Persepolis,” Catherine said, tentatively. “Say no more, Miss Barton.” Sir Isaac Newton’s House, St. Martin’s Street, London LATER THAT DAY “I’VE A SORT OF RIDDLE for you, to do with guineas,” was how Daniel ended the twenty-year silence between himself and Sir Isaac Newton. He had been fretting, ever since Enoch Root had turned up in his doorway in Massachusetts, over how to begin this conversation: what ponderous greeting would best suit the gravity of the occasion, how much time to spend reminiscing about student days in Cambridge, and whether to say anything about their last encounter, which had gone as badly as any social encounter, short of homicide, could go.

For it seems to me that if such Herculean efforts are to be made to practice a scheme, they were better directed to schemes that should enable our sea-captains to discover the Longitude anywhere.” Sir Isaac Newton’s answer comprised many many words, but contained no more than the following information: that one could do it by telling the time with an excellent sea-going chronometer, which no one knew how to make yet; or by watching the satellites of Jupiter through an excellent sea-going telescope, which no one knew how to make yet; or by looking at the position of the moon and comparing it against calculations derived from his, i.e., Sir Isaac Newton’s, lunar theory, which was not quite finished yet but would be coming out any minute now in a book.

“Even if I did, my lord, ’twould never stand; for the record now shows that the true butt at which Jack the Coiner aimed his shaft was not the Jewels but the Mint—to be specific, the Pyx. And how would I benefit from some compromise of the Pyx?” “How could anyone conceivably benefit from it?” Bolingbroke wanted to know. “It is of no account,” Isaac Newton broke in, “as the Pyx was never compromised!” “Sir Isaac Newton! We’ve not heard from you yet. For the benefit of those here who have never seen the Pyx, would you be so good as to explain its workings?” “It would be my pleasure, my lord,” said Newton, stepping forward, eluding the hand of the Marquis of Ravenscar who had groped forward, out of some instinct, trying to yank him back from the abyss.


The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

CHAPTER 2 Human Frailty Scientists are too contentious and too morally and intellectually fragile to follow any method consistently. AS THE MOON’S DISK CREPT across the face of the sun on May 29, 1919, a new science of gravity hung in the balance. Just a few years earlier, Albert Einstein had formulated his theory of general relativity, a conceptually radical replacement for the gravitational theory that made Isaac Newton famous at the beginning of modern science, more than two hundred years before. Whereas Newton held that massive bodies exert upon each other a “force of gravity,” Einstein said that they rather bend the space and time around them, giving it a characteristic curvature. When objects do their best to trace straight lines through this twisted medium, they move in a way that suggests the existence of gravitational force—but there is in fact no such thing.

Ernst Haeckel embellished his careful drawings of animal embryos around the same time to support his thesis that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—that a human embryo, for example, passes through stages in which it takes on forms more or less identical to those of fish embryos, then amphibian embryos, then bird embryos. Robert Millikan, in pulling together the data from which he inferred the electric charge of a single electron—work that earned him the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physics—omitted many measurements that did not “look right,” while claiming to have included everything. Even Isaac Newton manipulated certain empirical quantities to better fit his theories, tactics that in one case amounted, wrote his biographer Richard Westfall, to “nothing short of deliberate fraud.” There is one respect, I must note, in which Eddington and other modern scientists are almost exceptionlessly careful and methodical.

The war in Europe was over. Germany lay in ruins; France was triumphant; England, having executed its king, Charles I, was a republic. Over the silent battlefields settled a peace born of exhaustion. In the universities and learned societies, by contrast, the gravity wars were poised to begin. Isaac Newton was 7 years old. By the age of 11, he was ranked the second worst pupil in his class at King’s School in Grantham, Lincolnshire. At some point, however—possibly in reaction to his bullying by the third worst pupil—he threw himself into his studies, which drew him to Cambridge University’s Trinity College.


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A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

. … This Oeconomy depends on attractive power first discovered by the incomparable Sir Isaac Newton” (Keill, 1708, pp. v–vi, 8). 6 Boerhaave serves as another classic example of the kind of epigone that is instrumental in disseminating the ideas of the true cultural entrepreneurs, in his case Descartes and Newton. Famous and celebrated in his own days, his original contributions were few and middling, yet he helped spread the main cultural beliefs of the Enlightenment, not only in his own country but throughout Europe. 7 In his History of Astronomy, Smith wrote that “Such is the system of Sir Isaac Newton, a system whose parts are all more strictly connected together, than those of any other philosophical hypothesis …His principles, it must be acknowledged, have a degree of firmness and solidity that we should in vain look for in any other system.

—David Hume, 1742 Contents Acknowledgments ix Preface xiii Part I: Evolution, Culture, and Economic History Chapter 1: Culture and Economics 3 Chapter 2: Nature and Technology 16 Chapter 3: Cultural Evolution and Economics 22 Chapter 4: Choice-based Cultural Evolution 34 Chapter 5: Biases in Cultural Evolution 43 Part II: Cultural Entrepreneurs and Economic Change, 1500–1700 Chapter 6: Cultural Entrepreneurs and Choice-based Cultural Evolution 59 Chapter 7: Francis Bacon, Cultural Entrepreneur 70 Chapter 8: Isaac Newton, Cultural Entrepreneur 99 Part III: Innovation, Competition, and Pluralism in Europe, 1500–1700 Chapter 9: Cultural Choice in Action: Human Capital and Religion 119 Chapter 10: Cultural Change and the Growth of Useful Knowledge, 1500–1700 142 Chapter 11: Fragmentation, Competition, and Cultural Change 165 Chapter 12: Competition and the Republic of Letters 179 Part IV: Prelude to the Enlightenment Chapter 13: Puritanism and British Exceptionalism 227 Chapter 14: A Culture of Progress 247 Chapter 15: The Enlightenment and Economic Change 267 Part V: Cultural Change in the East and West Chapter 16: China and Europe 287 Chapter 17: China and the Enlightenment 321 Epilogue: Useful Knowledge and Economic Growth 339 References 343 Index 381 Acknowledgments This book had its origins in the Joseph Schumpeter lectures I delivered in Graz in November 2010 and I am deeply grateful to my hosts at the Schumpeter Society for their hospitality and penetrating comments at an early stage.

The deep significance of the institutions that governed the market for ideas resides here. In chapters 7 and 8, I will take a closer look at two of the cultural entrepreneurs whose influence I consider as supremely important for the rise of the Industrial Enlightenment and eventually the emergence of useful knowledge as the main engine of modern economic growth—Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. It should be made clear, however, that between 1500 and 1700, the European intellectual scene included other remarkable individuals, who dramatically changed the cultural menu of European society. Besides the obvious religious entrepreneurs such as Luther and Calvin, I could have easily picked Descartes or Spinoza as intellectuals whose work left an indelible print on the evolution of culture in Europe both on their contemporaries and future intellectuals.


pages: 289 words: 85,315

Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, kremlinology, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Wolfskehl Prize

T. 47 Mozans, H.J. 119 musical harmony, principles of 14–17 My Philosophical Development (Russell) 154 natural numbers 91 negative numbers 90–94 network formula 85–8 New York, subway graffiti 257 New York Times 254, 272–3, 282 Newton, Isaac 18, 47, 80, 81 Nixon, Richard Milhous 46–7 Noether, Emmy 110–11 nothingness, concept of 59 number line 92, 94–5, 185–6 numbers definition of 150, 152 relationships between 11 numerals, Indo-Arab 59–60 Oberwolfach symposium (1984) 215–19, 221 Olbers, Heinrich 115 order and chaos 17 overestimated prime conjecture 179 Paganini, Nicolò 63 parallelism, philosophy of 254, 257 parasites, life-cycles 106–7 particle physics 22–3 Pascal, Blaise 40, 43–4, 45–6 Penrose, Roger 198 Penrose tilings 198–9 People 274, 290–91 perfect numbers 11–13 philosopher, word coined by Pythagoras 10 pi (π) 17–18, 50–53, 166 Picturegoers, The (Lodge) 177–8 Pillow Problems (Dodgson) 138 Pinch, Richard 285 Plato 109 Poges, Arthur 37, 74 Poincaré, Jules Henri 199 points (dice game) 43 polynomials 237 Portraits from Memory (Russell) 160 prime numbers 70–71 almost primes 308 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 99–100 Germain primes 116 infinity of 100–101, 102–3 irregular primes 126–7, 177 practical applications 103–7 333,333,331 not prime 178 twin primes 308 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead) 156–7 probability 43–7 counter-intuitive 44–5 Problèmes plaisants et delectables (Bachet) 61 puzzles, compendiums of 138 Pythagoras abhors irrational numbers 50, 54–5 at Croton 9–10, 27–8 death 28 and mathematical proof 26 and musical harmony 14–17 and perfect numbers 12–13 and study of numbers 7 travels 7–8 Pythagoras’ equation 28 ‘cubed’ version 30–32 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 32, 65–6 whole number solutions 28–30 Pythagoras’ theorem 6–7, 19–20, 26, 333–4 Pythagorean Brotherhood 9–11, 13, 27–8, 49, 50, 108 Pythagorean triples 28–30, 65, 338 quadratic equations 236–7 quantum physics 162 quartic equations 237 quintic equations 237–8, 239–40, 245, 248–9 Ramanujan, Srinivasa 3 Raspail, François 242–3 rational numbers 11 rearrangement of equations 216 recipes, mathematical 8, 237 reductio ad absurdum 49–50, 53–4 reflectional symmetry 196 Reidemeister, Kurt 142 religion, and probability 46 Reynolds 323 Ribenboim, Paulo 144 Ribet, Ken 220, 229, 267, 270–71, 272, 276, 288–9, 304 Fermat Information Service 282 and significance of Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 221–3 Riemann hypothesis 73 river ratio 17–18 Rivest, Ronald 104 Rosetta stone 212 Rossi, Hugo 46–7 rotational symmetry 195–6 Rubin, Professor Karl 268–9, 300 Russell, Bertrand, 22, 44, 147, 153, 160 Russell’s paradox 152, 154–7 St Augustine (of Hippo) 12 Sam Loyd and his Puzzles: An Autobiographical Review 138 Samos, Greece 8–9 Sarnak, Peter 285–6, 291 Schlichting, Dr F. 144–6 scientific proof 21–2 scientific theories 22–3 scrambling and unscrambling messages 103–5, 168, 170–75 Segre 314 Selmer groups 287 Shamir, Adi 104 Shimura, Goro 193, 191–5, 202, 203, 206 relationship with Taniyama 205, 207, 209 and Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 209–10, 272, 274 Shimura-Taniyama conjecture see Taniyama–Shimura conjecture Silverman, Bob 284 Sir Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge 4–5, 266 Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of Ladies (Algarotti) 112 6, perfection of 11–12 Skewes, S. 179–80 Skewes’s number 180 sociable numbers 63–4 Socrates 109 Somerville, Mary 113 square, symmetries of 195–6 square-cube sandwiches 64, 184 square root of one 93 square root of two 53–4, 91–2, 312–4 strings and particles 23 vibrating 15–17, 16 Suzuki, Misako 207, 208 symmetry 195–202 Taniyama, Yutaka 190, 191–5, 202, 203 death 205, 207–8 influence of 209 and Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 202, 204–5 Taniyama–Shimura conjecture 205, 209–15 and Fermat’s Last Theorem 216–19, 221–3 Wiles and 215, 223, 225–31, 232, 258–61, 263–5, 274, 304 Taniyama-Weil conjecture see Taniyama–Shimura conjecture Tartaglia, Niccolò 40–41 Taylor, Richard 285, 292, 293, 296, 297, 299–300 Thales 26 Theano 9–10, 107–8 theorems 21, 71–2 Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour, The (von Neumann) 167 13 Lectures on Fermat’s Last Theorem (Ribenboim) 144 Thomson, J.

Various libraries and archives have gone out of their way to help me, and in particular I would like to thank Susan Oakes of the London Mathematical Society, Sandra Cumming of the Royal Society and Ian Stewart of Warwick University. I am also grateful to Jacquelyn Savani of Princeton University, Duncan McAngus, Jeremy Gray, Paul Balister and the Isaac Newton Institute for their help in finding research material. Thanks also go to Patrick Walsh, Christopher Potter, Bernadette Alves, Sanjida O’Connell and my parents for their comments and support throughout the last year. Finally, many of the interviews quoted in this book were obtained while I was working on a television documentary on the subject of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

The price he had to pay for his secrecy was that he had not previously discussed or tested any of his ideas with the mathematics community and therefore there was a significant chance that he had made some fundamental error. Ideally Wiles had wanted to spend more time going over his work to allow him to check fully his final manuscript. Then the unique opportunity arose to announce his discovery at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge and he abandoned caution. The sole aim of the institute’s existence is to bring together the world’s greatest intellects for a few weeks in order to hold seminars on a cutting-edge research topic of their choice. Situated on the outskirts of the university, away from students and other distractions, the building is especially designed to encourage the academics to concentrate on collaboration and brainstorming.


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Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Humankind was awakening from a dream of immobility to find itself in a waking fall, its planet plummeting through boundless space. The weight of authority that brought Galileo to his knees succeeded only in halting the growth of science in the Mediterranean. Thereafter, the great advances came in the north countries. The physics of the Copernican universe was to be elucidated by Isaac Newton, born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, on Christmas Day, 1642, the year of Galileo’s death. * Ruled not by a feudal aristocracy but by a thriving merchant class, Venice was relatively liberal, innovative, and inquisitive, an excellent place for a freethinker like Galileo. The difference was evident in the way the anatomy classes were conducted: The proscription against dissection, generally obeyed in Pisa, was circumvented at Padua by means of a laboratory table that could be lowered to an underground river, where corpses brought to the university by boat in the dark of night were raised into the hall for dissection in the advanced anatomy class.

The thoroughness and assurance with which he accomplished this task were such that his theory came to be regarded, for more than two centuries thereafter, as something close to the received word of God. Even today, when Newtonian dynamics is viewed as but a part of the broader canvas painted by Einstein’s relativity, most of us continue to think in Newtonian terms, and Newton’s laws still work well enough to guide spacecraft to the moon and planets. (“I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving now,” said astronaut Bill Anders, when asked by his son who was “driving” the Apollo 8 spacecraft carrying him to the moon.) Yet the man whose explication of the cosmos lives on in a billion minds was himself one of the strangest and most remotely inaccessible individuals who ever lived.

This he did, and three months later, in November, he sent Halley a paper that successfully derived all three of Kepler’s laws from the precept of universal gravitation obeying an inverse-square law. Halley, immediately recognizing the tremendous importance of Newton’s accomplishment, hastened to Cambridge and urged him to write a book on gravitation and the dynamics of the solar system. Thus was born Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World—the Principia. Work on the book took over Newton’s life. “Now I am upon this subject,” he wrote the astronomer John Flamsteed, in a letter soliciting data on the orbits of Saturn’s satellites, “I would gladly know the bottom of it before I publish my papers.”16 The effort only intensified his air of preoccupation.


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Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson

Danny Hillis, dark matter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Free Software Foundation, gentleman farmer, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion, short selling, short squeeze, Snow Crash, the scientific method, trade route, urban planning

He checked it again two months later. Nothing. At the time he assumed that Isaac had simply forgotten about it. Or perhaps he had stopped sinning! Years later, Daniel understood that neither guess was true. Isaac Newton had stopped believing himself capable of sin. This was a harsh judgment to pass on anyone—and the proverb went Judge not lest ye be judged. But its converse was that when you were treating with a man like Isaac Newton, the rashest and cruelest judge who ever lived, you must be sure and swift in your own judgments. Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony OCTOBER 12, 1713 Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d, In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate —MILTON, Paradise Lost LIKE A GOOD CARTESIAN who measures everything against a fixed point, Daniel Waterhouse thinks about whether or not to go back to England while keeping one eye, through a half-closed door, on his son: Godfrey William, the fixed stake that Daniel has driven into the ground after many decades’ wanderings.

To us both, opaque. What’s constituted so, only a pen Can penetrate. I have one here; let’s go. BOOK ONE Quicksilver Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations . . . may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be. —Roger Cotes, preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713 Boston Common OCTOBER 12, 1713, 10:33:52 A.M. ENOCH ROUNDS THE CORNER JUST as the executioner raises the noose above the woman’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place.

As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships. As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does from the North in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell.


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The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution by David Wootton

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, book value, British Empire, classic study, clockwork universe, Commentariolus, commoditize, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, interchangeable parts, invention of gunpowder, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mercator projection, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, QWERTY keyboard, Republic of Letters, social intelligence, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

. ———. ‘Alchemy versus Chemistry: The Etymological Origins of a Historiographic Mistake’. Early Science and Medicine 3 (1998): 32–65. Newton, Isaac. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Ed. HW Turnbull. 7 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77. ———. Isaac Newton’s Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy and Related Documents. Ed. IB Cohen. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958. ———. ‘A Letter of Mr Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors: Sent by the Author to the Publisher From Cambridge, Febr. 6. 1671/72; in Order to be Communicated to the R.

.: Harvard University Press, 1953: 227–45. Snobelen, Stephen D. ‘ “God of Gods, and Lord of Lords”: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia’. Osiris 16 (2001): 169–208. ———. ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite’. British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 381–419. ———. ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe’. In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought. Ed. CL Firestone and N Jacobs. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012: 49–184. ———. ‘William Whiston, Isaac Newton and the Crisis of Publicity’. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35 (2004): 573–603.

All men and nations do that according to the measure of their ignorance.’41 10 Hypotheses/Theories . . . an accompt of a Philosophicall discovery . . . being in my Judgment the oddest if not the most considerable detectioni which hath hitherto beene made in the operations of Nature. – Isaac Newton to Henry Oldenburg, 18 January 1672 § 1 ‘In the beginning of the Year 1666’ Isaac Newton had just turned twenty-three (his birthday was Christmas Day). The year before, he had obtained his BA degree; a year or so later he began to develop his theory of gravity; less than four years later, in October 1669, he became Lucasian professor of mathematics (at the time the only chair in mathematics at Cambridge), and exactly four years later, in the beginning of 1670, he gave his first university lectures, on the subject of optics.


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The Eureka Factor by John Kounios

active measures, Albert Einstein, Bluma Zeigarnik, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, classic study, deliberate practice, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flynn Effect, functional fixedness, Google Hangouts, impulse control, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, William of Occam

Maddening Creativity 1 Historical information relevant to the story of Sir Isaac Newton and the apple can be found in Steve Connor, “The Core of Truth Behind Sir Isaac Newton’s Apple,” The Independent, January 18, 2010. The quote from Humphrey Newton, Isaac Newton’s secretary and copyist, can be found on page 406 of S. Westphall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The quote from James Gleick came from an episode of the BBC Television series Horizon entitled “Isaac Newton: The Last Magician.” The quote by Milo Keynes about Sir Isaac Newton’s personality is from M. Keynes, “The Personality of Isaac Newton,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 49 (1995): 1–56.

It’s the sudden experience of comprehending something that you didn’t understand before, thinking about a familiar thing in a novel way, or combining familiar things to form something new. Insights are quantum leaps of thought, creative breakthroughs that power our lives and our history. Insight conveyed a theory of gravity to Sir Isaac Newton, the melody of a Beatles ballad to Sir Paul McCartney, and an understanding of the cause of human suffering to the Buddha. Nearly everyone has had aha moments of sudden clarity. They can and do change our lives. Much has been written purporting to explain how insight works and how you can make it work better.

But there is another source of evidence for the idea that insightfulness is a relatively stable characteristic. It seems that insightfulness is a blood relative of madness, and madness is firmly rooted in one’s biology. MADDENING CREATIVITY * * * It would be difficult to find an informed person who would disagree with the notion that Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was one of the greatest geniuses ever to walk among mere mortals. His contributions to physics (optics and classical mechanics) and mathematics (calculus) are monumental and seminal, securing him a permanent place in the pantheon of great achievements. Sir Isaac also had the distinction of experiencing the second most celebrated aha moment in scientific history (after Archimedes, a genius of comparable stature).


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To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

., General Introduction to Volume 20, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968), pp. xi–xii. 2. Ibid., Volume 2, footnote, pp. 206–7; and Volume 3, pp. 6–7. 3. See, for example, Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest—A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980), Chapter 14. 4. Peter Galison, How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Ill., 1987). 5. Quoted in Westfall, Never at Rest, p. 143. 6. Quoted in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles Coulston Gillespie (Scribner, New York, 1970), Volume 6, p. 485. 7. Quoted in James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Pantheon, New York, 2003), p. 120. 8.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1956). Martin Luther, Table Talk, trans. W. Hazlitt (H. G. Bohn, London, 1857). Moses ben Maimon, Guide to the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedländer, 2nd ed. (Routledge, London, 1919). Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, ed. D. Thomas Whiteside (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968). , Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Florian Cajori, rev. trans. Andrew Motte (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962). , Opticks, or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (Dover, New York, 1952, based on 4th ed., London, 1730)

Today we understand that the precession of the equinoxes is caused by a wobble of the Earth’s axis (like the wobble of the axis of a spinning top) around a direction perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, with the angle between this direction and the Earth’s axis remaining nearly fixed at 23.5°. The equinoxes are the dates when the line separating the Earth and the Sun is perpendicular to the Earth’s axis, so a wobble of the Earth’s axis causes the equinoxes to precess. We will see in Chapter 14 that this wobble was first explained by Isaac Newton, as an effect of the gravitational attraction of the Sun and Moon for the equatorial bulge of the Earth. It actually takes 25,727 years for the Earth’s axis to wobble by a full 360°. It is remarkable how accurately the work of Hipparchus predicted this great span of time. (By the way, it is the precession of the equinoxes that explains why ancient navigators had to judge the direction of north from the position in the sky of constellations near the north celestial pole, rather from the position of the North Star, Polaris.


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Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Brownian motion, cellular automata, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Future Shock, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, music of the spheres, Myron Scholes, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Russell's paradox, seminal paper, Thales of Miletus, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, traveling salesman

Mathematics under the Microscope. http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/%7Eavb/micromathematics/downloads. Brewster, D. 1831. The Life of Sir Isaac Newton (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street). Bukowski, J. 2008. The College Mathematics Journal, 39(1), 2. Burger, E. B., and Starbird, M. 2005. Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton). Burkert, W. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Cajori, F. 1926. The American Mathematical Monthly, 33(8), 397. ———. 1928. In The History of Science Society. Sir Isaac Newton 1727–1927: A Bicentenary Evaluation of His Work (Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company).

This unsurpassed genius had more opportunities to experience the “pleasure of discovery” than probably any other individual in the history of the human race. Figure 26 And There Was Light The great eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was thirty-nine years old when Isaac Newton (1642–1727) died (figure 27 shows Newton’s tomb inside Westminster Abbey). In a well-known couplet, Pope attempted to encapsulate Newton’s achievements: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! And all was light. Almost a hundred years after Newton’s death, Lord Byron (1788–1824) added in his epic poem Don Juan the lines: And this is the sole mortal who could grapple, Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.

How was that masterpiece—Principia—born? I Began to Think of Gravity Extending to the Orb of the Moon William Stukeley (1687–1765), an antiquary and physician who was Newton’s friend (in spite of the more than four decades in age separating them), eventually became the great scientist’s first biographer. In his Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life we find an account of one of the most celebrated legends in the history of science: On 15 April 1726 I paid a visit to Sir Isaac at his lodgings in Orbels buildings in Kensington, dined with him and spent the whole day with him, alone…After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea, under the shade of some apple trees, only he and myself.


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Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

Jobs had no idea that those engineers held the key to rescuing him from the Moses Trap. And it would have nothing to do with their machine. ISAAC NEWTON VS. STEVE JOBS: A BRIEF INTERLUDE Stories of great breakthroughs tend to coalesce around one person, one genius, and often one moment. Those stories are fun to tell and easy to digest. Occasionally they are true. More often, they contain a kernel of truth, but omit a much richer and more interesting picture. Isaac Newton, for example, is often celebrated for discovering universal gravity, explaining the motion of the planets, and inventing calculus. But well before Newton’s Principia, it was Johannes Kepler who first suggested the idea of a force from the sun driving the motion of the planets, Robert Hooke who first suggested a principle of universal gravity, Christiaan Huygens who showed that circular motion generates a centrifugal force, many who used Huygens’s law to derive the now-familiar form of gravity, Giovanni Borelli who explained the elliptical motion of Jupiter’s moons using gravitational forces, John Wallis and others who created the differential mathematics Newton used, and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus in the form we use today.

Smith analyzes competing theories of planetary motion and ends with a deep bow to Newton, whose theory of gravity he describes as “the greatest discovery that ever was made by man.” (Newton worship was all the rage at the time. For a taste, see the wonderfully titled Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies.) The complete works of Isaac Newton (abridged), 1739 The idea of an underlying force that can explain complex behaviors, as gravity explained the motion of planets and tides, fascinated Smith. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) proposes an underlying force that explains how humans behave.

And then we’ll see how small changes in structure, rather than culture, can transform the behavior of groups, the same way a small change in temperature can transform rigid ice to flowing water. Which will give all of us the tools to become the initiators, not the victims, of innovative surprise. Along the way, you will learn how chickens saved millions of lives, what James Bond and Lipitor have in common, and where Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs got their ideas. I’ve always appreciated authors who explain their points simply, right up front. So here’s the argument in brief: 1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy. 2. Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries. 3.


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AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

This system, called the “Trial of the Pyx,” was designed to prevent fraud at the Royal Mint, where English money was manufactured. It is fascinating precisely because it failed: it missed anomalies left and right, for centuries on end, playing an important yet underappreciated role in an economic crisis that caused widespread suffering and anger. And in 1696, the person at the center of it all was Isaac Newton. Yes, that Isaac Newton—inventor of calculus, explainer of gravity, and the man immortalized in Alexander Pope’s famous couplet: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light.” In 1696, Newton was a 54-year-old scientific rock star, with a professorship at Cambridge guaranteed for life.

No doubt her great-grandfather the admiral would have been proud. Through her efforts to bring people and machines a bit closer together through language, Grace Hopper played an enormous role in inventing the modern world. 5 THE GENIUS AT THE ROYAL MINT Real-time monitoring, from sports to policing to financial fraud: what Isaac Newton’s worst mathematical mistake can teach you about the search for anomalies in massive data sets. IF YOU’RE AN NFL fan, and you live outside a narrow strip of land from mid-Connecticut to Maine, then you probably view the New England Patriots—the most successful football team of the last 15 years—with a mix of peevishness and suspicion.

A late-seventeenth-century crisis in the English economy, in which the Mint played a subtle but fundamental role. 2. The Great Recoinage of 1696, a drastic step in English monetary policy designed to stanch the crisis, and which Newton had to rescue from disaster. 3. The importance of statistical variability in detecting anomalies—the subject of the worst mathematical mistake that Newton ever made. Isaac Newton’s Second Career Newton arrived at the Royal Mint in 1696 in the middle of a full-fledged currency crisis, one that threatened to bring England’s economy grinding to a halt. To appreciate Newton’s experience at the Mint, you have to understand the roots of that crisis. The problem was this: by 1696, English money had been disappearing from circulation for at least three decades.


Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability With Solutions by Frederick Mosteller

Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, stochastic process

Isaac Newlon Helps Samuel Pepys Pepys wrote Newton to ask which of three events is more likely: that a person get (a) at least I six when 6 dice are rolled, (b) at least 2 sixes when 12 dice are rolled, or (c) at least 3 sixes when 18 dice are rolled What is the answer? Solution for Isaac Newton Helps Samuel Pepys Yes, Samuel Pepys wrote Isaac Newton a long, complicated letter about a wager he planned to make. To decide which option was the favorable one, Pepys needed the answer to the above question. You may wish to read the correspondence in American Statistician, Vol. 14, No.4, Oct., 1960, 33 pp. 27-30, "Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton, and Probability," discussion by Emil D. ScheIl in "Questions and Answers," edited by Ernest Rubin; and further comment in the issue of Feb., 1961, Vol. 15, No.

Craps An experiment in personal taste for money Silent cooperation Quo vadis? . The prisoner's dilemma 14. Collecting coupons, including Euler's approximation for harmonic sums 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. Twin knights . An even split at coin tossing, including Stirling's approximation Isaac Newton helps Samuel Pepys The three-cornered duel Should you sample with or without replacement? . The ballot box Ties in matching pennies The unfair subway Lengths of random chords The hurried duelers. Catching the cautious counterfeiter Catching the greedy counterfeiter, including the Poisson distribution.

(b) Replace 8 by 2B in the above problem. Now what is the chance that they meet? 18. An Even Split at Coin Tossing When 100 coins are tossed, what is the probability that exactly 50 are heads? -According to Arthurian legend, they were so evenly matched that on another occasion they slew each other. 5 19. Isaac Newton Helps Samuel Pepys Pepys wrote Newton to ask which of three events is more likely: that a person get (a) at least 1 six when 6 dice are rolled, (b) at least 2 sixes when 12 dice are rolled, or (c) at least 3 sixes when 18 dice are rolled. What is the answer? 20. The Three-Cornered Duel A, B, and C are to fight a three-cornered pistol duel.


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Infinite Ascent: A Short History of Mathematics by David Berlinski

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Douglas Hofstadter, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam

For a very long time, the Elements was known to every educated man and woman, so much so that when, seven centuries after Euclid’s death, a philosopher addressing a gathering of Roman intellectuals asked slyly “how to construct an equilateral triangle given a straight line,” the company at once caught the reference to the very first proposition of the Elements, and with the satisfaction of men congratulating one another for being well read, broke into Greek in order to comment on the masterpiece that had formed their character. Warm throaty chuckles all around. When, in the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton completed his majestic Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and so created the first and the greatest of physical theories, he chose to express his thoughts in the language of Euclidean geometry, covering up as many traces of his own mathematical inventions as he could, so great was Euclid’s authority still.

If this is so, the universe must be filled either with material objects or with structures capable of placing material objects in contact with one another. Such are the Cartesian vortices. In Descartes’ view, it is the various vortices, whose effects resemble on a grand scale the spiral sweep of bathwater swirling an errant bar of soap drainward, that brings about the required contact. Isaac Newton demolished Cartesian physics with all the immense power of his genius. He did nothing to assuage the Cartesian scruple about action at a distance, and having with a snort of derision dismissed the Cartesian vortices, he replaced them with the force of universal gravitation, which acts at a distance and throughout the whole of space.

Many mathematicians had a hand in the development of the calculus—Gilles Personne de Roberval, Pierre de Fermat, Isaac Barrow, Bonaventura Cavalieri, John Wallis—and every one has acquired a contemporary scholar willing to insist that his boy had seen it all along; but it is Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton who are the most closely associated with the pause between heartbeats when everything changed. It is the second half of the seventeenth century. Shall we say roughly 1680 or so? Time has long since promoted both Newton and Leibniz into the pantheon of the great explorers. Like two immense polar bears, they remain forever frozen on the tundra of time.


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Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

Chapter Two Physics before Schrödinger The physics that Schrödinger learned as an undergraduate rested, like a tripod, on three legs: the understanding of mechanics developed by Isaac Newton; the understanding of electromagnetism developed by James Clerk Maxwell; and the understanding of thermodynamics to which Ludwig Boltzmann was a major contributor. He was taught nothing about the new ideas of Albert Einstein, whose special theory of relativity was only published in 1905, and very little about Max Planck’s investigation of electromagnetic radiation, published in 1900, which came to be seen as the birth of quantum theory. For our purposes, physics before Schrödinger means physics before 1900. And it begins with Isaac Newton. Newton and the world of particles Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is widely regarded as the founder of modern science.

.), Collected Papers on Wave Mechanics (London and Glasgow: Blackie, 1928) van der Waerden, B. L. (ed.), Sources of Quantum Mechanics (New York: Dover, 1968) Weber, Robert, Pioneers of Science, 2nd edn (Bristol: Adam Hilger/Institute of Physics, 1988) Westfall, Richard, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); a shorter version of this book was published by Cambridge University Press in 1993 under the title The Life of Isaac Newton Wheeler, John, and Wojciech Zurek (eds), Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) Woolf, Harry (ed.), Some Strangeness in the Proportion (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1980) Zeilinger, Anton, Dance of the Photons (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2010) Index action at a distance Aharonov, Yakir Aigentler, Henriette von Alpbach American Philosophical Society Anderson, Carl Annalen der Physik Annales de physique anti-particles Arosa Arzberger, Hans Arzberger, Rhoda (née Bauer, aunt) Aspect, Alain atoms: Bohr model; Boltzmann’s work; concept; Copenhagen Interpretation; decoherence; Einstein’s work; entanglement experiments; “green pamphlet”; Mach’s view; Maxwell’s work; nuclear model; Planck’s work; Poincaré’s work; quantum chemistry; quantum computing; quantum physics; quantum spin of electron; quantum teleportation experiments; Rutherford’s work; Schrödinger’s work; structure Austria: Anschluss (1938); army; First World War and aftermath; International Atomic Energy Agency representation; Nazism; religion; Schrödinger’s flight from; Schrödinger’s return to; Second World War aftermath Austria-Hungary Austrian Empire Austrian Physical Society Baird, John Logie Ballot, Christoph Buys Bamberger, Emily (Minnie, née Bauer, aunt) Bamberger, Helga (cousin) Bamberger, Max Bär, Richard Bauer, Alexander (grandfather) Bauer, Alexander (great-grandfather) Bauer, Emily (Minnie, aunt), see Bamberger Bauer, Emily (Minnie, née Russell, grandmother) Bauer, Friedrich (Fritz) Bauer, Georgie, see Schrödinger Bauer, Johanna (Hansi), see Bohm Bauer, Josepha (née Wittmann-Denglass, great-grandmother) Bauer, Rhoda (aunt), see Arzberger BBC Becquerel, Henri Bell, John Bell’s inequality Bennett, Charles Berlin: Academy of Sciences; Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry; Schrödinger’s departure; Schrödinger’s professorship; Schrödinger’s work; University of Bernstein, Jeremy Bertel, Annemarie (Anny), see Schrödinger Besso, Michele birds, vision Bitbol, Michel Blackett, Patrick Blair, Linda Bloch, Felix Bohm, David Bohm, Franz Bohm, Johanna (Hansi, née Bauer): escape from Austria to London; escape from Germany to London; marriage; memories of Schrödinger; pregnancy; relationship with Schrödinger; in Vienna Bohr, Niels: on collapse of wave function; on complementarity; Copenhagen Institute; Copenhagen Interpretation; Einstein’s views of his work; Festival; honours; influence; “Light and Life” lecture; model of the atom; Nobel Prize; quantization rules; relationship with Schrödinger; Schrödinger’s views of his work; work with Heisenberg Boltzmann, Ludwig: background; career; depression; education; on entropy; influence on Schrödinger; on international nature of physics; marriage; relationship with Mach; research; statistical approach; Stefan–Boltzmann Law of black body radiation; suicide; work on atoms; work on thermodynamics Born, Max: background and education; in Cambridge; career; on chance and probability; on Copenhagen school; on Dirac’s work; Edinburgh professorship; in Göttingen; Heisenberg’s studies; in Italy; matrix mechanics; Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance; Nobel controversy; Nobel Prize; on quantum mechanics; quantum revolution; relationship with Schrödinger; retirement; sacked under Nazis; Schrödinger’s response to his work; statistics; on von Neumann’s work; work on wave function Bose, Satyendra Nath Bose–Einstein statistics bosons Bragg, Lawrence Bragg, William Braunizer, Andreas (grandson) Braunizer, Arnulf Braunizer, Ruth (née March, daughter): in Belgium; birth; birth of son; care of Arthur; in Dublin; in Graz; half-sisters; in Innsbruck; marriage; in Oxford; pregnancy; relationship with Anny; relationship with father; relationship with mother Brecht, Bertolt Breslau Bristol University Brown, Robert Browne, Monsignor Paddy Brownian motion Bunsen, Robert Cahill & Company California: Institute of Technology; University of Cambridge: Born in; Cavendish Laboratory; Heisenberg’s lectures; Maxwell at; Newton at; Philosophical Society; Schrödinger’s visits; Tarner Lectures Cambridge University Press (CUP) “Can Quantum Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?”

Our special thanks go to the following people who and places that helped us, over the years, in our search for Schrödinger: Michel Bitbol; Dominic Byrne; John Cramer; Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; Einstein Archive, Princeton; Johns Hopkins University Archive; Sir William McCrea; Oxford University Archive; Rudolf Peierls; Terry Rudolph; Schrödinger Archive, Alpbach; Schrödinger Archive, Vienna; Christine Sutton; University of Berlin Archive; University of Wisconsin Archive; Vienna University Archive. Introduction It’s Not Rocket Science Rocket science is the purest expression of the laws of physics spelled out by Isaac Newton more than three hundred years ago, often referred to as “classical” science. Newton explained that any object stays still or moves in a straight line at constant speed unless it is affected by an outside force, such as gravity. He taught us that if you push something it pushes back—action and reaction are equal and opposite, as when a rifle kicks back against your shoulder while the bullet flies off in the opposite direction.


pages: 128 words: 38,963

Longitude by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, British Empire, clockwork universe, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius

Seafaring men such as Captain William Bligh of the Bounty and the great circumnavigator Captain James Cook, who made three long voyages of exploration and experimentation before his violent death in Hawaii, took the more promising methods to sea to test their accuracy and practicability. Renowned astronomers approached the longitude challenge by appealing to the clockwork universe: Galileo Galilei, Jean Dominique Cassini, Christiaan Huygens, Sir Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, of comet fame, all entreated the moon and stars for help. Palatial observatories were founded at Paris, London, and Berlin for the express purpose of determining longitude by the heavens. Meanwhile, lesser minds devised schemes that depended on the yelps of wounded dogs, or the cannon blasts of signal ships strategically anchored—somehow—on the open ocean.

Flamsteed took up residence the following May (in a building still called Flamsteed House today) and collected enough instruments to get to work in earnest by October. He toiled at his task for more than four decades. The excellent star catalog he compiled was published posthumously in 1725. By then, Sir Isaac Newton had begun to subdue the confusion over the moon’s motion with his theory of gravitation. This progress bolstered the dream that the heavens would one day reveal longitude. Meanwhile, far from the hilltop haunts of astronomers, craftsmen and clockmakers pursued an alternate path to a longitude solution.

Admiral Shovell’s disastrous multishipwreck on the Scilly Isles after the turn of the eighteenth century intensified the pressure to solve the longitude problem. Two infamous entrants into the fray in the aftermath of this accident were William Whiston and Humphrey Ditton, mathematicians and friends, who often engaged each other in wide-ranging discussions. Whiston had already succeeded his mentor, Isaac Newton, as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge—and then lost the post on account of his unorthodox religious views, such as his natural explanation for Noah’s flood. Ditton served as master of the mathematics school at Christ’s Hospital, London. In a long afternoon of pleasant conversation, this pair hit on a scheme for solving the longitude problem.


A Second Chance by Jodi Taylor

Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial independence, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, out of africa, publish or perish, trade route

A Second Chance A novel by Jodi Taylor Warning: This product contains nuts. St Mary’s is back and nothing is going right for Max. Once again, it’s just one damned thing after another. The action jumps from an encounter with a mirror-stealing Isaac Newton to the bloody battlefield at Agincourt. Discover how a simple fact-finding assignment to witness the ancient and murderous cheese- rolling ceremony in Gloucester can result in CBC – concussion by cheese. The long awaited jump to Bronze Age Troy ends in personal catastrophe for Max and just when it seems things couldn’t get any worse – it’s back to the Cretaceous Period again to confront an old enemy who has nothing to lose.

And what does he have to do with us?’ ‘Oh, you’ll love him, Max. He’s a really decent old buffer. He did a lot of the background science stuff when the Boss was setting up St Mary’s and now, finally, he’s retiring, and the Boss is giving him this jump as a going-away present. Apparently, his big ambition has always been to meet Isaac Newton – a big hero of his – and the Boss said yes. So, tomorrow, a quick dash to seventeenth-century Cambridge and a glimpse of the great man. Nothing to it.’ ‘Aha!’ I said, indulging in Olympic standard straw-clutching, ‘I’ve already done that period. In 1666 I was in Mauritius chasing dodos, so I can’t go.

God bless my soul,’ over and over again, while his senses got to grips with the sights, sounds, and, especially, the smells of 17th-century Cambridge. He pulled himself together eventually. ‘Sorry, Max. That was unprofessional of me.’ ‘Not at all, Eddie. On my first jump I was turning cartwheels.’ We set off for Trinity College, where a young Fellow named Isaac Newton was, with luck, about to make an appearance. Cambridge was every bit as wet and dreary as I thought it would be. I shivered inside my cloak as we picked our way carefully along Trinity Street, easing our way through the crowds. The place was packed as students, townspeople, tradesmen, and livestock noisily shoved their way along the uneven cobbles.


pages: 420 words: 124,202

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, delayed gratification, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, fudge factor, full employment, Higgs boson, independent contractor, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, moral hazard, Network effects, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, spinning jenny, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, zero-sum game, éminence grise

For all his extraordinary range of achievements (not only was he Christopher Wren’s surveyor and colleague during the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, an early advocate of evolutionary theory, the first to see that organic matter was made up of the building blocks that he named “cells,” and probably England’s most gifted mathematician,16 able to turn his hand to everything from describing the catenary curve of the ideal arch to the best way to trim sails), he is frequently remembered today, as he was known during his lifetime, as the world’s best second fiddle. The shadow cast by Wren, by Boyle, and even by Isaac Newton, with whom Hooke engaged in a long-running and ultimately futile dispute over the authorship of the law of gravitational attraction, is unaccountable without considering the class difference between them. James Aubrey, the seventeenth-century memoirist, paid Hooke something of a backhanded compliment when he called him “the best Mechanick this day in the world.”17 When the informal assembly at Oxford whose meetings were generally led by the clergyman John Wilkins was chartered, two years after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, as the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, each Fellow was explicitly to be a “Gentleman, free, and unconfin’d.”18 Hooke’s need to make a living disqualified him from fellowship, though his talent made him indispensable.

The two evidently hit it off, and Papin joined Boyle as his secretary, though a better term would have been “experimental assistant.” While Papin was no Hooke (this is scarcely an insult: by 1675, Hooke had explained the twinkling of stars, described the earth’s elliptical orbit, rebuilt the fire-destroyed Royal College of Physicians, disputed with Sir Isaac Newton over the discovery of the diffraction of light, and invented the anemometer, and he still had twenty productive years in front of him), he did excel at both experimental design and mechanical gadgetry. Most famously, in 1681 he invented a steam digester, or “machine for softening bones” as he described it, which was essentially a pressure cooker designed to clean bones rapidly for medical study.

Bad luck for the universities, good luck for the nation. Only decades after a tidal wave of scientific knowledge started washing over Britain—the first English translation of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences was published in the 1660s, nearly seventy years before an English edition of the Principia of Isaac Newton (Latin edition, 1687)—some of the nation’s most ambitious and practical young were excluded from Oxford and Cambridge. At the same time that he chartered the world’s first scientific society, Charles II had created an entire generation of dissenting intellectuals uncontrolled by his kingdom’s ever more technophobic universities.


pages: 778 words: 227,196

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Entretiens sur la Nature, les Sciences, les Métamorhphoses de la Terre et du Ciel, l’Humanité, l’Ame, et la Vie eternelle. That certainly covered it. ♣ What Coleridge actually wrote was this. ‘My opinion is this-that deep Thinking is only attainable by a man of deep Feeling, and that all Truth is a species of Revelation. The more I understand of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, the more boldly I dare utter to my own mind…that I believe the Souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton…Mind in his system is always passive-a lazy Looker-on on an external World. If the mind be not passive, if indeed it be made in God’s Image, and that too in the sublimest sense-the image of the Creator-there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system’ (23 March 1801, Letters, Vol. 2, p.709).

This is the time I have called the Age of Wonder, and with any luck we have not yet quite outgrown it. The idea of the exploratory voyage, often lonely and perilous, is in one form or another a central and defining metaphor of Romantic science. That is how William Wordsworth brilliantly transformed the great Enlightenment image of Sir Isaac Newton into a Romantic one. While a university student in the 1780s Wordsworth had often contemplated the full-size marble statue of Newton, with his severely close-cropped hair, that still dominates the stone-flagged entrance hall to the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. As Wordsworth originally put it, he could see, a few yards from his bedroom window, over the brick wall of St John’s College, The Antechapel, where the Statue stood Of Newton, with his Prism and silent Face.

This was a tantalising prospect for both of them. Davy had one further scientific seduction to offer. He confided to Jane that the Prince Regent was about to confer a knighthood upon him, for services to chemistry, in the forthcoming Birthday Honours. It would be the first scientific knighthood of the Regency, indeed the first since Sir Isaac Newton. She need no longer feel ashamed of him at the dinner tables of Mayfair. At the third time of asking, Davy’s proposal of marriage to Jane Apreece was at last accepted. He reacted with genuine rapture. T have passed a night sleepless from excess of happiness. It seems to me as if I began to live only a few hours ago…The great future object of my life will be your happiness…My happiness will be entirely in your will.’20 Congratulations were now in order, and Sir Joseph Banks was pleased and rather amused that one of his young scientific protégés had made such a fine-and wealthy-match: ‘She has fallen in love with Science and marries him in order to obtain a footing in the Academic Groves…It will give to Science a new kind of eclat; we want nothing so much as the countenance of the ladies to increase our popularity.’21 Banks evidently teased the bridegroom in a worldly way.


pages: 855 words: 178,507

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

It seemed finished—in every edition. It has no equivalent in any other language. Even so, the experts responsible for the third edition (“in Eighteen Volumes, Greatly Improved”), a full century after Isaac Newton’s Principia, could not bring themselves to endorse his, or any, theory of gravity, or gravitation. “There have been great disputes,” the Britannica stated. Many eminent philosophers, and among the rest Sir Isaac Newton himself, have considered it as the first of all second causes; an incorporeal or spiritual substance, which never can be perceived any other way than by its effects; an universal property of matter, &c.

Yaunde language YouTube ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK Chaos: Making a New Science Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier Isaac Newton A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Gleick was born in New York City in 1954. His previous books include Chaos and Genius, both Pulitzer Prize finalists and National Book Award nominees. His last book, Isaac Newton, was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. They have been translated into more than twenty languages. His Web site is at www.around.com. ILLUSTRATION CREDITS 4.1 Photograph courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 6.1 The New York Times Archive/Redux 7.1 Copyright Robert Lord 7.2 Reprinted with permission from Journal Franklin Institute, vol. 262, E.

A few engineers, especially in the telephone labs, began speaking of information. They used the word in a way suggesting something technical: quantity of information, or measure of information. Shannon adopted this usage. For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying.


pages: 564 words: 168,696

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

For the first time, scientific thinkers in sixteenth-century Europe started to challenge ancient wisdom. Copernicus was followed by other pioneers of what is often called the ‘scientific revolution’ – the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who first observed the moons of Jupiter in 1609, and the English mathematician Isaac Newton, who set out the laws of motion in 1687. Most historians would then tell you that this pattern continued for the next 400 years. The history of modern science, as traditionally told, is a story focused almost exclusively on men like Charles Darwin, the nineteenth-century British naturalist who advanced the theory of evolution by natural selection, and Albert Einstein, the twentieth-century German physicist who proposed the theory of special relativity.

In Italy, Galileo Galilei observed the moons of Jupiter, whilst in England, Robert Boyle first described the behaviour of gases. In France, René Descartes developed a new way of doing geometry, whilst in Holland, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first observed bacteria under a microscope. Typically, this story culminates with the work of Isaac Newton, the great English mathematician who set out the laws of motion in 1687.7 Historians have long argued over the nature and causes of the scientific revolution. Some see this as a period of intellectual advance, one in which a few lone geniuses made new observations and challenged medieval superstition.

Over the next 200 years, European empires began to expand more and more aggressively, particularly in Asia and Africa. This, coupled with the gradual weakening of the Ottomans, the Songhay, the Ming, and the Mughals, brought about the next great transformation in the history of science. The Silk Road couldn’t go on forever. Part Two Empire and Enlightenment, c. 1650–1800 3.Newton’s Slaves Isaac Newton invested in the slave trade. In the early eighteenth century, Newton – the famous English mathematician – purchased over £20,000 of shares in the South Sea Company. This was an incredible sum of money, equivalent to well over £2 million today. The South Sea Company had been established in 1711 to help raise funds to pay off the British national debt, which was soaring following years of expensive wars with France and Spain.


pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 87. 9. John McPhee, Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 108, 104. 10. Stephen D. Snobelen, “Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite,” British Journal for the History of Science 32, no. 4 (1999): 381–419. 11. Isaac Newton to Robert Bentley, December 10, 1692, 189.R.4.47, ff. 4A–5, Trinity College Library, Cambridge. 12. Sir Isaac Newton, Newton’s System of the World, translated by Andrew Motte and edited by N. W. Chittenden (New York: Geo. P. Putnam, 1850), 486. 13. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Essays, edited and translated by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 329. 14.

The earth might seem different now in looks, vegetation, animal population, coastlines, and terrain, but, ignoring those slow changes in appearance, it has always worked in the same way that it works now. Many cultures claimed starting times for time. For the Mayans, it was August 13, 3114 BC, as translated in Gregorian calendar dating. In the seventeenth century, the impression was that the universe is infinite in size and therefore time must also be infinite. Isaac Newton certainly believed that the universe is infinite. Lacking any historical records dating back further than the Trojan War or the great pyramids, many intelligent thinkers of Newton’s generation believed that—if not the universe—then at least the earth must have been formed recently. It’s difficult to know Newton’s religious belief; some biographers say that he was a heretic and that he surely did not believe that God recently created the planet we live on.10 To him, the earth was formed by an accident of gravity and it just happened to fall into a particular spin and orbit giving us, roughly, a 365-day year.

An asteroid could hit it at any time. With the world being so much older, we can feel that it has survived for such an extraordinarily long time without too many overwhelming consequences that the chances of surviving further are quite certain, if we treat it wisely, and don’t blow it up ourselves. Isaac Newton felt that true mathematical time was the mover of everything from stars to humans. To him it was some continuously flowing, enigmatic, forward-direction driver, an invisible river that propels everything to happen in lockstep with the myriad actions and events of the universe. He believed that, somehow, we can measure that mathematical time through observations of motion, as if the mysterious driver could never be known but its consequences could be measured.


pages: 349 words: 27,507

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

The fluently written article “Newton and the Eötvös Experiment” by Curtis Wilson, in his collected works Astronomy from Kepler to Newton: Historical Studies, (London: Variorum Reprints, 1989), is especially good on the subtleties Newton still had to work through. Chapter five of Westfall’s Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) further examines Newton’s actual accomplishments during the plague years in Lincolnshire; see also The “Annus Mirabilis” of Sir Isaac Newton, 1666-1966, ed. Robert Palter (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970). 86 They would learn what was on offer . . . : What I like about Veblen is that he concentrates on a particular so- notes ciointellectual cusp—the intersection of religion with science—which is liable to be especially laden with meaning.

There are accounts of Knut Haukelid and a team of fellow young Norwegians, forced to attack their own countrymen to avert a greater Nazi evil; Cecilia Payne, an Englishwoman who finds her career destroyed after daring to glimpse the sun’s fate in the year A.D. 6 billion; and a nineteen-year-old Brahmin, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who discovers something even more fearful, out in the beating heat of the Arabian Sea in midsummer. Through all their stories—as well as highlights from those of Isaac Newton, Werner Heisenberg, and other researchers—the meaning of each part of the equation becomes clear. P A R T Birth 1 Bern Patent Office, 1905 1 E=mc From THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALBERT EINSTEIN, VOLUME I: 13 April 1901 Professor Wilhelm Ostwald University of Leipzig Leipzig, Germany Esteemed Herr Professor!

m Is for mass 4 E=mc For a long time the concept of “mass” had been like the concept of energy before Faraday and the other nineteenth-century scientists did their work. There were a lot of different material substances around—ice and rock and rusted metal—but it was not clear how they related to each other, if they did at all. What helped researchers believe that there had to be some grand links was that in the 1600s, Isaac Newton had shown that all the planets and moons and comets we see could be described as being cranked along inside an immense, God-created machine. The only problem was that this majestic vision seemed far away from the nittygritty of dusty, solid substances down here on earth. To find out if Newton’s vision really did apply on Earth—to find out, that is, if the separate types of substance around us really were interconnected in detail—it would take a person with a great sense of finicky precision; someone willing to spend time measuring even tiny shifts in weight or size.


Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

As a self-professed strong, successful, educated, bloated (ugh!) woman, I am the perfect person to attack an institution of gender inequality in the sciences. And everyone loves when a woman gets on a soapbox! You can see up her skirt! Thank you very much for getting through my introduction. In the immortal words of Isaac Newton: “Please enjoy the rest of Megan Amram’s book. I’m Isaac Newton.” Now set your biological clocks to study time, because here we go! MEGAN AMRAM Writer / Alleged “Astronaut Killer” Letters to the Editor * * * Biology Introduction Reproduction How to Build a Biological Clock out of a Potato How Long Should You Wait?

FIG. 3.5 FIG. 3.4 FIG. 3.5 BACHELORS of SCIENCE * * * GALILEO GALILEI (primitive astrophysics) Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, but he also spoke the universal languages of love and Italian. He is best remembered for the Galileo, a sex move where the man enters the woman as both are falling at an equal gravitational rate from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. (This chapter’s bonus sex move!) * * * ISAAC NEWTON (classical mechanics/gravitation) Sir Isaac Newton, an all-around science genius, was alive from 1643 to 1726, which means that his lifetime spanned the year 1690, the ultimate 69. By all accounts, he spent the year 1690 giving oral pleasure to several British babes at once. He is famous for the three laws of sex, including: a penis in motion tends to stay in motion.

Make sure that your wrong shade of foundation doesn’t turn into the right shade of blackface! Laws of Physics . . . Jude Laws of Physics! I’m Talkin’ Hotties of Physics! ;) * * * There are laws for physics, just like there are laws for how many carbs you’re supposed to eat. First law of both physics and carbs is “EAT NO CARBS.” FIG. 3.4 Sir Isaac Newton (9 body, 4 face) invented Three Laws of Physics. But, hey, laws, shmaws. Physics should be done by following the heart. Here are some of the most eligible bachelors of physicsdom! (Dead people count as bachelors.) FIG. 3.5 FIG. 3.4 FIG. 3.5 BACHELORS of SCIENCE * * * GALILEO GALILEI (primitive astrophysics) Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, but he also spoke the universal languages of love and Italian.


pages: 257 words: 80,100

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK Chaos: Making a New Science Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier Isaac Newton The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Copyright © 2016 by James Gleick All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

It was true then and it’s true now. Also no one knows what time is. Augustine stated this pseudoparadox in the fourth century and people have been quoting him, wittingly and unwittingly, ever since: What then is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.*2 Isaac Newton said at the outset of the Principia that everyone knew what time was, but he proceeded to alter what everyone knew. Sean Carroll, a modern physicist, says (tongue in cheek), “Everybody knows what time is. It’s what you find out by looking at a clock.” He also says, “Time is the label we stick on different moments in the life of the world.”

Dark Satanic Mills, but either way, before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress. Technological change had not always seemed like a one-way street. Now it did. The children of the Industrial Revolution witnessed vast transformations within their lifetimes. To the past there was no return. Surrounded by advancing machinery, Blake blamed, more than anyone else, Isaac Newton—the blinkered rationalist imposing his new order*5—but Newton himself had not believed in progress. He studied a great deal of history, mostly biblical, and if anything he supposed that his own era represented a fall from grace, a tattered remnant of past glories. When he invented vast swaths of new mathematics, he thought he was rediscovering secrets known to the ancients and later forgotten.


Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

The studies of Kepler, Galileo and Descartes, and some of the later true greats of physics – Huygens, Hooke and Newton – were all fuelled by the desire to build better lenses for microscopes and telescopes to enable them to explore the Universe on every scale, and to make great scientific discoveries and advances in the basic science itself. YOUNG’S DOUBLE-SLIT EXPERIMENT By the end of the seventeenth century, two competing theories for light had emerged – both of which are correct. On one side was Sir Isaac Newton, who believed that light was composed of particles – or ‘corpuscles’, as he called them in his Hypothesis of Light, published in 1675. On the other were Newton’s great scientific adversary, Robert Hooke, and the Dutch physicist and astronomer, Christiaan Huygens. The particle/wave debate rumbled on until the turn of the nineteenth century, with most physicists siding with Newton.

Our old friend Ibn al-Haytham was one of the first to attempt to explain the physical basis of a rainbow in the tenth century. He described them as being produced by the ‘light from the Sun as it is reflected by a cloud before reaching the eye’. This isn’t too far from the truth. The basis of our modern understanding was delivered by Isaac Newton, who observed that white light is split into its component colours when passed through a glass prism. He correctly surmised that white light is made up of light of all colours, mixed together. The physics behind the production of a rainbow is essentially the same as that of the prism. Light from the Sun is a mixture of all colours, and water droplets in the sky act like tiny prisms, splitting up the sunlight again.

We can measure the precise constituents of any and every visible star in the sky, because encoded in the light that rains down on Earth is the key to understanding what they are made of. It is all made possible by a particularly beautiful property of the elements. The tale of how we learnt to read the history of the stars in their light began with the work of Isaac Newton in 1670. In his ‘Theory of Colour’, Newton demonstrated that light is made up of a spectrum of colours, and that with nothing more complicated than a glass prism you can split the white light of the Sun into its colourful components. Almost 150 years later, the German scientist Joseph von Fraunhofer made a startling discovery about the solar spectrum whilst calibrating some of his state-of-the-art telescopic lenses and prisms.


pages: 333 words: 76,990

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

Devil take the hindmost: A history of financial speculation. New York, NY: Plume. 5 See Thompson, E. (2007). The tulipmania: Fact or artifact? Public Choice, 130(1–2), 99–114. 6 Evans, R. (2014). How (not) to invest like Sir Isaac Newton. The Telegraph [online]. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10848995/How-not-to-invest-like-Sir-Isaac-Newton.html 7 Cutts, R. L. (1990). Power from the ground up: Japan's land bubble. The Harvard Business Review [online]. Available at https://hbr.org/1990/05/power-from-the-ground-up-japans-land-bubble 8 Johnston, E. (2009). Lessons from when the bubble burst.

.), The American business cycle: Continuity and change (pp. 39–122). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. The end of the Bretton Woods System. IMF [online]. Available at https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm Evans, R. (2014). How (not) to invest like Sir Isaac Newton. The Telegraph [online]. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10848995/How-not-to-invest-like-Sir-Isaac-Newton.html Fama, E. F. (1970). Efficient capital markets: A review of theory and empirical work. The Journal of Finance, 25(2), 383–417. Fama, E. F., and French, K. (1998). Value versus growth: The international evidence. Journal of Finance, 53(6), 1975–1999.

Many high-profile celebrities and politicians became investors in the railway stocks. The Brontë sisters were among them, as were several leading thinkers and politicians such as John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin and Benjamin Disraeli.14 They were in good company: King George I was an investor in the South Sea bubble (see Chancellor 2000, p. 73), as was Sir Isaac Newton, who reportedly lost £20,000, equivalent to about £3m in today's terms, when the market collapsed.15 This breadth of interest had led more people to believe in the ‘sure bet’ of the investment. In 1845 an author known as ‘successful operator’ wrote, ‘A short and sure guide to railroad speculation – a few plain rules how to speculate with safety and profit in railway shares’.


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Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. 20. White, M. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. 21. Anonymous. The World Will End in 2060, According to Newton. London Evening Standard, June 19, 2007. www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23401099-the-world-will-end-in-2060-according-to-newton.do. 22. White. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. 23. Ibid. 24. Newton, I. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition. Ed. I. B. Cohen and A. Koyré. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. 25.

Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory. Gallup. com, November 19, 2004. www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Supported-Darwins-Evolution-Theory.aspx. Newton, I. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 3rd edition. Ed. I. B. Cohen and A. Koyré. London: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Newton, I. Sir Isaac Newton: Theological Manuscripts. Ed. H. McLachlan. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1950. Nicolay, J. G., & Hay, J. Abraham Lincoln: A History. Volume 2. New York: Cosimo Classics, 1917. Nietzsche, F. Thus Spake Zarathustra.

After the civil wars ended and the Church of England was restored, many Puritans broke away. At first these “nonconformists” were again persecuted, but by the 1660s, they were tolerated. Because of their emphasis on individual liberty, their adherents included some of the greatest minds of the age, including Isaac Newton. Newton provides an example of how the idea of “science” had not yet fully emerged as something separate from religion in early Enlightenment thinking. In fact, during the seventeenth century, the word “scientist” was not commonly used to describe experimenters at all; they were called “natural philosophers”16 in an extension of the Puritan idea of the study of the Book of Nature.


pages: 404 words: 131,034

Cosmos by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, dark pattern, dematerialisation, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, time dilation, Tunguska event

And today those explorers, human and robot, employ as unerring guides on their voyages through the vastness of space the three laws of planetary motion that Kepler uncovered during a lifetime of personal travail and ecstatic discovery. The lifelong quest of Johannes Kepler, to understand the motions of the planets, to seek a harmony in the heavens, culminated thirty-six years after his death, in the work of Isaac Newton. Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, so tiny that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived. Even as a young man, Newton was impatient with insubstantial questions, such as whether light was “a substance or an accident,” or how gravitation could act over an intervening vacuum.

v3.1 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: American Folklore Society: Excerpt from “Chukchee Tales” by Waldemar Borgoras from Journal of American Folklore, volume 41 (1928). Reprinted by permission of the American Folklore Society. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.: Quote by Isaac Newton (Optics), quote by Joseph Fourier (Analytic Theory of Heat), and A Question Put to Pythagoras by Anaximenes (c. 600 B.C.). Reprinted with permission from Great Books of the Western World. Copyright 1952 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Harvard University Press: Quote by Democritus of Abdera taken from Loeb Classical Library.

Even this may be an accurate prophecy: If the planet ever is terraformed, it will be done by human beings whose permanent residence and planetary affiliation is Mars. The Martians will be us. *In 1938, a radio version, produced by Orson Welles, transposed the Martian invasion from England to the eastern United States, and frightened millions in war-jittery America into believing that the Martians were in fact attacking. †Isaac Newton had written “If the Theory of making Telescopes could at length be fully brought into practice, yet there would be certain Bounds beyond which Telescopes could not perform. For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in perpetual tremor.… The only remedy is the most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest mountains above the grosser Clouds.”


pages: 444 words: 139,784

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren

Albert Einstein, George Santayana, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, land tenure, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Departments of the history of science have become respectable, and excellent scientists study and write about the history of their subject. An example is what has been called the “Newton industry.” At the present time, intensive and extensive research is being undertaken in many countries on the work and strange personality of Sir Isaac Newton. Half a dozen books have been recently published or announced. The reason is that scientists are more concerned than ever before about the nature of the scientific enterprise itself. Thus we have no hesitation in recommending that you try to read at least some of the great scientific classics of our tradition.

Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) * Ethics 63. John Locke (1632-1704) * Letter Concerning Toleration * “Of Civil Government” (second treatise in Two Treatises on Government) * Essay Concerning Human Understanding Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine (1639-1699) Tragedies (esp. Andromache, Phaedra) 65. Isaac Newton (1642-1727) * Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy * Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) Discourse on Metaphysics New Essays Concerning Human Understanding Monadology 67. * *Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Robinson Crusoe 68. * *Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) A Tale of a Tub Journal to Stella * Gulliver’s Travels A Modest Proposal 69.

However, it can perhaps go a certain way toward suggesting what such exercises would be, and how to get the most out of them. The Appendix contains brief exercises and test questions at each of the four levels of reading: At the First Level of Reading—Elementary Reading—the texts used are biographical notes about two of the authors included in Great Books of the Western World, John Stuart Mill and Sir Isaac Newton. At the Second Level of Reading—Inspectional Reading—the texts used are the tables of contents of two works included in Great Books of the Western World, Dante’s Divine Comedy and Darwin’s The Origin of Species. At the Third Level of Reading—Analytical Reading—the text used is How to Read a Book itself.


pages: 524 words: 120,182

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

With Galileo, the scientific revolution, with experimental observations at its core, was definitively launched. The most important person in the history of dynamics was Isaac Newton. Newton, who was born the year after Galileo died, can be said to have invented, on his own, the science of dynamics. Along the way he also had to invent calculus, the branch of mathematics that describes motion and change. Galileo, 1564–1642 (AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives, E. Scott Barr Collection) Isaac Newton, 1643–1727 (Original engraving by unknown artist, courtesy AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives) Physicists call the general study of motion mechanics.

This is work that largely remains to be done, perhaps by those shocked and frustrated students as they take over from the older generation of scientists. I don’t think the students should have been shocked and frustrated. Any perusal of the history of science will show that the lack of a universally accepted definition of a central term is more common than not. Isaac Newton did not have a good definition of force, and in fact, was not happy about the concept since it seemed to require a kind of magical “action at a distance,” which was not allowed in mechanistic explanations of nature. While genetics is one of the largest and fastest growing fields of biology, geneticists still do not agree on precisely what the term gene refers to at the molecular level.

Sadi Carnot was a physicist of the early nineteenth century who originated some of the key concepts of thermodynamics. Similarly, we are waiting for the right concepts and mathematics to be formulated to describe the many forms of complexity we see in nature. Accomplishing all of this will require something more like a modern Isaac Newton than a modern Carnot. Before the invention of calculus, Newton faced a conceptual problem similar to what we face today. In his biography of Newton, the science writer James Gleick describes it thus: “He was hampered by the chaos of language—words still vaguely defined and words not quite existing….


pages: 497 words: 153,755

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, central bank independence, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Francisco Pizarro, German hyperinflation, Hernando de Soto, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, long peace, low interest rates, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, random walk, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

It would still be resonating in 1821, when Britain officially established the gold standard; it was at the root of William Jennings Bryan's famous cry of defiance about crucifying labor on a cross of gold; it would come back to haunt Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s; and it would continue to stir controversy over expansionary versus contractionary economic policies throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Nor can we expect these kinds of disputes to vanish in the twenty-first century. At this point, an unexpected character appears on center stage: the most distinguished scientist of his age, and surely among the most influential scientists who ever lived, Sir Isaac Newton. In March 1696, just a few months into the turbulence of the Great Recoinage, Newton took on the post of Warden of the Mint at the invitation of his good friend Charles Montagu, Chancellor of the Exchequer. What could possibly have been the Chancellor's motivation in choosing Newton for such a task?

Renewed fighting with France cut off the imports of gold for a while and made any further changes in the coinage unnecessary until the Treaty of Utrecht was signed in 1713. At that point, the flood of gold imports gathered renewed strength. Over £4 million came in over the next three years. When the East India Company exported three million ounces of silver in 1717, the authorities once again turned hopefully to the wisdoms of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton's "Representation to the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Revenue" has become a famous document in the history of money. The reading of it is a tedious business, and the essence of the content is no more than simple arithmetic reciting the values of various weights of gold and silver in different countries.

From the moment when Elizabeth I ascended to the throne in 1558 to the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, a period of 136 years, the Mint had issued no more than £15 million in gold coinage, of which half was in guineas that appeared after 1663. During the 45 years from 1695 to 1740, the Mint produced £17 million gold coins. The story on silver is precisely the opposite: L20 million in the earlier period versus rl million in the latter.52 Isaac Newton is the anti-hero of this chapter of our story. Quite aside from his scientific achievements, he deserves heroic status as the first civil servant in history bold enough to employ the laws of supply and demand to make an economic forecast that would determine public policy. He is the anti-hero, nevertheless, because he inaugurated a tradition that will haunt future chapters of this history: economic forecasts by policymakers that turn out to be wrong!


pages: 218 words: 63,471

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

. *** Simple arithmetic and patterns for looms are one thing, but if mathematicians wanted to do anything more, they did it by hand. The Holy Grail for scientists at the time was to solve differential equations. Astronomers who studied the skies needed differential equations to predict orbits. The invention of the steam engine would have gone a lot faster if James Watt had been able to solve differentials in Isaac Newton’s law of cooling. Newton stated that if an object, hot or cold, is in an area of constant temperature, then its rate of temperature change is proportional to the difference between the object’s temperature and the ambient temperature. Newton figured this out empirically with a thermometer. Watt ran experiments to figure out how fast steam would cool.

All bubbles end, and usually for no good reason except an economically unsustainable business is, well, unsustainable. As soon as 70 HOW WE GOT HERE the stock starts dropping, if only because it has exhausted its buyers, the whole thing unwinds. People who had borrowed money sold the stock to pay off the loans, which sent the stock price lower, the upside in exact reverse. Gravity works. In fact, Sir Isaac Newton himself dropped 20,000 pounds faster than an apple falls from a tree. The South Sea bubble is a great story, especially in relation to the Internet Bubble of 1999-2000, when shares of Priceline.com, which sold discount tickets on airlines such as Delta Airlines, were worth more than the airline companies themselves.

More gold meant the money supply could increase as more of this fiduciary money was created. It wasn’t a bad system, money supply had to come from somewhere. Using gold as a store of wealth was already a sleight of hand, money only fractionally backed by gold was a sleight of a sleight. So what. But then someone messed it all up. *** Sir Isaac Newton had leveraged his planetary dreaming into a real job, as Master of the Mint. In 1717, the Newt decided that the Guinea would represent 129.4 grains of gold. Put another way, an ounce of gold was worth 4 pounds, 4 shillings and 11½ pence. You can tell Sir Isaac was a scientist, if he was an engineer he would have rounded it down to 4 pounds per ounce and called it a day.


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The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

But the very year that he died, a baby was born in England who would grow up to complete Galileo’s and Kepler’s unfinished theories, giving us a unified theory of the heavens. Newton’s Theory of Forces Isaac Newton is perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. In a world obsessed with witchcraft and sorcery, he dared to write down the universal laws of the heavens and apply a new mathematics he invented to study forces, called the calculus. As physicist Steven Weinberg has written, “It is with Isaac Newton that the modern dream of a final theory really begins.” In its time, it was considered to be the theory of everything—that is, the theory that described all motion.

A blazing comet sailed over London. Everyone, from kings and queens to beggars, was buzzing with the news. Where did it come from? Where was it going? What did it portend? One man who took an interest in this comet was astronomer Edmond Halley. He took a trip to Cambridge to meet the famous Isaac Newton, already well-known for his theory of light. (By shining sunlight through a glass prism, Newton showed that white light separated into all the colors of the rainbow, thereby demonstrating that white light is actually a composite color. He also invented a new type of telescope that used reflecting mirrors rather than lenses.)

It makes no mention of the Standard Model, because it lacks matter fields. Also, it is not clear if the scattering of multiloops in this formalism is truly finite. There is speculation that the collision between two loops yields divergent results. Chapter 1: Unification—The Ancient Dream “It is with Isaac Newton”: Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon, 1992), 11. So the equations of Newton: Because Newton’s Principia was written in a purely geometric fashion, it is clear that Newton was aware of the power of symmetry. It is also clear that he exploited the power of symmetry intuitively to calculate the motion of the planets.


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Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

Very quickly it became so valuable that it was preserved in the face of even the blatant contraventions alleged by Hooke (who denounced Oldenburg as a spy, selling English secrets to the philosopher of Louis XIV, Christiaan Huygens). And the resolutions, too, of some of the most important of those disputes hung on the management of the archives that had been created by the Society’s reading practices. The greatest exponent of such management was to be Isaac Newton. isaac newton and the rejection of perusal Newton was, of course, the dominant figure to emerge in English natural philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His emergence took shape through repeated episodes of engagement with the perusalregistrationcirculation sequence. The first of these spanned the period from his initial introduction to the Royal Society in early 1672 to his declaration six years later that he was withdrawing and ceasing all philosophical correspondence.

It was a university enterprise, devoted to explaining routine natural processes by means of an Aristotelian causal analysis. It was qualitative (the mathematical sciences occupied a lower disciplinary level), discursive, and disputational. Between the discovery of the New World in the late fifteenth century and the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia in 1687, every aspect of this enterprise came under challenge, and most were overthrown. The claims of astronomers, mathematical practitioners, physicians, and natural magicians cast doubt not only on existing knowledge but also on the processes, personnel, and institutions that should be granted intellectual authority.

That word, nowhere used in the original law of 1710, was copyright. Piracy flourished so scandalously in a city that saw the origins not only of capitalism, but also of the modern natural sciences and mechanical arts. The London of Atkyns and Henry Hills was also the London of Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, and Isaac Newton. The question of how this could possibly be – of how experimental science could be created in the same place, and sometimes in the same bookshops and printing houses, that saw piracy boom – is the subject of the next chapter. For now, however, it is important to insist that the origin of the concept in struggles of the book trade was never forgotten.


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Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

He became a mathematician by way of reputation, yet remained a courtier by way of life. “Leibniz’s tragedy was that he met the lawyers before the scientists,” concluded E. T. Bell.4 Nonetheless, Leibniz made fundamental contributions to mathematics on several fronts. The development of a calculus of continuous functions he shared, controversially, with Isaac Newton, while in combinatorial analysis—the study of relations among discrete sets—Leibniz had the field to himself. Leibniz continued reasoning about reasoning where Hobbes left off. He attempted to formalize a consistent system of logic, language, and mathematics by means of an alphabet of unambiguous symbols manipulated according to definite rules.

A fascination with formal systems and an insight into mechanical computation were combined in the person of Leibniz from the start. Encouraged by his initial steps toward symbolic logic—and by a working model of a calculating machine—Leibniz declared in 1675 to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society and Leibniz’s go-between with Isaac Newton, that “the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.”5 Leibniz thus helped set in motion the two great movements that led to the age of digital computers in which we live.

The three-ton device “flawlessly performed its first major calculation,” and “affirmed that Babbage’s failures were ones of practical accomplishment, not of design.”22 Babbage associated with the famous and powerful of his day (“I . . . regularly attended his famous evening parties,” recalled Charles Darwin)23 and held Isaac Newton’s Lucasian chair at Cambridge University from 1828 to 1839. His most celebrated collaboration was with the mathematically gifted Lady Augusta Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and protégée not only of Babbage but, to a lesser extent, of logician Augustus de Morgan, who was at the same time encouraging work on the Laws of Thought by George Boole.


pages: 476 words: 118,381

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

Two thousand years ago, long before we understood how and why the planets moved the way they do in the night sky, the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy could not restrain his reverence as he contemplated them. In the Almagest he writes: “When I trace, at my pleasure, the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies, I no longer touch Earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia.” People no longer wax poetic about the orbital paths of planets. Isaac Newton solved that mystery in the seventeenth century with his universal law of gravitation. That Newton’s law is now taught in high school physics classes stands as a simple reminder that on the ever-advancing frontier of discovery, on Earth and in the heavens, the wonders of nature and of human creativity know no bounds, forcing us periodically to reassess what to call the most wondrous

Whether you’re playing baseball, cricket, football, golf, jai alai, soccer, tennis, or water polo, a ball gets thrown, smacked, or kicked and then briefly becomes airborne before returning to Earth. Air resistance affects the trajectories of all these balls, but regardless of what set them in motion or where they might land, their basic path is described by a simple equation found in Isaac Newton’s Principia, his seminal 1687 book on motion and gravity. Some years later, Newton interpreted his discoveries for the Latin-literate lay reader in The System of the World, which includes a description of what would happen if you hurled stones horizontally at higher and higher speeds. Newton first notes the obvious: the stones would hit the ground farther and farther away from the release point, eventually landing beyond the horizon.

They successfully installed two new instruments, repaired two others, replaced gyroscopes and batteries, added new thermal insulation to protect the most celebrated telescope since the era of Galileo. It was the crowning achievement of what can happen when the manned space program is in synchrony with the robotic program. Space Tweet #21 Space Shuttle Atlantis – final trip before retirement today. On board, a chunk from Isaac Newton’s apple tree. Cool May 14, 2010 2:22 AM By the way, Hubble is beloved not only because it has taken such great pictures, but because it’s been around a long time. No other space telescopes were designed to be serviced. You put them up; the coolant runs out after three years; the gyros go out after five; they drop in the Pacific after six.


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Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Conselice, Galactic Encounters: Our Majestic and Evolving Star-System, From the Big Bang to Time’s End (New York: Springer, 2014), 30–32. 41. William Herschel, The Scientific Papers of Sir William Herschel, vol. 1 (London: Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, 1912), xxix–xxx. 42. Ethan Siegel, “When Did Isaac Newton Finally Fail?,” Forbes, May 20, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/05/20/when-did-isaac-newton-finally-fail/#8c0137648e7e; Michael W. Begun, “Einstein’s Masterpiece,” New Atlantis, fall 2015, www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/einsteins-masterpiece. 43. Ethan Siegel, “Happy Birthday to Urbain Le Verrier, Who Discovered Neptune with Math Alone,” Forbes, March 11, 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/03/11/happy-birthday-to-urbain-le-verrier-who-discovered-neptune-with-math-alone/#6674bcd7586d. 44.

On average, it takes roughly twelve minutes for a signal from Mars to reach Earth traveling at the speed of light.7 If something is wrong, and a scientist on Earth spots and responds to the problem in a split second, another twelve minutes will pass for that command to reach Mars. That’s twenty-four minutes round trip, but it takes about six minutes for a spacecraft to descend from the top of the Martian atmosphere down to the surface. All we can do is load up the spacecraft with instructions ahead of time and put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat. That’s where the peanuts come in. In the early 1960s, JPL was in charge of the unmanned Ranger missions, which were designed to study the Moon to pave the way for the Apollo astronauts. The Ranger spacecraft would be launched toward the Moon, take close-up photos of the lunar surface, and beam those images back to Earth before plummeting into the Moon.8 The first six missions ended in failure, leading critics to accuse JPL officials of adopting a cavalier “shoot-and-hope” approach.9 But a later mission succeeded when a JPL engineer happened to bring peanuts to the mission control room.

But it was another composition—of a nonmusical kind—that would overshadow Herschel’s music career. Herschel was fascinated with math. Lacking a university education, he turned to books for answers. He devoured volumes on trigonometry, optics, mechanics—and my favorite, James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, and Made Easy to Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics. This was the eighteenth-century version of Astronomy for Dummies. He read books on how to construct telescopes and asked a local mirror-builder to teach him how to build one. Herschel began making telescopes, grinding mirrors for sixteen hours a day and making molds out of manure and straw.


What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, On the Relations Between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, vol. 1 (1802; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 7. Quoted in V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind (New York: Morrow, 1998), 227. 8. Isaac Newton, Principia, General Scholium (1713). 9. E. J. Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961; repr., Prince ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 479–80. 10. Ibid., 488; Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, 1693, in Newton: Philosophical Writings, ed. Andrew Janiak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 102–3. 11. For more detailed analysis, see McMullin, Newton on Matter and Activity, chap. 3. 12.

All are instances of the “political guardianship” that the genuine libertarian tradition seeks to dismantle and reconstruct from below, while also changing industry “from a feudalistic to a democratic social order” based on workers’ control, respecting the dignity of the producer as a genuine person, not a tool in the hands of others, in accordance with a libertarian tradition that has deep roots—and, like Marx’s old mole, is always burrowing close to the surface, always ready to peek through, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways, seeking to bring about what seems to me at least to be a reasonable approximation to the common good. 4 | THE MYSTERIES OF NATURE: HOW DEEPLY HIDDEN? THE TITLE FOR this chapter is drawn from Hume’s observations about the man he called “the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species,” Isaac Newton. In Hume’s judgment, Newton’s greatest achievement was that while he “seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain.”

And in a later discussion, “In my opinion there is just the same reason to conclude that the brain thinks, as that it is white, and soft.”51 Priestley criticizes Locke for being hesitant in putting forth his speculation about thinking matter, since the conclusion follows so directly from “the universally accepted rules of philosophizing such as are laid down by Sir Isaac Newton.” He urges that we abandon the methodological dualism that deters us from applying to thought and sensation the rules that we follow “in our inquiries into the causes of particular appearances in nature” and expresses his hope “that when this is plainly pointed out the inconsistency of our conduct cannot fail to strike us and be the means of inducing” philosophers to apply the same maxim to investigation of mental aspects of the world that they do in other domains—a hope that has yet to be realized, I think.52 Priestley clearly “wished the disappearance of solid matter to signal an end to matter-spirit dualism,” Thackray writes.


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Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Only in 1940 did the American geophysicist Chaim Leib Pekeris realize it was a consequence of the fact that the moon creates tides not only in the earth’s oceans but in its rocks as well (to be precise, the tides are caused by both the moon and the sun, with those of the moon being twice as big as those of the sun). As Isaac Newton first understood, tides are a distortion in the shape of the earth caused by the pull of the moon being stronger on parts of the earth closer to it. Imagine the ocean immediately beneath the moon. The pull on water at the surface is greater than the pull on water at the seabed. The difference causes the sea to bulge upwards towards the moon.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FALLING Though it does not look like it, the moon is perpetually plummeting towards the earth “The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” —DOUGLAS ADAMS1 WHY DON’T SATELLITES FALL down? More than once I have been asked this question by schoolchildren. The answer, surprisingly, is that they are falling down—but they never reach the ground! The first person to realize this far-from-obvious fact was Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. He was of course not thinking about artificial satellites but rather the earth’s natural satellite: the moon. Newton wondered why the moon orbits the earth, and he came up with the following explanation. Imagine a cannon that fires a cannonball horizontally across the ground.

A WONDERFUL THING IS A PIECE OF STRING The universe may have at least ten dimensions “Technically, you need the extra dimensions. At first people didn’t like them too much, but they’ve got a big benefit, which is that the ability of string theory to describe all the elementary particles and their forces along with gravity depends on using the extra dimensions.” —EDWARD WITTEN ISAAC NEWTON WAS FIRST to realize that, at a fundamental level, all there is to the universe is particles of matter and the forces that bind them together. We now know of four fundamental forces, of which gravity and the electromagnetic force that glues together the atoms in your body and powers our electrical world are the most familiar.


pages: 189 words: 49,386

Letters From an Astrophysicist by Neil Degrasse Tyson

dark matter, do what you love, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, microaggression, Pluto: dwarf planet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unbiased observer

Since any two people in the world have a common ancestor—depending on how far back you look, the line we draw to establish family lineage is entirely arbitrary. When I wonder what I am capable of as a human being, I don’t look to “relatives,” I look to all human beings. That is the genetic relationship that matters to me. The genius of Isaac Newton, the courage of Joan of Arc and Gandhi, the athletic feats of Michael Jordan, the oratorical skills of Sir Winston Churchill, the compassion of Mother Teresa. I look to the entire human race for inspiration for what I can be—because I am human. I don’t care if I am a descendent of kings or paupers, saints or sinners, the brave or cowardly.

I ranked the Bible No. 1, but my comment irked many a believer. A few years later, catching up with the comments in the thread, I posted a response. The list . . . 1.The Bible “ . . . to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself” 2.The System of the World by Isaac Newton “ . . . to learn that the universe is a knowable place.” 3.On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin “ . . . to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.” 4.Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift “ . . . to learn, among other satirical lessons, that most of the time humans are Yahoos.” 5.The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine “ . . . to learn how the power of rational thought is the primary source of freedom in the world.” 6.The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith “ . . . to learn that capitalism is an economy of greed, a force of nature unto itself.” 7.The Art of War by Sun Tzu “ . . . to learn that the act of killing fellow humans can be raised to an art.” 8.The Prince by Machiavelli “ . . . to learn that people not in power will do all they can to acquire it, and people in power will do all they can to keep it.”

Six moons, including our Moon, are bigger than Pluto. Not only that, several objects in the outer solar system are almost the same size of Pluto (within a factor of two). So what matters more than “how many?” is “what are their various properties?” and “what features do they have in common?” And how about the question of when Isaac Newton was born? This too, does not have an unambiguous answer. According to his mother and all local records, he was born on December 25, 1642. But at the time, England (where Newton was born) used the Julian calendar. Today we use the Gregorian calendar (introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582), which is shifted by ten days from the Julian calendar, and not yet adopted in Protestant England in Newton’s time.


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The confusion by Neal Stephenson

correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land bank, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, urban planning, web of trust

Our President is the Marquis of Ravenscar, a very powerful Whig, and he has been assiduous in finding ways to harness the ingenuity of the Fellows of the Royal Society for practical ends. Some of these, I gad, have to do with money, revenue, banks, stocks, and other subjects that fascinate you. But I must confess I have fallen quite out of touch with such matters. Isaac Newton was elected to Parliament a year ago, in the wake of our Revolution. He had made a name for himself in Cambridge opposing the former King’s efforts to salt the University with Jesuits. He spent much of the last year in London, to the dismay of those of us who would prefer to see him turn out more work in the vein of Principia Mathematica.

He spent much of the last year in London, to the dismay of those of us who would prefer to see him turn out more work in the vein of Principia Mathematica. He and your friend Fatio have become the closest of companions, and share lodgings here. POST-SCRIPT—FEB. 1690 After I wrote the above, but before I could post this, King William and Queen Mary prorogued and dissolved Parliament. There have been new elections and the Tories have won. Isaac Newton is no longer M.P. He divides his time between Cambridge, where he toils on Alchemy, and London, where he and Fatio are reading Treatise on Light by our friend and erstwhile dinner-companion Huygens. All of which is to say that I am now even more useless to you than I was a month ago; for I am in a failing Society linked to a Party that has lost power and that has no money, there being none in the kingdom to be had.

And I will thank you to keep Daniel out of it as well.” Fatio had turned red. “The only thing I wish to snare is a clearer understanding of what has passed between you and Isaac.” “You want to know if you have a rival.” Fatio said nothing. “The answer is: you do not.” “That is well.” “You do not have a rival, Fatio. But Isaac Newton does.” Ireland 1690–1691 THE KING’S OWN BLACK TORRENT Guards had been founded by a man King William did not like very much (John Churchill), and as a sort of punishment for that, the regiment had now been exiled in Ireland for almost two years. Bob Shaftoe had learned many things about this island during that time: For example, that it was commonly divided into four pieces, which were variously styled Kingdoms or Duchies or Presidencies or Counties depending on whom you were talking to and what peculiar notions they held concerning the true nature and meaning of Irish history.


The First Tycoon by T.J. Stiles

book value, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Edward Glaeser, gentleman farmer, informal economy, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, margin call, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, public intellectual, risk free rate, short selling, Snow Crash, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, working poor

Though WmC's report was made three years earlier, its truth regarding the events of 1845 and 1846 were clearly born out. For contemporary evidence of Drew's partnership with Newton in Hudson River steamboats, see Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton v. New York and Erie Rail Road Company, September 10, 1842, file 1842-#331, Superior Court, and Caleb F. Lindsley and George E. Cock v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, March 20, 1848, file 1848-#951A, Court of Common Pleas, NYCC (the latter referring to an incident in 1846); also entries for August 1846, pages 336–6, in vol. 2 of the William D. Murphy Account Books, NYHS. 19 Curtis Peck v.

Daniel Drew, January 7, 1850, file PL-1850-P 3, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Curtis Peck v. Daniel Drew, January 31, 1848, file PL-1848-P 256, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC. 20 Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, June 27, 1848, file PL-1848-R, and Nelson Robinson, Robert W. Kelley, and Daniel B. Allen v. Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton, November 2, 1848, file PL-1848-R 2, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; Medbery 312; Edmund Clarence Stedman, The New York Stock Exchange (New York: Stock Exchange Hstorical Company, 1905), 104. Interestingly, the court filings cited here make clear that manipulation of the road's traffic and its stock price were part of the initial investment plan. 21 Boston Daily Advertiser, July 3, 1845.

On the loss of the Independence, see AltaC, April 1, 1853, and a report from the San Francisco Whig, reprinted in the LT, May 13, 1853. 48 NYT, October 12, 1853; EP, quoted in the HC, October 17, 1853; RGD, NYC, 341:184. Drew was not new to transactions with the Erie Railroad. As early as February 10, 1842, he and Isaac Newton supplied a steamboat connection to the Erie's terminus at Piermont; see Daniel Drew and Isaac Newton v. New York & Erie Rail Road Co., September 10, 1842, file 1842-#331, Superior Court, NYCC. 49 LW Dictation. 50 CV v. ATC, January 12, 1854, file PL 1854-V9, Supreme Court Pleadings, NYCC; NYH, December 2, 7, 8, 1853; NYTr, December 9, 1853. 51 NYH, January 6, 7, 1854. 52 NYT, January 17, 23, 1854; NYH, November 11, 18, 1853.


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The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

Thus, while it is technically an overstatement, I will assume throughout that the error made in asserting that the laws treat past and future on equal footing is minimal—at least as far as explaining the puzzle of time’s arrow is concerned. 6. Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way (New York: Anchor, 1989). Chapter 2 1. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. A. Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), vol. 1, p. 10. 2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 12. 5. Albert Einstein, in Foreword to Max Jammer, Concepts of Space: The Histories of Theories of Space in Physics (New York: Dover, 1993). 6. A. Rupert Hall, Isaac Newton, Adventurer in Thought (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 27. 7. Ibid. 8.

And since the angle associated with causally related events is always greater than 45 degrees, the time slices of an observer, who necessarily travels at less than light speed, cannot first encounter the effect and then later encounter the cause. To all observers, cause will precede effect. 12. The notion that causes precede their effects (see the preceding note) would, among other things, be challenged if influences could travel faster than the speed of light. 13. Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. A. Motte and Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), vol. 1, p. 634. 14. Because the gravitational pull of the earth differs from one location to another, a spatially extended, freely falling observer can still detect a residual gravitational influence.

New York: Viking, 1997. Gell-Mann, Murray. The Quark and the Jaguar. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1994. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Gott, J. Richard. Time Travel in Einstein’s Universe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Guth, Alan. The Inflationary Universe. Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1997. Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage, 2000. Gribbin, John. Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995. Hall, A. Rupert. Isaac Newton. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Halliwell, J. J., J. Pérez-Mercader, and W. H. Zurek. Physical Origins of Time Asymmetry.


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Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

(New York: Basic Books, 1981), 13–17, 20; Michael J. Sheehan, The International Politics of Space—Space Power and Politics series (London/New York: Routledge, 2007), 2. 110.Isaac Newton, Opticks: or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light, 4th ed. (London, 1730), bk. 1, pt. 1, prop. viii, prob. 2; see p. 110 of the Project Gutenberg ebook at sirisaacnewton.info/writings/opticks-by-sir-isaac-newton (accessed Jan. 13, 2018). 111.Robert W. Duffner, The Adaptive Optics Revolution: A History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), ix. 112.For more detail, see, e.g., Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Star Magic,” Natural History 104:9 (Sept. 1995), 18–20, digitallibrary.amnh.org/handle/2246/6501 (accessed Jan. 14, 2018).

And I told you, that the Theory, which I propounded, was evinced to me, not by inferring ’tis thus because not otherwise, that is, not by deducing it only from a confutation of contrary suppositions, but by deriving it from Experiments concluding positively and directly. The way therefore to examin it is, by considering, whether the Experiments which I propound do prove those parts of the Theory, to which they are applyed; or by prosecuting other Experiments which the Theory may suggest for its examination.” Isaac Newton, “A Serie’s of Quere’s propounded by Mr. Isaac Newton, to be determin’d by Experiments, positively and directly concluding his new Theory of Light and Colours; and here recommended to the Industry of the Lovers of Experimental Philosophy, as they were generously imparted to the Publisher in a Letter of the said Mr. Newtons of July 8. 1672,” Philosophical Transac.

Although none of the seventeenth-century telescopes measured up to those of later centuries, and not everyone could master the knack of seeing through them, the telescope and its cousin the binocular nonetheless brimmed with potential, both astronomical and military. But the breadth of astronomical possibilities surfaced only gradually and incidentally. Passable wide-field astronomical telescopes barely existed until the second half of the century, by which time Isaac Newton’s nemesis, the talented British scientist Robert Hooke, would have good cause to speculate that “there may be yet invented several other helps for the eye, as much exceeding those already found, as those do the bare eye, such as by which we may perhaps be able to discover living Creatures in the Moon, or other Planets [italics in original].”


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Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Ultimately, neglect of science and technology caused the Chinese to lose their edge. By the late fourteenth century, Europe had caught up. For warfare, Europeans developed and perfected the smooth-bore cannon. Rockets were relegated to firework displays.6 Wan Hu’s dreams of traveling to the stars were forgotten. They were given a firm theoretical basis in the work of Isaac Newton, the author of a theory of gravity and laws of motion that would be the basis for space travel centuries later. Newton’s 1687 masterwork, Principia, unified the terrestrial and celestial realms. Drop an apple and it falls in one second 3,600 times farther than the Moon curves in its orbit, both caused by the action of the Earth’s gravity.

With no friction or air resistance, the only force operating is gravity.7 Fired at modest speed, the cannonball will land at the base of the mountain. As the initial speed is increased, the ball travels farther and farther before landing. Newton calculated the speed where the ball falls toward the Earth’s surface at the same rate as the Earth’s surface is “falling away” from it (Figure 5). Figure 5. In the thought experiment of Isaac Newton, a cannonball is launched horizontally from a mountain tall enough to be above the Earth’s atmosphere. As the velocity increases, the surface curves at the same rate the cannonball falls, creating a circular orbit. This is the concept of an orbit. Any projectile shot from Newton’s hypothetical cannon at 7.9 kilometers per second or 17,650 mph would remain a captive of the Earth’s gravity but would never hit the ground.

Professor Goddard . . . does not know the relation of action and reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. . . . Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”17 Forty-nine years after ripping Goddard, and a day after the launch of Apollo 11, the paper issued a brief correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”18 The apology was too late for Goddard, who died of throat cancer in 1945. Wernher von Braun Warfare and space exploration merged again in the 1940s.


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Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

Two hydrogen nuclei have to be able to get very close in order to fuse; but the closer they get, the stronger the repulsive force between them becomes, as each carries a positive electric charge and “like” charges repel. In fact, for them to get close enough to fuse, the particles have to be able to get through the subatomic equivalent of a brick wall: an apparently impenetrable energy barrier. Classical physics*1—built upon Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, mechanics and gravity, which describe very well the everyday world of balls, springs, steam engines (and even planets)—would predict that this shouldn’t happen; particles should not be able to pass through walls and therefore the sun shouldn’t shine. But particles that obey the rules of quantum mechanics, such as atomic nuclei, have a neat trick up their sleeve: they can easily pass through such barriers via a process called “quantum tunneling.”

One could argue over who was responsible for this extraordinarily productive shift in human thought; medieval Arab and Persian scholars, such as Alhazen and Avicenna, certainly played a role, and the trend was then taken up in the emerging scholarly institutions of Europe such as the universities of Paris and Oxford. But this way of describing the world probably bore its first great fruit in the University of Padua in Italy, where Galileo enshrined simple laws of motion in mathematical formulae. In the year he died, 1642, Isaac Newton was born in Lincolnshire, England, and went on to provide an extraordinarily successful mathematical description of how the motion of inanimate objects could be changed by forces, a system which is to this day referred to as Newtonian mechanics. Newton’s forces were initially rather mysterious notions, but over the following centuries they became increasingly identified with the concept of energy.

Descartes exempted the human mind from his mechanistic view, leaving it with an immortal soul; but his philosophy did at least attempt to provide a scientific framework that accounted for life in terms of the physical laws that were being discovered to govern inanimate objects. The mechanistic biological approach was continued by a near-contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton’s: the physician William Harvey, who discovered that the heart was nothing more than a mechanical pump. A century later, the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier demonstrated that a respiring guinea pig consumes oxygen and generates carbon dioxide, just like the fire that provided the motive force of the new technology of steam engines.


pages: 412 words: 122,952

Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, Copley Medal, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, William of Occam

As both an amateur astronomer and a geodeist, a profession that took him to towering mountain sites, he had long been convinced that astronomy would best be served by taking its instruments to the highest elevations possible, where a telescope's resolution would improve immensely in the clear, more rarefied atmosphere. Isaac Newton first pointed this out in the eighteenth century. “For the Air through which we look upon the Stars, is in a perpetual Tremor,” he wrote in his Opticks. “… The only remedy is a most serene and quiet Air, such as may perhaps be found on the tops of the highest Mountains above the grosser Clouds.”

Barnard in a notice to the Royal Astronomical Society. “… [Keeler] has a real artistic ability such as very few observers possess.” Keeler's real forte, however, was in using a spectroscope, which was a relatively recent addition to astronomy's instrumental arsenal. The scientific basis for it was established in the seventeenth century. A young Isaac Newton, sitting in a darkened room in 1666, let a small stream of sunlight enter through a hole in his window shutter. He then passed it through a triangular prism of glass. Beholding a rainbow of colors on the wall behind him, an enchanting phenomenon observed with pieces of glass since antiquity, Newton clearly demonstrated that white light was a mixture of many hues: On one end was a band of red, followed by orange, yellow, green, and blue, until it reached a deep violet on the other end.

Over that time scholars only occasionally reflected on the possibility of a universe significantly bigger. In the sixteenth century, for example, Thomas Digges in England imagined the stars scattered throughout a boundless space, while in Italy Giordano Bruno presciently declared that “the center of the universe is everywhere, and the circumference is nowhere.” Even Isaac Newton had a good scientific reason to prefer a cosmos without end. If the universe had a border, gravity would gradually draw all its matter inward, and ultimately the universe would collapse. To keep the cosmos stable—immutable and immovable—required that the stars be spread infinitely outward in all directions.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

“Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature”: Nathanael Fairfax, “Divers Instances of Peculiarities of Nature, Both in Men and Brutes; Communicated by the Same,” Philosophical Transactions 1666–67, 2 (1666): 549–51. back in Woolsthorpe: Newton also spent some time at Cambridge during these plague years, where he did work as well. Information on Newton’s life and work can be found in these sources: George Smith, “Isaac Newton,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2008 edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/newton/; V. Frederick Rickey, “Isaac Newton: Man, Myth, and Mathematics,” The College Mathematics Journal 18, no. 5 (1987): 362–89. “great tragedy of Science”: Tania Lombrozo, “Must Science Murder Its Darlings?” NPR 13.7: Cosmos and Culture, January 27, 2014, http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2014/01/26/266784786/must-science-murder-its-darlings.

According to the scholar Daniel Boorstin, “Before he was twenty-six, Leibniz had devised a program of legal reform for the Holy Roman Empire, had designed a calculating machine, and had developed a plan to divert Louis XIV from his attacks on the Rhineland by inducing him to build a Suez Canal.” In the words of Frederick the Great, Leibniz was “a whole academy in himself.” Similarly, Isaac Newton stitched together a whole host of phenomena—from how objects fall to the orbit of Mars—through his theory of gravitation. Around the same time, Gresham College, one of the oldest colleges in England, and devoted to providing public lectures on various topics, had a small faculty in areas such as astronomy, geometry, and music.

He did not speculate about why thunder might have this effect on a woman, noting only, “And thus it hath been with this Gentlewoman from a Girl.” One gets the sense that while Fairfax wanted to eventually learn something from these observations and facts he recorded, the act of making the observations was itself enough, at least as a first step toward understanding. Around this same time, a young physicist named Isaac Newton was thinking about how objects move and how light works. While Newton was studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, a plague began to sweep through the country. As a precaution, the university closed. So Newton spent the next couple of years primarily at home, back in Woolsthorpe in the countryside.


pages: 198 words: 57,703

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

But this should be far from obvious. To explore this further, I will introduce three concepts that are not always taught to students of physics, but which most certainly should be: universality, symmetry, and reductionism. UNIVERSALITY The first ‘universal’6 law of physics was discovered by Isaac Newton.7 Whether or not he saw an apple fall from a tree on his mother’s farm, triggering him to develop his law of gravitation, or what the mathematical formula articulating this law looks like, are not of importance here. The crucial point is that Newton realised that the force that pulls an apple to the ground has the same origin as the force that keeps the Moon in orbit around the Earth—that a simple mathematical relation can describe both processes equally well.

And what if we now get rid of the physical walls of both boxes, and everything else in this imaginary universe, so that all that is left is nothingness? Is that nothingness still something? Does this empty space exist ready to be filled with matter, or to be contained within the confines of a box? Maybe I am just asking the same question in different ways, but only because it is by no means a trivial one. Isaac Newton believed that space has to exist in order for matter and energy to be contained within it and for events to take place within it. But space exists, he argued, only as an empty nothingness, independently of the laws of physics that govern the behaviour of matter and energy within it. For Newton, space is the canvas on which reality is painted.

These two statements sound contradictory … until you learn about Einsteinian relativity. Einstein proved that absolute space and absolute time do not exist as separate entities. But to appreciate why this notion is necessary, I need to introduce you to the first of his two theories of relativity. EINSTEIN’S SPECIAL THEORY Until Isaac Newton completed his work on the laws of motion, debates about the nature of time were considered to be the domain of philosophy and metaphysics rather than proper science. Newton described how objects move and behave under the influence of forces, and since all motion or change requires time to make any sense, time had to be included as a fundamental part of his mathematical description of the world.


pages: 332 words: 109,213

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

In the West, theory was unconstrained by new observations, and in the East, observations were unguided by theory. Then came the great awakening in the West, when Bacon and Descartes together led the way to the flowering of modern science. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the heyday of the scientific amateurs. During those two centuries, professional scientists like Isaac Newton were the exception and gentleman amateurs like his rival Gottfried Leibniz were the rule. Amateurs had the freedom to jump from one area of science to another and start new enterprises without waiting for official approval. But in the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of amateur leadership, science became increasingly professional.

Random House, 2002. 3. The theme of amateur biology is explored further in my forthcoming book, A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (University of Virginia Press, 2006). 17 A NEW NEWTON IT WAS A strange juxtaposition. A big metal box filled with the manuscripts of Isaac Newton, hidden by Newton during his lifetime and unread for two hundred years afterward, and a fat young man with red hair and khaki shorts, strutting on the stage at meetings of the British Union of Fascists. The big metal box was packed up by Newton in 1696, when he left Cambridge and moved to London.

He quotes with approval Westfall’s judgment that The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, a book written by Newton in his old age and published after his death, is “a work of colossal tedium.” Anyone who would like a more sympathetic and more detailed account of Newton’s religious studies, based on the Yahuda papers in Jerusalem, should read the book The Religion of Isaac Newton by Frank Manuel.4 Manuel’s book is, so far as I know, the only important work about Newton that does not appear in Gleick’s bibliography. For several years after the publication of the Principia in 1687, Newton was deeply involved in national politics. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 was a turning point in English constitutional history, as important for England as the revolution of 1776 was for America.


pages: 444 words: 111,837

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

But on the other hand, some sections of the public also grew wary of science because many of its practitioners, such as Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, publicly supported the radical politics of the French Revolution. He paid dearly for his views. In 1791, an angry mob burned down his house and laboratory. Moreover, England’s two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, offered no courses in subjects that resemble modern-day physics and engineering. Cambridge, being Isaac Newton’s alma mater, did rigorously train students in the mathematical principles that great scientist had discovered. But basking in Newton’s legacy, professors there saw no need to extend his work and were suspicious of novel mathematical techniques being developed abroad. In 1806, when one progressive scholar, Robert Woodhouse, urged the adoption of a European style of mathematics, he was condemned as unpatriotic in the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review.

Intrigued, Bernoulli turned to mathematics for an explanation. Specifically, Bernoulli looked first at the one aspect of the physical world the mathematics of the day could describe, namely the way solid objects such as cannonballs and billiard balls move—the so-called principles of mechanics. These had been established by Isaac Newton in the 1680s and had become a sophisticated tool by the time Bernoulli was writing in the 1730s. Bernoulli applied these principles to fluids such as blood and water and showed that they predicted what he’d observed. Now known as Bernoulli’s principle, the idea can be extended beyond liquids to gases.

Hilbert then allowed Noether to lecture in his name, thus frustrating the Göttingen Senate’s desire to prevent her from teaching. Noether worked in this way for four years without pay—her family covered her living expenses. The year Noether arrived in Göttingen, 1915, was the same year Einstein published his general theory of relativity, overturning Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity. Hilbert found the mathematical implications of Einstein’s work fascinating. In fact, one reason he had invited Noether to Göttingen was because she was an expert in the theory of invariants, a key technique Einstein had used in his work. Hilbert, in essence, asked Noether to assess the validity of Einstein’s mathematics.


pages: 186 words: 64,267

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

Four years before his death in 1642, while he was still under house arrest, the manuscript of his second major book was smuggled to a publisher in Holland. It was this work, referred to as Two New Sciences, even more than his support for Copernicus, that was to be the genesis of modern physics. ISAAC NEWTON Isaac Newton was not a pleasant man. His relations with other academics were notorious, with most of his later life spent embroiled in heated disputes. Following publication of Principia Mathematica—surely the most influential book ever written in physics—Newton had risen rapidly into public prominence.

v3.1 CONTENTS Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright FOREWORD Chapter One Our Picture of the Universe Chapter Two Space and Time Chapter Three The Expanding Universe Chapter Four The Uncertainty Principle Chapter Five Elementary Particles and the Forces of Nature Chapter Six Black Holes Chapter Seven Black Holes Ain’t So Black Chapter Eight The Origin and Fate of the Universe Chapter Nine The Arrow of Time Chapter Ten Wormholes and Time Travel Chapter Eleven The Unification of Physics Chapter Twelve Conclusion ALBERT EINSTEIN GALILEO GALILEI ISAAC NEWTON GLOSSARY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS About the Author FOREWORD I didn’t write a foreword to the original edition of A Brief History of Time. That was done by Carl Sagan. Instead, I wrote a short piece titled “Acknowledgments” in which I was advised to thank everyone. Some of the foundations that had given me support weren’t too pleased to have been mentioned, however, because it led to a great increase in applications.

As far as Kepler was concerned, elliptical orbits were merely an ad hoc hypothesis, and a rather repugnant one at that, because ellipses were clearly less perfect than circles. Having discovered almost by accident that elliptical orbits fit the observations well, he could not reconcile them with his idea that the planets were made to orbit the sun by magnetic forces. An explanation was provided only much later, in 1687, when Sir Isaac Newton published his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences. In it Newton not only put forward a theory of how bodies move in space and time, but he also developed the complicated mathematics needed to analyze those motions.


pages: 200 words: 60,987

The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America by Steven Johnson

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, Danny Hillis, discovery of DNA, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kevin Kelly, planetary scale, seminal paper, side project, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The History began with a stirring argument for why electricity was so interesting in the first place: Hitherto philosophy has been chiefly conversant about the more sensible properties of bodies; electricity, together with chemistry, and the doctrine of light and colours, seems to be giving us an inlet into their internal structure, on which all their sensible properties depend. By pursuing this new light, therefore, the bounds of natural science may possibly be extended, beyond what we can now form an idea of. New worlds may open to our view, and the glory of the great Sir Isaac Newton himself, and all his contemporaries, be eclipsed, by a new set of philosophers, in quite a new field of speculation. Could that great man revisit the earth, and view the experiments of the present race of electricians, he would be no less amazed than Roger Bacon, or Sir Francis, would have been at his.

Priestley aimed to popularize not simply by helping ordinary readers understand the new science of electricity, but also by encouraging them to become scientists themselves. While he wanted to celebrate the electricians’ discoveries, he deliberately avoided establishing an aura of otherworldly genius around them: Were it possible to trace the succession of ideas in the mind of Sir Isaac Newton, during the time he made his greatest discoveries, I make no doubt but our amazement at the extent of his genius would a little subside. . . . [T]he interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder with which several first rate philosophers are considered; and . . . an opinion of the greater equality of mankind in point of genius would be of real service in the present age.

Franklin, astonishing as it must have appeared, contrived actually to bring lightning from the heavens, by means of an electrical kite, which he raised when a storm of thunder was perceived to be coming on. . . . [S]o capital a discovery as this (the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton) cannot but give pleasure to all my readers. . . . The classic image of Franklin with his electrified kite, ingrained in the minds of countless American schoolchildren over the past two centuries, dates back to this paragraph from Priestley’s History. Franklin himself had only published a brief third-person account of his experiment in the Pennsylvania Gazette, without specifying that he himself had performed it.


pages: 310 words: 89,653

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission by Jim Bell

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Virgin Galactic

Through my youthful eyes, the biggest appeal of Voyager was indeed this idea of exploring the truly unknown—throwing a bottle, of sorts, into the cosmic ocean and seeing where the eddies and currents of nature would take it. In my telescope, on a clear cold night, I could make out the reddish-brown belts and bands of Jupiter, as well as its famous Great Red Spot. It was a good-sized instrument for a young amateur astronomer, a so-called Newtonian telescope (designed by Isaac Newton, and using mirrors instead of lenses) made by a company called Meade Instruments, with a main mirror about eight inches in diameter and a tube about four feet long. With that tube held by a metal mounting post and three wide metal legs, it was a heavy, bulky, cumbersome thing to schlep outside and in from the garage and to set up every time I wanted to use it (especially in the snow), but it was so worth the effort.

But no one recognized it as a planetes asteres, a wandering star. At least, not until March of 1781. That’s when the German-born English musician and astronomer William Herschel (1738–1822) single-handedly doubled the size of the solar system. Herschel is one of those almost mythic characters from the early history of Western astronomy. Like Isaac Newton in the century before him, Herschel was a prominent polymath—a person with many different kinds of technical and academic skills. He focused much of his energy on, and made his living by, composing and performing music (twenty-four symphonies, fourteen concertos, and many other pieces) and also dabbled in astronomy, optics, and other areas of science.

Notable examples from the history of Western astronomy include pioneers like the sixteenth-century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus; Danish observer Tycho Brahe and German astronomer Johannes Kepler working together in the late sixteenth century; the late-seventeenth-century English physicist Isaac Newton; and of course the first loner at the telescope, Galileo Galilei, in the early 1600s. But the history of individual, or “small,” science pushed forward mostly by key individuals goes much farther back in time and crosses many cultures, including notable Greek, Arab, Persian, Chinese, Indian, and other thinkers.


pages: 336 words: 92,056

The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked a Technological Revolution by Henry Schlesinger

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Copley Medal, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, index card, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Livingstone, I presume, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Building his conclusions through experiment after experiment, he amassed a huge body of data in order to reach those proofs. In the words of the historian of science Park Benjamin, “…he, first of all men, systematically replaced the great doctrine of words by the great doctrine of works.” De Magnete marked the beginning of modern science, opening the door for Galileo and Isaac Newton. In particular, Newton took to experimentation with sometimes frightening gusto—at one point staring at the sun with one eye to study the afterimages, nearly blinding himself in the process. In another series of experiments, he inserted various instruments around his eye, including a bodkin (an ivory toothpick) as well as his finger to change the shape of his eyeball.

Landed gentry, noblemen, and successful tradesmen with social ambitions who possessed the time and resources enthusiastically took to science, reading the details of the latest discoveries, supporting research, attending lectures, and even setting up small laboratories of their own to conduct experiments. Not surprisingly, with the popularity of science on the rise among the aristocracy, interest grew among the less fortunate classes. Ben Jonson—a friend of Bacon’s—wrote a popular comic play called The Magnetick Lady or Humours Reconcil’d, featuring Lady Lodestone as the lead character. Sir Isaac Newton, an intensely private and often paranoid man, paradoxically became something of a pop culture icon of the day with his likeness adorning an endless stream of portraits and commemorative medals. A kind of cottage industry began to flourish with itinerant men of science offering demonstrations for small towns and villages.

Charlatans and natural philosophers of dubious merit soon took to presenting demonstrations in parlors and lecture halls, many of them making up theories as they went along. To feed the curiosity of a public eager for the latest news of scientific discovery, publications also multiplied, ranging from the serious science of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions to popular titles such as Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explained for the Ladies. In the mid-1600s, a London physician named Thomas Brown published Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Enquiries into Vulgar and Common Errors. Like Gilbert, he intended to discredit unproven and untested beliefs. Although an instant bestseller, quickly selling out multiple printings, the book is generally seen as a mishmash of solid experimentation and confusing explanations, though he did manage to coin several new words.


pages: 208 words: 70,860

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

So Zeno’s argument that a finite duration of time is just made up of a sequence of such consecutive instants is wrong. It would take advances in mathematics as well as physics for this paradox to be finally laid to rest. More specifically, it was an understanding of calculus, the field of mathematics developed by Isaac Newton and others in the seventeenth century, which describes how to add up tiny quantities in order to describe the notion of change correctly, that would lay Zeno’s naïve ideas to rest. Well, almost. In 1977, two physicists at the University of Texas published a surprising research paper that suggested Zeno’s Arrow Paradox might have been laid to rest too prematurely.

OUR EXPANDING UNIVERSE In 1915 Einstein published his greatest work. It wasn’t his famous equation, E = mc2; nor was it his work on light, which won him the Nobel Prize. It is called his General Theory of Relativity, and in it he describes how the force of gravity affects space and time. We learn at school a description of gravity that Isaac Newton gave us: that it is an invisible force acting to pull all objects together. Of course, this is quite right, and we live our lives under the influence of our planet’s gravity holding us to its surface. Newton’s law of gravity also explains how the Moon orbits the Earth and how its gravitational pull affects the ocean tides; and it explains how the Earth orbits the Sun, thus confirming Copernicus’ heliocentric model of the solar system.

But even our most powerful scientific theories often fall short when we try to push them too far in trying to answer such deep metaphysical questions as: “Does time really flow, or is that just an illusion?” and: “Is there an absolute rate to the flow of time, or even an unambiguous direction to this flow?” Clearly, statements such as “time points from the past to the future” or “time goes by at a rate of one second every second” are somewhat unhelpful. Until Isaac Newton completed his work on the laws of motion more than three centuries ago in his Principia mathematica, time was considered to be the domain of philosophy rather than science. Newton described how objects move and behave under the influence of forces, and since all movement and change require the notion of time to make sense, time had to be included as an integral part of his mathematical description of nature.


pages: 225 words: 65,922

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering by Ann K. Finkbeiner

Albert Einstein, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, digital map, Galaxy Zoo, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Magellanic Cloud, Skype, slashdot

Chapter 11: Everything’s Different The American Museum of Natural History’s website on the Sloan is at http://www.amnh.org/sciencebulletins/astro/f/sdss.20051208/. The information about the large surveys PanSTARRS and LSST came from their excellent websites: PanSTARRS, http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/, and LSST, http://www.lsst.org/lsst. Chapter 12: Jim Again The quote from Isaac Newton came from “Four Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Doctor Richard Bentley Containing Some Arguments in Proof of a Deity” (between 1692 and 1756); quoted in Joseph Silk, “How Big Is the Universe,” Historical Development in Modern Cosmology. Vicent J. Martínez, Virginia Trimble, and María Jesús, ed., ASP Conference Series 252 (2001): 117.

And for every dollar that Princeton puts in, Chicago matches it. And then for every dollar the universities put in, NSF matches it. And for every dollar NSF puts in, Sloan matches it. OK? The multiplicative factors add up. —Jerry Ostriker, Princeton University God, they’ve been doing this since Isaac Newton, can’t they get it right? —Hirsh Cohen, Sloan Foundation ABOUT THE TIME the University of Chicago was founded, Princeton University turned 150 years old. Nassau Hall, its main building, had been the venue for the Continental Congress in 1783, just after the university amended its charter so that its trustees no longer needed to swear allegiance to the king of England.

Chapter 12 Jim Again But if the matter were evenly disposed throughout an infinite space, it could never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses, scattered throughout all that infinite space. —Isaac Newton It’s easier if you’re smart, but I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. I think dedication really matters more. —Jim Gunn, Princeton University START NOW NOT with scale, small to large, but with time, at the beginning—though not at the very beginning, which is the province not of cosmology but of theoretical physics, some of it highly theoretical.


pages: 469 words: 97,582

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

The average world market price of gold in 2009 was about £20,500 per kilogram. Who invented the catflap? It wasn’t Sir Isaac Newton. It’s an appealing idea that the father of gravitation, the leading theoretical scientist of his day and arguably the most famous celebrity in Europe at the start of the eighteenth century, invented something as mundane as the cat flap. Sadly, the evidence doesn’t stack up. To this day, students at Cambridge are told that, while an undergraduate at Trinity College, Isaac Newton cut two holes in the door of his lodgings – a large one for his pet cat and a smaller one for its kittens.

The trick was to remove small amounts of metal from legal coinage, melt down the scraps and recast new coins. There were three ways of doing this: ‘clipping’ (filing tiny fragments from the coin’s edges); ‘drilling’ (taking the coin and punching small holes in it, which were then hammered shut); and ‘sweating’ (shaking a bag of coins for long enough to create a dust of gold and copper). Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727) became obsessed with the underworld of counterfeiting gangs after he was made Warden of the Royal Mint in 1696. His secret career as an alchemist had made him something on an expert at assessing the purity of metals. By his reckoning, one in five coins in circulation in England were false.

Whatever afflicted him, it didn’t prevent Newton from producing Principia Mathematica (1687), the most influential scientific book of all time, or from building a successful second career as a civil servant and administrator. He lived until he was eighty-four and died a very wealthy man, leaving assets worth £31,821 (equivalent to £49 million in today’s money). STEPHEN There are people in history who were said to be agelastic, including Isaac Newton, who was supposed to have laughed only once in his life. CLIVE ANDERSON When an apple fell on his head. STEPHEN No, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid, and he burst out laughing. JIMMY CARR Yeah, that is a good one, though. What did Molotov invent? Molotov didn’t invent his ‘cocktails’.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

In fact, atoms stayed out of fashion right up until 1800, when the English chemist John Dalton proved that they were real (he didn’t know, and couldn’t know, that atoms do indeed exist, but are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, which are in turn made of quarks, and none of it can be called solid). * * * The no-atom business made it difficult for Isaac Newton (1642–1727) to talk about what he understood as small, solid masses moving about in a void. But really, Democritus and Newton were positing the same kind of system – there is a void, or empty space, and there are solid, indestructible bits of matter moving about in the void. Newton’s great idea was to add the force of gravity to explain movement. * * * In the 17th century, Isaac Newton built his mighty model of how the world works on the notion of empty space that was exactly that – a void – with solid matter moving about inside the empty space, worked upon by gravity.

His idea, like so many innovations of the Industrial Revolution, was to mechanise repetitive work. The word ‘computer’ at this time was used for human operators doing the tedious arithmetical tabling that Babbage imagined (correctly) could be done by his Difference Engine. Babbage was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post held by both Isaac Newton before him and Stephen Hawking after him (and still never held by a woman, btw). Babbage had a fascination for mechanical automata, as well as numbers. Building a cogs-and-wheels calculating machine was perfect for him. And for Ada, as it turned out. To be invited to a Babbage party you had to be beautiful, clever or aristocratic.

Ross Ashby, 1956 Buddhism for Beginners, Thubten Chodron, 2001 A Simple Path: Basic Buddhist Teachings, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, 2000 The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Fritjof Capra, 1975 The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision, Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, 2014 Wholeness and the Implicate Order, David Bohm, 1980 Reality Is Not What It Seems, Carlo Rovelli, 2014 A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1945 The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch, 1970 A Little History of Philosophy, Nigel Warburton, 2011 The Symposium, Plato On the Soul and Poetics, Aristotle Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, Edith Hall, 2018 Shakespeare’s sonnets Opticks, Isaac Newton, 1704 The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance and Empower the Mind, Michio Kaku, 2014 (I am just about to read Kaku’s The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything, 2021. I recommend all his books.) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, Ray Kurzweil, 1999 Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, James Lovelock, 2019 (and everything he has written) Coal-Fired Vampire Epic of Gilgamesh (world’s earliest surviving text) Dracula, Bram Stoker, 1897 Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice, 1976 The Twilight saga, Stephenie Meyer 2005–20 The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, 1890 Faust, Goethe, 1808 The Divine Comedy, Dante, 1472 ‘Piers Plowman’ (poem), William Langland, 1370–90 ‘The Vampyre’ (short story), John William Polidori, 1819 How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Ray Kurzweil, 2012 ‘Transhumanism’ (article), Julian Huxley, 1968 Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, Nick Bostrom, 2014 To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, Mark O’Connell, 2017 Selected poems of Andrew Marvell, 1995 (I should have included ‘To His Coy Mistress’ in the essay.


pages: 404 words: 134,430

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological principle, death from overwork, discovery of DNA, Eddington experiment, false memory syndrome, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, life extension, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

In 1965, observing the accelerating rate at which individuals were entering the sciences, the junior minister of science and education of Great Britain concluded, "For more than 200 years scientists everywhere were a significant minority of the population. In Britain today they outnumber the clergy and the officers of the armed forces. If the rate of progress which has been maintained ever since the time of Sir Isaac Newton were to continue for another 200 years, every man, woman and child on Earth would be a scientist, and so would every horse, cow, dog, and mule" (in Hardison 1988, p. 14). Transportation speed has also shown geometric progression, with most of the change being made in the last 1 percent of human history.

"No, I do believe in ghosts." "What?" "The laws of physics and logic, the number system, the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravity existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity." "Of course." "So, before the beginning of the Earth, before people, etc., the law of gravity existed. Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy, and not existing in anyone's mind." "Right."

It has just passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that the law of gravity didn't have, or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. I predict that if you think about it long enough, you will go round and round until you realize that the law of gravity did not exist before Isaac Newton. So the law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads. It is a ghost!" This is what I call Pirsig's Paradox. One of the knottier problems for historians and philosophers of science over the past three decades has been resolving the tension between the view of science as a progressive, culturally independent, objective quest for Truth and the view of science as a nonprogressive, socially constructed, subjective creation of knowledge.


pages: 544 words: 134,483

The Human Cosmos: A Secret History of the Stars by Jo Marchant

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, complexity theory, Dava Sobel, Drosophila, Easter island, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, founder crops, game design, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, overview effect, Plato's cave, polynesian navigation, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, trade route

European kings started: Hutchison, “Copernican Revolution”; Eran Shalev, “A Republic amidst the Stars: Political Astronomy and the Intellectual Origins of the Stars and Stripes,” Journal of the Early Republic 31 (2011): 39–73. “system of the world”: Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 157–67. “language of mathematics”: Galilei Galileo, Opere 6:232; Douglas Jesseph, “Galileo, Hobbes and the Book of Nature,” Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 191–211. “solitary, poor, nasty”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Ware, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2014), 97. See also Jesseph, “Galileo, Hobbes.” Newton replaced this aimless cosmos: Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, vol. 2 (London, 1729), 388; available at http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/NATP00056.

The minor variations in the Sun’s speed through the sky (which create a discrepancy of up to sixteen minutes between “Sun time” and “clock time”) hadn’t been large enough to matter. But now clocks were more accurate than the Sun. The devices initially built to imitate the cosmos had transcended it, with profound consequences for human thought. Poised to take advantage of this development was the physicist Isaac Newton, working on his theory of gravity. His pioneering work Principia, published in 1687, revolutionized the scientific view of the cosmos, and remains one of the most important scientific publications ever. In it, Newton set out three basic laws of motion and explained how these, combined with his law of gravitational attraction,* could account for all of the movements of the solar system from wandering planets and distant moons to once-in-a-lifetime comets and even the ocean tides.

Kirchhoff, though just as brilliant in his own field, was in many ways the opposite of Bunsen. Thirteen years younger than the exuberant chemist, Kirchhoff was described by his colleagues as modest and shy. He was interested in how electricity behaves in different circuits and materials, and like Isaac Newton he had a talent for making meticulous observations of complex phenomena, then deriving elegant mathematical laws to describe them. Kirchhoff suggested that instead of comparing different colored flames by eye, Bunsen should pass their light through a glass prism, just as Newton had done in 1666.


New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

Chomsky has cut the Gordian knot by emphasizing a more fundamental difficulty: the mind–body problem cannot even be formulated. This is not, as generally supposed, because we have too limited an understanding of the mind, but because we don’t have criteria for what constitutes a body. In a typically radical attempt at clarification he points out that, as Isaac Newton’s insights led to the demise of contact mechanics, the Cartesian notion of body was refuted and nothing since has replaced it. In the absence of a coherent notion of “body”, the traditional mind–body problem has no conceptual status, so no special problems of causality arise. More generally, there is no special metaphysical problem associated with attempts to deal naturalistically with “mental” phenomena (such as knowledge of language), any more than there are metaphysical problems for chemists in defining the “chemical”.

The enterprise of epistemic naturalism is uncontentious, apart from the term, which is misleading in a peculiarly modern way. The epistemic naturalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was science, an attempt to construct an empirical theory of mind; Hume, for one, compared his enterprise with Isaac Newton’s. Epistemic naturalism, in Naturalism and dualism 81 contrast, is presented as a “philosophical position,” something apparently different. We plainly cannot read back into earlier periods a distinction between science and philosophy that developed later. We would not use the term “visual naturalism” to refer to the empirical study of the growth and functioning of the visual system (also a topic of earlier rational psychology), implying that there was some coherent alternative for the same realm of problems.

To account for them, he postulated a new principle; in his framework, a second substance, whose essence is thought. The “unification problem” arose as a question about the interaction of body and mind. This metaphysical dualism was naturalistic in essence, using empirical evidence for factual theses about the world – wrong ones, but then, that is the rule. The Cartesian theory collapsed soon after, when Isaac Newton showed that terrestrial and planetary motion lie beyond the bounds of the mechanical philosophy – beyond what was understood to be body, or matter. What remained was a picture of the world that was “antimaterialist,” and that “relied heavily on spiritual forces,” as Margaret Jacob puts it (M. Jacob 1988: 97).


Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

v All from the island of Sulawesi (Alfred Russel Wallace’s Celebes) or its surrounding waters. 18 Opening Up the Razor The maxim which inspires all scientific philosophising… [is] ‘Occam’s razor’: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. Bertrand Russell, 19141 In April 1761, thirty-four years after the death of Isaac Newton and 118 years before the birth of Albert Einstein, Richard Price (1723–91), the non-conformist Protestant minister, moral philosopher and mathematician, examined the unpublished papers of his recently deceased friend and mathematician Thomas Bayes (1702–61). Bayes had been a modestly successful scientist. Thirty years earlier, he had rushed to the defence of Isaac Newton’s mathematical method known as calculus, which had been attacked in an article addressed to ‘an infidel mathematician’ by the Irish philosopher and Roman Catholic bishop George Berkeley who feared that Newton’s mechanistic science would undermine religious faith.

Franklin had shown that lightning, for millennia thought to be a missile of the gods, was just another form of electricity. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called Franklin ‘the new Prometheus’, and the English chemist Joseph Priestley described the kite experiment as ‘the greatest, perhaps, that has been made in the whole compass of philosophy, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton’, insisting that Franklin was ‘the father of modern electricity’.12 Is life electric? A few years earlier, in 1746, Robert Turner, an English naturalist steeped in the vitalist tradition, had published Electricology: Or a Discourse upon Electricity. Being an Enquiry into the Nature, Causes, Properties and Effects thereof, upon the Principles of the Aether.

His pamphlet Diatribe du Docteur Akakia is a vicious lampoon of the life and work of another Frenchman, Berlin resident and the president of the Berlin Academy, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759). Maupertuis was born in 1698, four years before Thomas Bayes, in Saint-Malo, a port on the Brittany coast of France. He studied mathematics in Paris and in 1723 was admitted to the Académie des Sciences where he became a champion of the mechanistic laws that Isaac Newton had discovered across the Channel. In the 1730s Maupertuis engaged in a debate over whether the earth was flattened at either equator (prolate) or the poles (oblate). He used Newtonian mechanics to predict that the earth was oblate, in opposition to the opinion of the eminent French astronomer Jacques Cassini (1677–1756).


pages: 405 words: 105,395

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator by Keith Houston

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, classic study, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Grace Hopper, human-factors engineering, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, machine readable, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Neil Armstrong, off-by-one error, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert X Cringely, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Home Computer Revolution, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

There was one more innovation to come, after which the form of the slide rule was essentially fixed. The so-called cursor, a sliding vertical bar that made it easier to read slide rules with multiple scales, was independently invented at least four times before it finally stuck. First to come up with the idea was Isaac Newton, shortly after logarithmic scales became fashionable, but it was a young French artillery officer named Amédée Mannheim whose 1850 design, bearing a metal cursor and four scales labeled A to D, became the prototype for all that followed.73 The end result of all this tinkering and tweaking—this elaborate ruler, this clever stick—was a portable mathematics powerhouse.

‡ Coincidentally, Johannes Gutenberg’s father held a similar position in Mainz a century and a half earlier. It is interesting to compare what the two men did with their knowledge of metalworking: Gutenberg perfected movable type; Napier applied it to the practice of alchemy. § In 1687, seventy years after John Napier’s death, Isaac Newton would put an end to more than a millennium of such outlandish theories with the observation that all physical bodies exhibit an attraction to one another in proportion to their mass. For all intents and purposes, the publication of Principia Mathematica was the alchemical act that transmuted astrology into astronomy

It was the brainchild of a mathematician and philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a man so argumentative that only his secretary attended his funeral, and whose philosophical assertion that we must necessarily live in “the best of all possible worlds” was mercilessly satirized by, among others, the celebrated French writer Voltaire.8 For all his faults, Leibniz was an indefatigable scholar, vaulting between disciplines as he pleased. He created binary arithmetic, inspired by an ancient Chinese book called the Yì jīng (often spelled “I Ching”).9 And he would later be given dual credit, with Isaac Newton, for having invented “calculus,” the mathematics of gradients, change, integration, and differentiation, whose name descends from the Roman counting tokens called calculi.10 An 1862 drawing of the internals of Charles Xavier Thomas’s arithmometer. Fig. 2 shows a section through one of the device’s counters.


pages: 277 words: 87,082

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

So it was that quantum mechanics seemed at the outset to be about this notion of ‘quantized energy’: how it increases in steps, not smoothly, for atoms and molecules and light radiation. This, we’re told, was the fundamental physical content of the early theory; the rest was added as a theoretical apparatus for handling it. That, however, is a little like saying that Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation was a theory of how comets move through the solar system. It was indeed the appearance of a comet in 1680 that prompted Newton to think about the shape of their paths and to formulate a law of gravity that explained them. But his gravitational theory is not about comets.

Wavefunctions Ψ and the corresponding ‘rungs’ on the energy ladder for the first three quantum states of a particle in a box. The amplitudes of all the wavefunctions are zero at the walls themselves. Here, then, is the quantum alternative to the mechanics of classical physics, as embodied in the equations of motion deduced by Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century. And how abstract and hard to visualize this description has become! Instead of particles and trajectories, we have wavefunctions. Instead of definite predictions, we have probabilities. Instead of stories, we have maths. It doesn’t seem enough. What is the real nature of the electron that underlies these probabilities, this smooth, spread-out wavefunction?

In effect, it says that quantum events (the radioactive decay of an atom, say) happen for no reason. They just happen. That sounds like a terribly unscientific thing to say, and seems to go against the grain of everything that scientists and natural philosophers have striven to achieve since well before the time of Isaac Newton: to explain the world. Quantum events don’t appear to have an explanation as such – one in which definable causes lead to specific effects – but only a probability of occurrence. This is what Einstein found unreasonable. Who can pretend that it isn’t? He suspected that this apparent randomness is just like the randomness of a toppling pin: it really does have a specific, deterministic cause (this leads to that), but we can’t see what that is.


pages: 467 words: 114,570

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Book of Ingenious Devices, colonial rule, Commentariolus, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, retrograde motion, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, trade route, William of Occam

6 That Jābir is regarded in the West as having been ‘just an alchemist’ probably has more to do with the prejudices of the early European translators of his work than with his own scientific leanings. Some of his most influential books were translated into Latin in the twelfth century, at a time when alchemy was still considered a respectable pursuit in Europe (it would continue to be so, well into the Renaissance). Even Isaac Newton was a devoted alchemist later in life and is sometimes referred to as the last of the magicians rather than the first scientist of the age of reason – and he lived nine hundred years after Jābir. One distinction that was made between the two disciplines is that while chemistry was regarded as the science of matter, alchemy involved the philosophy of matter.

In any case, I do not see that such a stance is necessary in order to legitimize the achievements of Jābir in chemistry. After all, was Aristotle a fool for believing in the four elements theory of matter? Was Plato any less of a genius for his adherence to the intromission theory of vision (that claimed we see objects by emitting light from our eyes)? Indeed, was Isaac Newton less worthy of the mantle of the greatest scientist who ever lived for his own obsession with alchemy? Hindsight is wonderful, but we should not project back our modern scientific ideas and values onto a very different time. Referring to Jābir ibn Hayyān as an alchemist rather than a chemist (according to our modern definitions of the two words) is rather like referring to the great Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy as an astrologer.

It was during the second half of the tenth century that we see the three most outstanding thinkers in the history of Islam arriving on the scene. The first of these was a man after my own heart: a physicist; in fact, the greatest physicist since Archimedes and the like of whom would not be seen until Isaac Newton seven hundred years later. And acknowledging someone as being the greatest physicist in a span of nearly two thousand years is not done lightly.1 The Arab polymath Abū Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytham was born in Basra in southern Iraq in c. 965. He is often said to be Egyptian, because he spent his later, most productive years there.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

New York: Springer Science, p. 24. 23. Soros, G. (2009) ‘Soros: a general theory of reflexivity’, Financial Times, 26 October 2009. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0ca06172-bfe9-11de-aed2-00144feab49a.html#axzz3dtwpK5o2 24. Holodny, E. (2016) ‘Isaac Newton was a genius but even he lost millions in the stock market’, 20 January 2016, Businessinsider.com, available at http://uk.businessinsider.com/isaac-newton-lost-a-fortune-on-englands-hottest-stock-2016-1?r=US&IR=T 25. Keen, S. Rethinking Economics Kingston 2014, 19 November 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR_75cdCujI 26. Brown, G. (1999), Speech to the Labour Party Conference, 27 September 1999. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/458871.stm 27.

In the sixth century BCE, the oldest known map of the world, the Imago Mundi, was etched into clay with a sharpened stick in Persia, showing Earth as a flat disc and with Babylon firmly at its centre. The Ancient Greek father of geometry, Euclid, mastered the analysis of circles, triangles, curves and rectangles in two-dimensional space, creating a diagrammatic convention that Isaac Newton later used to lay out his groundbreaking laws of motion, and that is still used in maths classes worldwide today. Few people have heard of the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio but Leonardo da Vinci’s visual depiction of his theory of proportion is instantly recognised the world over in the image of Vitruvian Man, standing – naked and open armed – in a circle and square simultaneously.

Following his lead, Aristotle distinguished economics from chrematistics, the art of acquiring wealth – in a distinction that seems to have been all but lost today. The idea of economics, and even chrematistics, as an art may have suited Xenophon, Aristotle and their time, but two thousand years later, when Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion, the allure of scientific status became far greater. Perhaps this is why, in 1767 – just forty years after Newton’s death – when the Scottish lawyer James Steuart first proposed the concept of ‘political economy’, he defined it no longer as an art but as ‘the science of domestic policy in free nations’.


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The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began by Stephen Greenblatt

Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, classic study, complexity theory, Eratosthenes, George Santayana, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, work culture

Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and strikingly Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that “In nature nothing24 really exists besides individual bodies”; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relationship between fear and religious delusions. In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in God25 as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem. “While the Particles continue entire,” he remarked, “they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed.”

Hugh de Quehen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 139. 18 On the contrary, with a backward glance at John Evelyn, Hutchinson observed that a “masculine wit,” presenting to the public only a single book of the difficult poem, “thought it worth printing his head in a laurel crown.” 19 Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation, pp. 24–25. 20 Ibid., p. 23. 21 Ibid., p. 26. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p. 24. 24 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, II.ii. 25 The most powerful philosophical expression of this view is in the works of the French priest, astronomer, and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). 26 Isaac Newton, Opticks, Query 32 (London, 1718), cited in Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson, “Lucretius and the History of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius, pp. 141–42. 27 To William Short, October 31, 1819: “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”

“Darwin Still Rules, But Some Biologists Dream of a Paradigm Shift,” The New York Times, June 26, 2007, p. D2. Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Fara, Patricia. Newton: The Making of a Genius. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. ———, and David Money. “Isaac Newton and Augustan Anglo-Latin Poetry,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 35 (2004), pp. 549–71. Fenves, Peter. A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. ———. Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth. New York: Routledge, 2003.


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Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments by Michael Batnick

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, global macro, hindsight bias, index fund, initial coin offering, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, multilevel marketing, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, Pershing Square Capital Management, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, short squeeze, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Y Combinator

He got an expensive lesson in just how far intelligence goes when attempting to turn money into even more money. When asked about the direction of the markets, Newton replied, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.” Isaac Newton actually was one of the smartest people to ever walk the earth, and not even he was able to resist the sight of other people getting rich without him. One of the problems many investors face is that we all feel we have a little Isaac Newton in us. We all feel we're above average. In a classic 1977 study, “Not Can, But Will College Teaching Be Improved,” 94% of professors rated themselves above their peer group average.1 If traders and investors were asked the same question, I would guess that the results would be very similar.

Zacks, Chasing the Last Laugh, 6. 11. Krass, Ignorance, Confidence, and Filthy Rich Friends, 197. 12. Ibid., 201. 13. Quoted in Zacks, Chasing the Last Laugh, 67–70. CHAPTER 4 John Meriwether Genius's Limits Investment success accrues not so much to the brilliant as to the disciplined. —William Bernstein Isaac Newton advanced science and thinking like few others ever have. With an IQ of 190, and the ability to calculate to the 55th decimal by hand, his intellect towered above Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. But powerful as his brain was, it was unable to save him from falling prey to our most basic human instincts, namely, greed and envy.


The Fractalist by Benoit Mandelbrot

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, double helix, financial engineering, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, Louis Bachelier, Louis Blériot, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Olbers’ paradox, Paul Lévy, power law, Richard Feynman, statistical model, urban renewal, Vilfredo Pareto

In the 1930s, the Yale mathematics department had been driven by a bitter split between two leading figures: a Norwegian and a Swede, brothers-in-law who became bitter enemies and pushed everyone to choose a side. That dark era was and remains a spur to a strong collegiality. Isaac Newton Institute The Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England, bears some similarities to the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden, but it is larger and of a broader scope. In 1999, from January to April, it held a program on fractals. The University of Cambridge kindly offered me a visiting Rothschild Professorship, but had to withdraw the offer after finding that I exceeded its retirement age by ten years.

After the carnage of World War I, Hadamard and Paul Montel recognized that fresh blood was desperately needed, and were delighted to find themselves a successor who closely shared their interests. Therefore, Szolem encountered open arms rather than competition or discrimination. Later, many foreigners flocked to Paris. Competition revived and discrimination returned. Like Poincaré and Hadamard, and Isaac Newton long before them, Szolem viewed mathematics as almost real, but with a crucial difference. They were fascinated by profound issues of physics and the actual world, but Szolem was not. He befriended a brilliant and driven younger man, André Weil (1906–98), soon to become the founder and forceful leader of a new generation of French mathematicians who emerged just after World War I.

Matching the sterling quality of their accomplishments was far beyond my ambitions, and I couldn’t think of less exalted advisers. Norbert Wiener of MIT The towering Keplerian achievements of Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) were his mathematical theory of Brownian motion and cybernetics—the word and the book. Isaac Newton knew around 1700 that prisms decompose light into components of different colors. But the mathematical theory was given much later, by Wiener. A related achievement, his theory of Brownian motion, strongly affected me later in my life—as a miserable model of the variation of competitive prices, and as a wiggle with an interesting boundary that forms fractal islands.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Because Google, alone among the five, is the protagonist of a new and apparently successful “system of the world.” Represented in all the most prestigious U.S. universities and media centers, it is rapidly spreading through the world’s intelligentsia, from Mountain View to Tel Aviv to Beijing. That phrase, “system of the world,” which I borrow from Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle novel about Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, denotes a set of ideas that pervade a society’s technology and institutions and inform its civilization.1 In his eighteenth-century system of the world, Newton brought together two themes. Embodied in his calculus and physics, one Newtonian revelation rendered the physical world predictable and measurable.

Money is a central metric to both, exchange rates mediating cross-border transactions, and interest rates guiding movement through time. When the signs and signals of time and space are muddled by government interventions or by arbitrary “caps” or controls, trade can founder, and the horizons of investment shrink in both dimensions. In scrutinizing this problem, Kendall first became fascinated with Isaac Newton’s system of the world—his perdurable gold standard as the exemplary money—and then became intrigued by Satoshi’s bitcoin as an imitation of gold. To understand the prospects for bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies and tokens, it is necessary to grasp the centrality of gold. Gold resolved both the horizontal and vertical enigmas of money.

“The limit to the size of the firm is set where its costs of organizing a transaction become equal to the cost of carrying it out through the market.” Chapter 2: Google’s System of the World 1. Stephenson borrowed the title from Newton himself, who titled the third volume of his Principia, “De mundi systemate.” 2. D. T. Whiteside, The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xxix. 3. Franz Lieber, “Appointment in Tomorrow,” Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1951. 4. For my explorations of this theory see Knowledge and Power (2013), expanded in The Scandal of Money (2016). 5. Nathan K. Lewis, “The World’s Experience with Gold Standard Systems,” Chapter 5 in Gold: The Monetary Polaris (New Berlin, N.Y.: Canyon Maple Publishing, 2013). 6. 


pages: 415 words: 125,089

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, computerized trading, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, experimental economics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mental accounting, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norman Macrae, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Post-Keynesian economics, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, prudent man rule, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, spectrum auction, statistical model, stocks for the long run, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, trade route, transaction costs, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

With the Restoration in full sway, the English were finally rid of the intellectual repression that the Puritans had imposed on the nation. The death of absolutism and Republicanism led to a new sense of freedom and progress throughout the country. Great wealth was beginning to arrive from the colonies across the Atlantic and from Africa and Asia as well. Isaac Newton, now 28 years old, was leading people to think in new ways about the planet on which they lived. Charles II himself was a free soul, a Merry Monarch who offered no apologies for enjoying the good things of life. It was time to stand up and look around. John Graunt did, and began counting. Although Graunt's book offers interesting bits for students of sociology, medicine, political science, and history, its greatest novelty is in its use of sampling.

Naumann sent the results of his study to Leibniz, who in turn sent them on to the Royal Society in London. 16 Naumann's data soon attracted the attention of Halley. Halley was then only 35 years old but already one of England's most distinguished astronomers. Indeed, he was responsible for persuading Isaac Newton in 1684 to publish his Principia, the work in which Newton first set forth the laws of gravity. Halley paid all the costs of publication out of his own modest resources, corrected the page proofs, and put his own work aside until the job was done. The historian James Newman conjectures that the Principia might never have appeared without Halley's efforts.

In his introduction he confesses to the long delay and to frequent prodding by the publishers, but he offers as an excuse of "my absence on travels" and the fact that "I was too young and inexperienced to know how to complete it."' Perhaps he deserves the benefit of the doubt: he spent those eight years seeking out the opinions of the leading mathematicians of his time, including Isaac Newton. In addition to conducting an active correspondence for the exchange of ideas, he traveled to London and Paris to consult with outstanding scholars in person. And he made a number of contributions to mathematics on his own, including an analysis of the use of conjecture and probability theory in applications of the law.


pages: 436 words: 127,642

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

(If I were to pull out a pair of binoculars and look at your speeding car, I would actually see its length contracted and you moving in slow motion inside.) So Einstein set about recasting the laws of physics accordingly. To make these laws absolute, he made distance and time relative. It was the sacrifice of absolute time that was most stunning. Isaac Newton believed that time was objective, universal, and transcendent of all natural phenomena; “the flowing of absolute time is not liable to any change,” he declared at the beginning of his Principia. Einstein, however, realized that our idea of time is something we abstract from our experience with rhythmic phenomena: heartbeats, planetary rotations and revolutions, the ticking of clocks.

“To those of us who believe in physics,” he wrote to the widow of a friend who had recently died, “this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, if a stubborn one.” When his own turn came, a couple of weeks later, he said, “It is time to go.” 2 Time—the Grand Illusion? Isaac Newton had a peculiar notion of time. He saw it as a sort of cosmic grandfather clock, one that hovered over the rest of nature in blithe autonomy. And he believed that time advanced at a smooth and constant rate from past to future. “Absolute, true, mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external,” Newton declared at the beginning of his Principia.

It took Galton nearly two decades to work out the subtleties of regression, an achievement that, according to Stephen M. Stigler, a historian at the University of Chicago, “should rank with the greatest individual events in the history of science—at a level with William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood and with Isaac Newton’s of the separation of light.” By 1889, when he published his most influential book, Natural Inheritance, his grasp of it was nearly complete. He knew that regression had nothing special to do with life or heredity. He knew that it was independent of the passage of time. (Regression to the mean even held between brothers, he observed; exceptionally tall men tend to have brothers who are somewhat less tall.)


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Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

—FRIEDRICH ENGELS, ANTI-DUHRING Zero and infinity had destroyed the Arisotelian philosophy; the void and the infinite cosmos had eliminated the nutshell universe and the idea of nature’s abhorrence of the vacuum. The ancient wisdom was discarded, and scientists began to divine the laws that governed the workings of nature. However, there was a problem with the scientific revolution: zero. Deep within the scientific world’s powerful new tool—calculus—was a paradox. The inventors of calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, created the most powerful mathematical method ever by dividing by zero and adding an infinite number of zeros together. Both acts were as illogical as adding 1 + 1 to get 3. Calculus, at its core, defied the logic of mathematics. Accepting it was a leap of faith.

Calculus, on the other hand, gave scientists a way to express the laws that govern the motion of the celestial bodies—and laws that would eventually tell scientists how those moons and stars had formed. Calculus was the very language of nature, yet its very fabric was infused with zeros and infinities that threatened to destroy the new tool. The first discoverer of calculus nearly died before he ever took a breath. Born prematurely on Christmas Day in 1642, Isaac Newton squirmed into the world, so small that he was able to fit into a quart pot. His father, a farmer, had died two months earlier. Despite a traumatic childhood* and a mother who wanted him to become a farmer, Newton enrolled in Cambridge in the 1660s—and flourished. Within a few years he developed a systematic method of solving the tangent problem; he could figure out the tangent to any smooth curve at any point.

As you raise the temperature of a gas, the average molecule moves faster and smashes harder into the walls of its container. The gas pushes harder on the walls: the pressure goes up. Statistical mechanics—the theory of wiggles—explained some of the basic properties of matter, and it even seemed to explain the nature of light itself. The nature of light was a problem that had consumed scientists for centuries. Isaac Newton believed that light was composed of little particles that flowed from every bright object. Over time, though, scientists came to believe that light was not in fact a particle, but a wave. In 1801 a British scientist discovered that light interferes with itself, apparently putting the matter to rest once and for all.


pages: 510 words: 163,449

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

Several were now bishops; one, John Tillotson, was even Archbishop of Canterbury. Tillotson and the other “Latitude men” were also closely wired into the new scientific ideas sweeping across seventeenth-century Europe. They were keen admirers of England’s two most famous scientists, the chemist Robert Boyle and the mathematician Isaac Newton, and saw no conflict between religious belief and rational scientific inquiry into the nature of man and the world. To a Scottish Presbyterian of the old school, Latitudinarianism was little different from atheism. And in Aikenhead’s jocose remarks, Lord Advocate Stewart sensed more than a whiff of both.

But he was also troubled by the radical direction Simson’s teachings sometimes seemed to take. Simson proposed that belief in Jesus as Savior was not necessary for salvation, and that even moral and upright pagans might be saved. He cast doubt on the Trinity and on Jesus Christ as the Son of God—Christian tenets that advanced English thinkers such as John Locke and Isaac Newton had also abandoned. At one point in a lecture, Simson was even supposed to have told his students that when they read the passage from the Bible proclaiming Jesus “the highest God,” they should read it “with a grain of salt.” No wonder Simson ran into such trouble with the Kirk authorities, who branded his teachings blasphemy.

Hutcheson believed there had to be a middle way between these two extremes, one that preserved the notion of an unquestionable moral law governing men’s actions, but without the austere tyranny of a jealous God. He found some of what he was looking for in the classes of another professor, Gershom Carmichael. If Hutcheson is the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment, then Carmichael can claim to be its grandfather. He was one of the first teachers in Scotland to discuss Isaac Newton in his lectures. As Professor of Moral Philosophy, Carmichael intoduced his students to the great natural-law thinkers of the previous century, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius and the German Samuel Pufendorf. Hutcheson came to listen as Carmichael lectured—or, more precisely, read aloud his written notes in Latin, the common form of university teaching in those days.


Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, always be closing, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Parkinson's law, the scientific method

”Oh, the laws of physics and of logic-the number system-the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real. ”They seem real to me,” John says. ”I don’t get it,” says Chris. So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.” ”Of course.” ”So when did this law start? Has it always existed?” John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at. ”What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.” ”Sure.” ”Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere this law of gravity still existed?”

John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.” ”Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense. ”And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.” ”Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”

He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.” I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentiethcentury lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself. ”But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world.


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The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Albert Einstein, ASML, British Empire, business climate, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Etonian, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, GPS: selective availability, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, John Harrison: Longitude, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, means of production, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, trade route, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

This in turn was a relic of a mighty tree that had been blown down in a great historic storm that had devastated a country estate a little farther north, that of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. And Woolsthorpe Manor was the home of Sir Isaac Newton. It was to Lincolnshire that Newton had fled from Cambridge in 1666—and it was here, during the summer of that annus mirabilis, that he famously observed the apple falling from the tree. It was here, and from wondering of the force that might have impelled the apple’s fall, that he came up with the notion of gravity, as a force that affected both this humble fruit and by logical extension affected the constant motion and altitude of the moon in orbit around the planet Earth. So, Isaac Newton’s apple tree—or more properly a child descendant of it—now flowers and fruits in a Beijing garden, beside where the Ming emperors once buried their dead, where one can see the Great Wall running along the mountain ridges, and where China’s latest generation of scientists are confirming their intellectual ambitions by working out, with the greatest accuracy, the effect that gravity has upon the steady beat of time.

He was about to abandon the quest when, suddenly, one day that October, he had his brain wave: why not, he thought, employ a gas turbine as an engine, a gas turbine that, instead of driving a propeller at the engine’s front, would thrust out a powerful jet of air from the engine’s rear? An idea that would change the world in unimaginable ways had come to Frank Whittle when he was just twenty-two years old. His recent school days, and his later mathematical skills, reminded him that a propelling jet of the kind he was proposing would offer a working demonstration of Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion, propounded back in 1686. Newton (a Cambridge man, as it happens) had written that “for every force acting on a body, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Under this law, a powerful jet being thrust from the rear of an aircraft engine would drive that aircraft forward with equal power and, in theory, at almost any imaginable speed.

Since this nine-odd-degree arc was located around the middle of the meridian—Dunkirk is at 51 degrees North and Barcelona 41 degrees North, with the midpoint of 45 degrees North being the village of Saint-Médard-de-Guizières in the Gironde—it was thought likely the oblate nature of the Earth’s shape, the bulge that afflicts its sphericity and makes it resemble more of an orange than a football, would be most evident and so easier to counter with calculation. (To further confirm the Earth’s shape the French Academy of Sciences sent out two more expeditions, one to Peru and the other to Lapland, to see how long a degree of high latitude was: all confirmed the orange shape that Isaac Newton had predicted centuries before.) The story of the triangulation of the meridian in France and Spain, and which was carried out by Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre over six tumultuous years during the worst of the postrevolutionary terror, is the stuff of heroic adventure. On numerous occasions the pair escaped great violence (but not jail time) only by the skin of their teeth.


Adam Smith: Father of Economics by Jesse Norman

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial intermediation, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mirror neurons, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, scientific worldview, seigniorage, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Veblen good, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working poor, zero-sum game

But any resulting benefit was probably a mutual one, since Adam Smith was to amass a formidable reputation later in life for absent-mindedness. As Rae drily remarked, ‘He would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy.’ Moments during which the son escaped his mother’s watchful eye were rare. The link between them was exceptionally strong, and lasted over six decades. Adam Smith was born on or before 5 June 1723—like Isaac Newton, a posthumous child. His father, also Adam Smith, had died five months earlier at the age of only forty-three, having worked his way up via public service and the law to be Comptroller of Customs in Kirkcaldy. Information is scarce, but this branch of the Smith family seems to have hailed from Seaton, near Aberdeen, from which Adam senior went to Edinburgh to study law.

Like his fellow students, Smith studied these subjects as well as the ancient languages and authors, and of course divinity. But his greatest early interest lay in natural philosophy—we should say the sciences today—and specifically in physics and mathematics. These subjects had been revolutionized after 1687 by Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which had set out from first principles a new and extraordinarily powerful theory of the movements of the planets and other heavenly bodies, and of gravity. The Professor of Mathematics at Glasgow, Robert Simson, nephew of the banned theologian John, was a follower of Newton and an expert on the ancient Greek geometer Euclid, whose Elements was still seen as the gold standard for demonstrative reasoning in the exact sciences.

But in the seventeenth century it had come under severe criticism from those in and around the new Royal Society, who followed Francis Bacon in seeking to purge science of the false and ‘idolatrous’ influences of human subjectivity, culture and religion, even of language itself. The brilliant mathematician Colin Maclaurin, a student of Isaac Newton and vigorous defender of Newtonianism against religious attack, kept the flame of scientific expression alive in Scotland—as it was remarked, his ‘pure, correct and simple style inducing a taste for chasteness of expression [and]… a disrelish of affected ornaments’. But, if rhetoric was an intellectually contested topic, it was also one of considerable practical importance in lowland Scotland after the disaster of the ’45, and especially so in Edinburgh, whose professional young men needed to be able to communicate well—both in speech and on paper—if they were to make their way in the courts, in politics, in the Church or as soldiers.


pages: 437 words: 132,041

Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos

Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital rights, Edward Thorp, family office, forensic accounting, game design, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, lateral thinking, Myron Scholes, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, random walk, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, SETI@home, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, two and twenty

Yet here was one of the most elegant and uncomplicated equations in maths. Pi, the poster boy of disorder, it turned out, had some kind of order in his DNA. Leibniz had devised the formula using ‘the calculus’, a powerful type of mathematics he had discovered, in which a new understanding of infinitesimal amounts was used to calculate areas, curves and gradients. Isaac Newton had also come up with calculus, independently, and the men spent a good deal of time bickering about who had got there first. (For years, Newton was considered to have won the argument, based on the dates of his unpublished manuscripts, but it now appears that a version of calculus was actually first invented in the fourteenth century by the Indian mathematician Madhava.)

Having become a keen amateur geometer in later life, Hobbes published his solution when he was 67. Even though circle-squaring was still an open question at the time, his proof was received with bemusement by the scientific community. John Wallis, professor at Oxford and the finest British mathematician before Isaac Newton, exposed Hobbes’s errors in a pamphlet, thus setting in motion one of the most entertaining – and pointless – feuds in the history of British intellectual life. Hobbes replied to Wallis’s comments with an addendum to his book entitled Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics. Wallis countered with Due Correction for Mr Hobbes in School Discipline for not saying his Lessons right.

We have also seen that there are many infinite series that converge on pi. On the other hand, the series 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 +… is divergent, heading off towards infinity. The Greeks may have been wary of infinity, but by the seventeenth century mathematicians were happy to take it on. An understanding of infinite series was required for Isaac Newton to invent calculus, which was one of the most significant developments in mathematics. When I studied maths one of my favourite exercises was being presented with an infinite series and being asked to work out whether it converged or diverged. I always found it incredible that the difference between convergence and divergence was so brutal – the difference between a finite number and infinity is infinity – and yet the elements that decided which path the series took often seemed so insignificant.


pages: 588 words: 131,025

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

FIGURE 3.2: Parallels in the marked uptake of the printing press and smartphones, with very different x-axis time intervals. Fostering Autonomy When we’re sharing ideas via print or electrons, there’s a lot more chance you can do things yourself. Take Isaac Newton, one of if not the most influential scientists of all time. Amazingly enough he was self-taught in mathematics via books that he either bought or borrowed. Newton himself was responsible for, as Bernard Cohen wrote in The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, “the transformation of a youth who knew no more mathematics than simple arithmetic and who could not read a treatise on astrology for want of trigonometry into the profound creator of higher mathematics.”31 As Eisenstein affirmed, the impact of books to alter the master-apprentice traditional relationship was quite clear, as people could “instruct themselves primarily from books with a minimum of outside help” and “cut the bonds of subordination which kept pupils and apprentices under the tutelage of a given master.”32 The do-it-yourself (DIY) capabilities took varied forms, from learning to be musicians, self-help in medicine, to autodidact printers like Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin.

The communal gathering places consisted of reading rooms, coffeehouses, and bookshops.20 The coffeehouses weren’t just for drinking coffee, but were used to discuss the latest books, pamphlets, and new-sheets. By the seventeenth century, many of the coffeehouses were specialized for particular topics such as science, literature, or politics. A coffeehouse argument accounted for Isaac Newton’s canonical book Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, which laid the foundation for classical mechanics, the laws of motion and gravity, and much more.21 We’ll come back to Newton shortly. Later in the 1700s, the preeminent economist Adam Smith actually wrote The Wealth of Nations in a coffeehouse, after having repeatedly circulated drafts for input among the regulars there.

Hall, The Scientific Renaissance 1450–1630 (New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 130. 29. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 268. 30. N. Schmidle, “A Very Rare Book,” New Yorker, December 16, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/16/131216fa_fact_schmidle. 31. I. Cohen, “Review of The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton,” Scientific American 1 (1968): 139–144. 32. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 245. 33. Ibid., 179. 34. Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, 74. 35. Ericsson, “On The Pulse of the Networked Society,” Ericsson Mobility Report, June 2014, http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2014/ericsson-mobility-report-june-2014.pdf. 36.


pages: 334 words: 100,201

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Similar, but subtly different, is the idea that, yes, there was a moment of creation when great forces or beings roamed the universe making things, but since then, nothing much has changed. The elders of Lake Mungo might have seen the universe like this, describing a world brought to life more or less in its current form by their ancestors. Isaac Newton saw God as the “first cause” of everything and argued that He was present in all of space. That is why Newton thought that the universe as a whole did not change much. The universe, he once wrote, was “the Sensorium of a Being incorporeal, living, and intelligent.”1 Early in the twentieth century, Einstein was so sure the universe was unchanging (at large scales) that he added a special constant to his theory of relativity to make it predict a stable universe.

Many collected or read about experimental instruments such as telescopes, microscopes, and air pumps; they thought of Newton as the greatest of scientists; they knew Earth orbited the sun; they did not take magic, the histories recounted in ancient legends, the stories of unicorns, or (most) stories of miracles seriously; they believed in the advancement of knowledge and something like progress. New information provided the intellectual bricks and mortar for new types of knowledge. As Isaac Newton developed his laws of gravity, he had access to an unprecedented range of information. He could, for example, compare how pendulums swung in Paris with how they swung in the Americas and Africa. No previous generation of scientists could have tested their ideas so thoroughly or within such wide and varied networks of information.

Newton’s achievement can be tied to the vast increase in general knowledge that overseas trade and exploration had brought to Europeans. The courage to generalize, to arrive at universals about the natural world, owes much to the immense quantity of information—and self-confidence—that European mastery of the great seas gave land-bound thinkers like Isaac Newton.11 Dazzling new flows of wealth and information had one more powerful effect: they stimulated the commercial forms of mobilization often described as capitalism that were driven by gradients of both wealth and information. For the most part, traditional rulers had mobilized wealth with the threat of coercion, the promise of protection, and appeals to religious and legal authorities.


pages: 233 words: 66,446

Bitcoin: The Future of Money? by Dominic Frisby

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, capital controls, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer age, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, fixed income, friendly fire, game design, Hacker News, hype cycle, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Julian Assange, land value tax, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Occupy movement, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price stability, printed gun, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing complete, Twitter Arab Spring, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, War on Poverty, web application, WikiLeaks

But Satoshi was the one who actually coded his idea and put it into practice. Back, Finney, Dai and Szabo were all Cypherpunks. Bitcoin has implemented all of their ideas, and the ideas of many more besides.34 Without these developments, Bitcoin almost certainly could not have happened. It was ‘standing on the shoulders of Cypherpunks’, to misquote Isaac Newton – who, incidentally, also laid down a new system of money: the gold standard on which Britain would thrive in the 18th and 19th centuries. Bitcoin’s first year It was two days before anyone even acknowledged Satoshi’s creation. ‘Announcing the first release of Bitcoin’, he said. ‘A new electronic cash system.’35 Nobody seemed to care.

From mathematics to computer programming to economics and monetary history to politics to PR and psychology to cryptography to business acumen and vision to plain old written English – in all of these fields he excelled. To cap it all, he’s probably good-looking too. It’s too early in history to be drawing this sort of comparison, I know, but there are many parallels between Satoshi and Isaac Newton. Newton was a brilliant scientist and mathematician, of course. But he was also Master of the Royal Mint. He redesigned England’s monetary system, putting us onto the gold standard on which Britain’s colossal progress during the next 200 years was built. As I continued my hunt for Satoshi, I started asking myself questions not just about who he could be…but also about why he did what he did?

There are many who will disagree with this interpretation. And, with investment, it is dangerous to have rigid opinions – I reserve the right to change my mind as events unfold. You could still make a mint There seems to be a 100-year cycle in money. 1716 saw the first Great Recoinage, in the years after Isaac Newton had taken over at the Bank of England. A hundred years later, after excess spending on the Napoleonic Wars, there was another Great Recoinage in 1816. 1913-4 saw another fundamental change to the monetary system with the founding of the Federal Reserve Bank in the US and in Europe the move away from the gold standard.


pages: 206 words: 70,924

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton by Colin Read

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discovery of penicillin, discrete time, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, martingale, means of production, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Paul Samuelson, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Works Progress Administration, yield curve

However, once word arrived in London that one of the South Seas Trading Company’s initiative in the New World, the Mississippi Scheme, had failed to materialize, rampant profit taking induced a mass sell-off that burst the speculative bubble and caused millions of pounds of losses for all but the earliest purchasers of the stock. After making a handsome profit from early The Times 99 purchases of the stock and rolling the profit over into later purchases and losing everything, Sir Isaac Newton was quoted as having quipped that he could not calculate the madness of people: “I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.”3 The bursting of the South Sea Trading Company bubble and the loss of huge potential profits by legislators as their warrants became worthless induced those legislators bribed with these warrants to put in place waves of regulation that restricted options trading.

With the faint praise of his highly placed supervisor, Bachelier did not earn the highest thesis grade of très honorable and thus did not carry the weight he might have wished for as he tried to find an academic appointment. The reason for Poincaré’s faint support may have been the subject matter. Bachelier chose to devote his mathematical physics skills to an understanding of the stock market and the options prices listed on the Paris Stock Exchange. Ever since Isaac Newton’s damning of financial markets, serious scientists and mathematicians viewed the stock market as folly at best and gambling at worst. Nonetheless, Bachelier’s life experiences endowed him with a fascination for the financial market and he would not be persuaded to study elsewhere over mere issues of academic snobbery.

He was the former President of the American Sociological Association and, in 1994, was awarded a National Medal of Science by President Bill Clinton, the first sociologist to be granted this award. He also coined such terms as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” “role model” and “focus groups,” which are still used today. And in his epic but undertitled essay, “A Note on Science and Democracy,” he quoted Isaac Newton as having said “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” He may have anticipated the work of his son and of a finance discipline grappling with uncertainty through the last book of his life, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity. Robert King Merton, the first-generation son of Jewish immigrants, married Suzanne Carhart in 1934.


pages: 231 words: 72,656

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Halley later recalled that Wren offered to "give Mr Hook or me 2 months time to bring him a convincing demonstration thereof, and besides the honour, he of us that did it, should have from him a present of a book of 40 shillings." Neither Halley nor Hooke took up Wren's challenge, however, and this prize went unclaimed. A few months later Halley went to Cambridge, where he visited another scientific colleague, Isaac Newton. Recalling his heated coffeehouse discussion with Wren and Hooke, Halley asked Newton the same question: Would an inverse-square law of gravity give rise to elliptical orbits? Like Hooke, Newton claimed to have proved this already, though he could not find the proof when Halley asked to see it.

During the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thought in France had flowered under thinkers, such as the philosopher and satirist Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, who extended the new scientific rationalism into the social and political spheres. After offending a nobleman with a witticism in 1726, Voltaire had been imprisoned in the Bastille prison in Paris and was only released on condition that he went to England. While there he immersed himself in the scientific rationalism of Isaac Newton and the empiricism espoused by the philosopher John Locke. Just as Newton had rebuilt physics from first principles, Locke set out to do the same for political philosophy. Men were born equal, he believed, were intrinsically good and were entitled to the pursuit of happiness. No man should interfere with another's life, health, liberty, or possessions.

London: Chatto 8c Windus, 1973. Froissart, Sir John de. Chronicles of England, France, Spain and the Adjoining Countries. Translated by Thomas Johnes. New York: Colonial Press, 1901. Gaiter, Mary K., and W. A. Speck. Colonial America. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave, 2002. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. London: Fourth Estate, 2003. Gribbin, John. Science: A History, 1543-2001. London: Allen Lane, 2001. Harms, Robert. The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade. Reading, Mass.: Perseus Press, 2002. Hartman, Louis E, and A. L. Oppenheim. "On Beer and Brewing Techniques in Ancient Mesopotamia."


pages: 209 words: 68,587

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Made of brick, metal, and stone, they had large windows and a futuristic, Japanese temple look. I liked the windows, and there were a lot of them. The complex had won some design awards, but the design element I’d have liked most would have been arrows on signs saying “This way to Stephen Hawking.” Stephen’s pavilion was adjacent to an older building called the Isaac Newton Institute. Newton’s name came up a lot when you knew Stephen. People even compared him to Newton, which is ironic because Stephen didn’t like Newton. Newton engaged in many petty squabbles, and was conniving and vindictive when in a position of power. He refused to share credit for any of his discoveries or even to acknowledge that he’d been influenced by the ideas of others.

He refused to share credit for any of his discoveries or even to acknowledge that he’d been influenced by the ideas of others. He was also humorless. A relative who’d been his assistant for five years said he’d only seen Newton laugh once, when someone asked him why anyone would want to study Euclid. I’d read several biographies of the man, and though they had various titles, any one of them could have been called Isaac Newton: What an Ass. Perhaps more important than Stephen’s estimation of Newton’s disposition is that, in high school, Stephen had been bored by the Newtonian physics he was taught. What excites a scientist is discovery—the revelation of a type of behavior that no one has ever seen, or the achievement of an understanding no one has ever had.

question, for two millennia everyone had assumed that the universe had either always been in existence and was unchanging, or else that it was created at some moment—for example, as described in the Bible—and had been relatively unchanging since then.*1 Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant, as well as scientists, including even Isaac Newton, believed this. Newton should have known better. How could a collection of galaxies and stars maintain a stationary configuration when each, through the force of gravity, pulls all the others toward it? Shouldn’t the objects coalesce over time? And, since forever is a long time, shouldn’t all matter, by now, be clumped together in a big dense ball?


pages: 121 words: 31,813

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions by Lee Freeman-Shor

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, family office, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Pershing Square Capital Management, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

I will demonstrate how legendary investors have been easily led astray by temptations such as a new idea, love or fear – and how the successful ones were able to escape and recover. Anyone who reads this book will be able to use the exact same methods themselves. Lee Freeman-Shor London, 2015 “If I have seen so far it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” – Sir Isaac Newton * * * 1 Being Right or Making Money, by Ned Davis (2000). 2 As quoted in Ibid. Part I : I’m Losing – What Should I Do? In this part of the book we meet some of the world’s greatest investors in losing situations. These are situations we can all relate to – the investors have lost a lot of money and there is massive uncertainty and negativity surrounding their investments.

However, if someone yells fire in a theatre with very few people, the people can get up, look for signs of fire, and walk out in an orderly manner. This is another reason that the Connoisseurs’ approach of taking some profit over the years is a good idea. It’s like inching towards the fire exit. Sir Isaac Newton famously lost everything with his investment in the South Sea stock in the 1700s. The amazing thing, however, was that he was early into the trade and sold out completely having made a nice profit. Then the stock kept going up, and Newton saw his friends who had remained invested become very rich.


pages: 105 words: 34,444

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

All painters learn from other painters – whether imitating or reacting against them. Learning how to do something means learning to adapt existing ideas in new ways. Practically everything we use in everyday life has been designed and made by someone else, and they too were collaborating. Entirely original and independent creations are astonishingly rare. As Isaac Newton stated, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Technology is the same, but with the dependency even more apparent. Smartphones, for instance, combine thousands, even hundreds of thousands of ideas and innovations, big, small and microscopic, accumulated over decades and even centuries.

Although it has recently suffered some corruption (notably from proprietary publishers and a creeping pressure to commercialise), publicly funded science remains dedicated to the open creation and sharing of information. The very essence of science is “publication”: the sharing of the results of research with other scientists and the community at large. Openness is central to the cumulative and collaborative nature of science. As Isaac Newton knew, each scientist stands on the shoulders of those who went before. The Secret of Life On 28 February 1953 Francis Crick stood up in the Eagle pub on Benet Street in Cambridge and shouted “we’ve found the secret of life”. Whether any of his fellow drinkers that lunchtime knew what he meant, history does not relate.


Layered Money: From Gold and Dollars to Bitcoin and Central Bank Digital Currencies by Nik Bhatia

Alan Greenspan, bank run, basic income, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, central bank independence, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, quantitative easing, reserve currency, risk free rate, Satoshi Nakamoto, slashdot, smart contracts, time value of money, tulip mania, universal basic income

The Gold Standard Pound sterling has been the currency denomination of England since 1158 when King Henry introduced a silver coin of 92.5% purity.9 The currency represented a weight in silver until England started minting a gold coin in 1663 called guinea, which was named after the part of West Africa from which the gold was mined. The guinea subjected the pound to the plaguing complications of bimetallism when both the guinea and the English silver coin called shilling carried official values in pounds. But shortly after the creation of the Bank of England, English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton as Master of the Mint permanently altered the course of bimetallism around the world by setting a new exchange rate between gold guineas and silver shillings in 1717. Newton studied the flow of gold and silver throughout Europe and the exchange rates set forth in other countries’ bimetallic standards, specifically France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

A Monetary Mix Sixteen years after the Declaration of Independence, the second Congress of the United States of America finally passed the Coinage Act in 1792 to establish the United States dollar as the country’s official unit of account, defining one dollar as both 1.6 grams of gold and 24 grams of silver. For the next 108 years, the United States experimented with a few different monetary regimes. An early adjustment to the exchange rate between gold and silver had the opposite effect of Isaac Newton’s adjustment as Master of the Mint and drove gold out of usage for several decades. Two separate central banks were created in 1791 and 1812, but each ended after its twenty-year charter. Many early Americans didn’t trust central banks to administer their currency. The banks existed in antithesis to limited government ideals and led to a great deal of political vitriol, which prevented the institutions from charter renewal.


pages: 339 words: 112,979

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

He also, in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802), anticipated a time when 'The remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed'. His collaborator Coleridge said elsewhere that 'the souls of 500 Sir Isaac Newtons would go to the making up of a Shakespeare or a Milton'. This can be interpreted as the naked hostility of a leading Romantic against science in general, but the case of Coleridge is more complicated. He read a great deal of science and fancied himself as a scientific thinker, not least on the subject of light and colour, where he claimed to have anticipated Goethe.

Sir Arthur Eddington, whose own scientific writings were noted for poetic flair, used the solar eclipse of 1919 to test General Relativity and returned from Principe Island to announce, in Banesh Hoffmann's phrase, that Germany was host to the greatest scientist of the age. I read those words with a catch in the throat, but Einstein himself took the triumph in his stride. Any other result and he would have been 'sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct.' Isaac Newton made a private rainbow in a dark room. A small hole in a shutter admitted a sunbeam. In its path he placed his famous prism, which refracted (bent) the sunbeam through an angle, once as it penetrated the glass, then again as it passed through the farther facet into the air again. When the light fell on the far wall of Newton's room, the colours of the spectrum were clearly displayed.

'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1820) Keats and Lamb should have raised their glass to poetry, and to mathematics, and to the poetry of mathematics. Wordsworth would have needed no encouragement. He (and Coleridge) had been inspired by the Scottish poet James Thomson, and might have recalled Thomson's 'To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton' (1727): ... Even Light itself, which every thing displays, Shone undiscovered, till his brighter mind Untwisted all the shining robe of day; And, from the whitening undistinguished blaze, Collecting every ray into his kind, To the charmed eye educed the gorgeous train Of parent colours.


pages: 492 words: 149,259

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter (Fourth Estate, 2000) An account of the life of Galileo, which includes letters sent to him by his daughter, who lived in a convent from the age of thirteen. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Abacus, 1995) The book based on the famous television series, which must have been the inspiration for numerous careers in astronomy. Chapter 2 James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Fourth Estate, 2003) An accessible and concise account of the life of Isaac Newton. Hans Reichenbach, From Copernicus to Einstein (Dover, 1980) A short history of the ideas that contributed to relativity theory. David Bodanis, E = mc2 (Walker, 2001) The biography of an equation, inspired by Cameron Diaz, who once asked if somebody could explain the meaning of Einstein’s famous formula.

Day and night I rack my brain in an effort to penetrate more deeply into the things that I gradually discovered in the past two years and that represent an unprecedented advance in the fundamental problems of physics.’ In speaking of ‘truly great things’ and ‘fundamental problems’, Einstein was referring to the fact that the general theory of relativity seemed to be leading him towards an entirely new theory of gravity. If Einstein was right, then physicists would be forced to question the work of Isaac Newton, one of the icons of physics. Newton was born in tragic circumstances on Christmas Day 1642, his father having died just three months earlier. While Isaac was still an infant, his mother married a sixty-three-year-old rector, Barnabas Smith, who refused to accept Isaac into his home. It fell to Isaac’s grandparents to bring him up, and as each year passed he developed a growing hatred towards the mother and stepfather who had abandoned him.

As discussed in Chapter 1, the scientific establishment at the start of the twentieth century was confident that the universe was static and eternal, not contracting and temporary. Not surprisingly, Einstein disliked the notion of a collapsing universe: ‘To admit such a possibility seems senseless.’ Although Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was different, it also gave rise to a collapsing universe, and Newton had also been troubled by this implication of his theory. One of his solutions was to envisage an infinite, symmetric universe, in which every object would therefore be pulled equally in all directions, and there would be no overall movement and no collapse.


pages: 285 words: 78,180

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

This would be the ultimate proof by synthesis. 8 Synthesis of the M. mycoides Genome If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. —Richard Feynman, 19881 Many believe that the most important innovations of human creativity are the result of some kind of visionary gift, a gift associated with such extraordinary and singular geniuses as Isaac Newton, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. I don’t doubt the incredible impact of individuals who can make great intellectual leaps, who can see further than anyone before them, and who discern patterns where others see only noise. However, there is also a less dramatic kind of creativity that drives science, a humble variety that is no less important: problem-solving.2 Vaulting a single hurdle to achieve one very particular goal can sometimes result in a technology that can prove to have an extraordinary range of other uses.

We are moving toward a borderless world in which electrons and electromagnetic waves will carry digitized information here, there, and everywhere. Borne upon those waves of information, life will move at the speed of light. 12 Life at the Speed of Light The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations. —Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks (1718)1 When life is finally able to travel at the speed of light, the universe will shrink, and our own powers will expand. Simple calculations indicate that we could send electromagnetic sequence information to a digital-biological converter on Mars in as little as 4.3 minutes, at the closest approach of the Red Planet, to provide a settlement of colonists with vaccines, antibiotics, or personalized drugs.

“A controlled clinical trial of a therapeutic bacteriophage preparation in chronic otitis due to antibiotic-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa: A preliminary report of efficacy.” Clinical Otolaryngology 34, no. 4 (August 2009): pp. 349–57. 35. L. J. Marinelli, et al. “Propionibacterium acnes bacteriophages display limited genetic diversity and broad killing activity against bacterial skin isolates.” mBio 3, no. 5 (2012): e00279-12. Chapter 12 1. Isaac Newton. Opticks, 2nd edition (1718). Book 3, Query 30, 349. 2. Brett J. Gladman, Joseph A. Burns, Martin Duncan, Pascal Lee, and Harold F. Levison. “The exchange of impact ejecta between terrestrial planets.” Science 271, no. 5254 (March 8, 1996): p. 1387(6). 3. David S. McKay, et al. “Search for past life on Mars: Possible relic biogenic activity in Martian meteorite ALH84001.”


pages: 270 words: 73,485

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One by Meghnad Desai

3D printing, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, women in the workforce

“The man of system,” he wrote, seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand that arranges the different pieces on a chess-board; he does not consider that the different pieces upon a chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own. Altogether different from that which the legislator might choose to impress upon it.2 The “Principle of Motion” Adam Smith and his Scottish contemporaries were part of the Scottish Enlightenment. They founded what we now consider to be the social sciences. They were deeply impressed by Isaac Newton’s achievement in astronomy, delineating the principles upon which the planets moved in a systematic way unaided by any explicit agency. It was said that Newton had discovered God’s system of how the heavens worked. Smith and his fellow Scotsmen wanted to discover the principles of social astronomy, as it were: what made societies function and evolve, grow or decay.

The invisible hand was a similar idea of a sort of secular rather than divine mechanism to coordinate the myriad activities of separate individuals, buying and selling, working and saving, investing and exporting. But no one is actually in charge; we all are on our separate ways. The idea of society as a self-organizing entity that Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment gifted to posterity comes from such notions about how the world works. Isaac Newton’s theory about the movements of planets also fitted in with this idea. The universe was obeying the laws of motion (implicitly set by God long ago and discovered by Newton) and no one was driving the planets on a daily basis. Once it was understood that the economy was a complex web of mutually interdependent relations, with each person pursuing their own interest and yet arriving at a good outcome, it was easy to see the international system as just an extension of this idea.

Champions of the French Revolution identified with Godwin, though he admired Edmund Burke, a virulent enemy of the Revolution. But there was economic turbulence as well. Inflation, the old specter of a century ago, had raised its head again. To combat inflation in the earlier century, the pound sterling had been based on its value in terms of gold, £3 17s 10½d per ounce, a price fixed by Sir Isaac Newton when he was Master of the Mint. (This price held until 1933.) Citizens could take gold to be coined at the Mint and offer their coins to get gold if they wanted. The pound was convertible into gold. Banknotes issued by the Bank of England were also convertible into gold – the £20 note still bears the legend “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of twenty pounds.”


pages: 284 words: 79,265

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date by Samuel Arbesman

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, bioinformatics, British Empire, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, data science, David Brooks, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Galaxy Zoo, Gregor Mendel, guest worker program, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index fund, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, National Debt Clock, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, p-value, Paul Erdős, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, SimCity, social contagion, social graph, social web, systematic bias, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation

One simple example of eurekometrics—and one that I was involved in—is examining how discoveries become more difficult over time. . . . IF you look back in history you can get the impression that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes; Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity; Isaac Newton poked around his own eye with a darning needle to understand color perception. It took creativity and knowledge (and perhaps a lack of squeamishness or regard for one’s own well-being) to ask the right questions, but the experiments themselves could be very simple. Today, if you want to make a discovery in physics, it helps to be part of a ten-thousand-member team that runs a multibillion-dollar atom smasher.

And now think about your math classes from high school and college. What Tai “discovered,” even being so bold as to term it Tai’s Model, is integral calculus. Tai was not the first person to discover calculus, no doubt to her great disappointment. Rather, it was first developed in the latter half of the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, more than three hundred years before Tai’s diabetes-related calculations. Specifically, Tai rediscovered something known as the trapezoidal rule for calculating the area below a curve, which seems to have been known to Newton. And yet Tai’s article passed through the editors and has received well over one hundred citations in the scientific literature.

Luckily, the Times was willing to print a correction. The only hitch: They printed it the day after Apollo 11’s launch in 1969. Three days before humans first walked on the moon, they recanted their editorial with this bit of understatement: Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error. Why do we believe in wrong, outdated facts? There are lots of reasons. Kathryn Schulz, in her book Being Wrong, explores reason after reason why we make errors.


pages: 278 words: 70,416

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

Rails translated what Twitter’s programmers wanted to tell all those computer transistors to do—with relatively little effort. And that allowed them to build a company fast. In the world of high tech—like in racing—a tiny time advantage can mean the difference between winning and getting passed. ISAAC NEWTON ATTRIBUTED HIS success as a scientist to “standing on the shoulders of giants”—building off of the work of great thinkers before him. Platforms are tools and environments that let us do just that. It’s clear how using platforms applies in computer programming, but what if we wanted to apply platform thinking to something outside of tech startups?

I had to jump to grab the first ring and then swing like a pendulum in order to reach the next ring. To get to the third ring, I had to use the momentum from the previous swing to keep going. If I held on to the previous ring too long, I’d stop and wouldn’t be able to get enough speed to reach the next ring. This is Isaac Newton’s first law of motion at work: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, unless acted on by external forces. Once you start swinging, it’s easier to keep swinging than to slow down. The problem with some rapid success, it turns out, is that lucky breaks like Bear Vasquez’s YouTube success or an entrepreneur cashing out on an Internet wave are like having someone lift you up so you can grab one of the Olympic rings.

If you’re really hungry, the books in this list will keep you going for a while: “A Reading List for the Self-Taught Computer Scientist,” Reddit, http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/ch0wt/a_reading_list_for_the_selftaught_computer/ (accessed February 16, 2014). 85 He called it Ruby on Rails: For more information on Ruby on Rails, see http://rubyonrails.org/. 85 a couple of guys at a podcasting startup: For a thorough and dramatic history of Twitter, see Nick Bilton, Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (Portfolio, 2013). 86 “standing on the shoulders of giants”: The common contemporary quotation comes from a line in one of Sir Isaac Newton’s letters to Robert Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants,” Newton, letter to Hooke, February 5, 1676, http://www.isaacnewton.org.uk/essays/Giants. The phrase appears to have originated with Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century: Robert K. Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants (Free Press, 1965). 86 managed to be the best with less effort: Robert Compton directed Dr.


pages: 265 words: 79,944

First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

The small part of the spectrum that we refer to as ‘light’ in everyday life is just the visible part that our eyes have adapted to, and we use the word colour to talk about the specific wavelengths in that small section. The first person to understand that light was composed of different colours was English physicist Isaac Newton. In 1666, he aligned a glass prism with a beam of sunlight and observed a rainbow emanating from the other side of the prism.15 I’m running low on diagram space so just look up Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album cover. It had been noted before how a broken piece of glass, or a prism, resulted in different colours when held up to sunlight.

Had we just looked at Centaurus A in visible wavelengths, the black hole would not have been so obvious, whereas in radio it might as well have an arrow-shaped sign saying ‘Black Hole Here’. Taking the temperature of the stars Let’s go back and colour in our drawing of the Sun. We often depict the Sun as yellow but, as we know from Isaac Newton, William Herschel and Pink Floyd, sunlight comprises a whole range of different wavelengths. The range of wavelengths of light a star emits makes up a barcode unique to that star, a stellar spectrum, with similar types of star having similar spectra. The solar spectrum demonstrates that the Sun radiates across a range of wavelengths, with only 40 per cent being visible to the human eye.

Chatto & Windus. 13 Klimchuk, J. A. 2006. On Solving the Coronal Heating Problem. Solar Physics, 234 (1): 41–77. 14 G Caspi, A. et al. 2020. A New Facility for Airborne Solar Astronomy: NASA’s WB-57 at the 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. The Astrophysical Journal, 895 (2): id.131. 15 Gleick, J. 2004. Isaac Newton. Harper Perennial. 16 Private communication with Royal Society Librarian Keith Moore. 17 Herschel, W. 1800. Experiments on the refrangibility of the invisible rays of the Sun. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 90: 284–292. 18 Einstein, A. 1905. On a heuristic point of view about the creation and conversion of light.


pages: 168 words: 35,753

Ye Olde Britain: Best Historical Experiences by Lonely Planet Publications

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Winter of Discontent

Apart from the royal graves, keep an eye out for the many famous commoners interred here, especially in Poets’ Corner, where you’ll find the resting places of Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Dr Johnson and Kipling as well as memorials to the other greats (Shakespeare, Austen, Brontë etc). Elsewhere you’ll find the graves of Handel and Sir Isaac Newton. Verger-led tours are held several times a day (except Sundays) and are limited to 25 people per tour; call ahead to secure your place. Of course, admission to the Abbey is free if you wish to attend a service. On weekdays, Matins is at 7.30am, Holy Communion at 8am and 12.30pm, and Choral Evensong at 5pm.

It’s a wonderful introduction to one of Cambridge’s most venerable colleges, and a reminder of who really rules the roost. As you enter the Great Court, scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 32 Nobel Prize winners. The square is also the scene of the run made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – 350m in 43 seconds (the time it takes the clock to strike 12).


pages: 406 words: 115,719

The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes

Albert Einstein, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, the new new thing, the scientific method, Works Progress Administration

If this were a criminal investigation, the detectives assigned to the case would start from the assumption that there was one prime suspect, one likely perpetrator, because the crimes (all the aforementioned diseases) are so closely related. They would only embrace the possibility that there were multiple perpetrators when the single-suspect hypothesis was proved insufficient to explain all the evidence. Scientists know this essential concept as Occam’s Razor. When Isaac Newton said, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances,” he was saying the same thing that Albert Einstein, three centuries later, said (or was paraphrased as saying): “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Burkitt and Trowell went along with their peers and adopted a less parsimonious way of viewing the emergence of these Western diseases. But is this perspective justified? Can a host of chronic diseases that cluster together both in individuals and in populations and associate closely with Western diets and lifestyles best be explained by the presence of a single dietary trigger—i.e., sugar—or by multiple triggers? When Isaac Newton paraphrased the concept of Occam’s Razor, he did so by saying, “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” This was rule number one of Newton’s “rules of reasoning in natural philosophy” in his Principia. So is it necessary to posit multiple aspects of diet and lifestyle—multiple causes—to explain the presence of these chronic diseases that associate with Western and urban lives, or will one suffice?

A conservative estimate: The CDC estimates the direct and indirect costs for heart disease and stroke at $315 billion each year, cancer at $157 billion, diabetes at $245 billion, and obesity (in 2008) at $147 billion (CDC 2016a). The Rand Corporation has estimated the total monetary cost of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, at between $157 and $215 billion (Hurd et al. 2013). Alzheimer’s as type 3 diabetes: See, for instance, Guthrie 2007. “We are to admit”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Isaac_Newton. “Everything should be”: See https://​en.​wikiquote.​org/​wiki/​Albert_​Einstein. “multifactorial, complex disorders” or “multidimensional diseases”: See, for instance, NIDDK 2011: 117–38. At least a tenth of all cases of lung cancer: ALA 2014: 5. “all wars combined”: West 1978: ix. Heavy smokers had twenty to thirty times: See, for instance, Doll and Hill 1964.


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Indeed, the historian of science Catherine Wilson has argued that the whole of seventeenth-century empiricism, started by Pierre Gassendi in opposition to Descartes, and taken up by the most influential thinkers of the age, including Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz and Bishop Berkeley, was fuelled to a remarkable extent by the sudden popularity of Lucretius. As Lucretian ideas percolated, the physicists were the first to see where they led. Isaac Newton became acquainted with Epicurean atomism as a student at Cambridge, when he read a book by Walter Charleton expounding Gassendi’s interpretation of Lucretius. Later he acquired a Latin edition of De Rerum Natura itself, which survives from his library and shows signs of heavy use. He echoed Lucretian ideas about voids between atoms throughout his books, especially the Opticks.

It could come, dangerously, from small, portable books – and even from ideas you came to yourself.’ Gradually, by reading Lucretius and by experiment and thought, the Enlightenment embraced the idea that you could explain astronomy, biology and society without recourse to intelligent design. Nikolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Baruch Spinoza and Isaac Newton made their tentative steps away from top–down thinking and into the bottom–up world. Then, with gathering excitement, Locke and Montesquieu, Voltaire and Diderot, Hume and Smith, Franklin and Jefferson, Darwin and Wallace, would commit similar heresies against design. Natural explanations displaced supernatural ones.

It was inevitable that these things would be invented or discovered just about when they were. The history of inventions, writes the historian Alfred Kroeber, is ‘one endless chain of parallel instances’. It’s just as true in science as in technology. Boyle’s Law in English-speaking countries is the same thing as Mariotte’s Law in French-speaking countries. Isaac Newton vented paroxysms of fury at Gottfried Leibniz for claiming, correctly, to have invented the calculus independently. Charles Darwin was prodded into publishing his theory at last by Alfred Wallace having precisely the same idea, after reading precisely the same book (Malthus’s Essay on Population).


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

As long as Newton’s long shadow casts itself over economic theory, it is unlikely that economics, as a discipline, will be able to accommodate the growing schisms that threaten all of its most basic assumptions. Economic historian E. Ray Canterbery notes that taking on the likes of Adam Smith becomes increasingly daunting because he rides on the coattails of the great Sir Isaac Newton. He writes, “From time to time, a cluster of economists consider conventional economics ripe for revolution, but any economic revolutionaries will have to go to the barricades against the genius of Isaac Newton as well as against Adam Smith and his long line of followers.”6 Now however, for the first time, the many cracks in the theoretical foundations of the discipline are threatening to tumble the edifice of classical economic theory.

In their attempts to understand the new forces let loose by coal-powered steam technology and factory production, the founding fathers of the new discipline—Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, and the like—looked to the new field of physics for a set of guiding principles and metaphors to fashion their own theories of the workings of the marketplace. NEWTON’S LAWS AND SELF-REGULATING MARKETS Sir Isaac Newton’s mathematical method for discussing mechanical motion was all the rage at the time. It was being purloined by virtually every serious thinker to explain away the meaning of existence and the ways of the world. Newton declared that “all the phenomena of nature may depend upon certain forces by which the particles of bodies, by causes hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled toward each other, and cohere in regular figures, or are repelled and recede from each other.”

N. (1952). Science and the Modern World. New York: New American Library, p. 50. 4.Miller, G. T. (1971). Energetics, Kinetics, and Life: An Ecological Approach. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, p. 46. 5.Soddy, F. (1911). Matter and Energy New York: H. Holt and Co., pp. 10–11. 6.Canterbery, E. R. (2003). Isaac Newton and the Economics Paradigm: Newton, Natural Law and Adam Smith. In The Making of Economics. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Pub, p. 75. 7.Laslett, P. (1967). Second Treatise. In John Locke: Two Treatises of Government Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 312. 8.Schrödinger, E. (1947).


God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History by Stephen Hawking

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, G4S, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, the long tail, three-masted sailing ship, tontine, Turing machine

But we know that a is one of the roots of this equation, and therefore NR, the shorter length, must be a, and CG must be y. Then x = y − a = CG − NR, the first of the required mean proportionals. 233. That is, makes so small an angle with it. 234. This is especially noticeable when there are six real positive roots. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) HIS LIFE AND WORK Galileo died on January 8, 1642, exactly three hundred years before the day I was born. Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day of that year in the English industrial town of Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. He would later become Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the chair I now hold. Newton’s mother did not expect him to live long, as he was born very prematurely; he would later describe himself as having been so small at birth he could fit into a quart pot.

Heath, courtesy of Dover Publications. Selections from Diophantus of Alexandria, A Study in the History of Greek Algebra, by Thomas L. Heath, reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press. The Geometry of Rene Descartes, trans. David E. Smith and Marcia L. Latham courtesy of Dover Publications. Selections from Isaac Newton’s Principia, notes by David Eugene Smith, courtesy of New York: Daniel Adee, © 1848. English translation of Leonhard Euler’s On the sums of series of reciprocals (De summis serierum reciprocarum) courtesy of Jordan Bell. Leonhard Euler’s The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg and Proof that Every Integer is A Sum of Four Squares courtesy of Dover Publications.

Alan Turing’s On computable numbers with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society courtesy of the London Mathematical Society. Picture Credits: Euclid: Getty Images. Archimedes: Getty Images. Diophantus: Title page of Diophanti Alexandrini Arthimeticorum libri sex. . . ., 1621: Library of Congress, call number QA31.D5, Rare Book/Special Collections Reading Room, (Jefferson LJ239). Rene Descartes: Getty Images. Isaac Newton: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images. Leonhard Euler: Getty Images. Pierre Simon de Laplace: Getty Images. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier: Science and Society Picture Library, London. Carl Friedrich Gauss: Getty Images. Augustin-Louis Cauchy: © Bettmann/CORBIS. Évariste Galois: © Bettmann/CORBIS.


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Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives) by David Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, creative destruction, credit crunch, cross-border payments, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, dematerialisation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, index card, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Irish bank strikes, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, land bank, large denomination, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, Northern Rock, Pingit, prediction markets, price stability, QR code, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social graph, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, wage slave, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons

Towards the end of the seventeenth century the government gave up passing pointless laws about money (such as the 1660 act forbidding the export of bullion) and instead of asking investment bankers or celebrities for advice in the modern fashion, they decided to ask someone clever instead. And so it was that the smartest man that ever lived, Sir Isaac Newton, then the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was appointed the Master of the Mint. Newton quickly figured out what was wrong and changed money in such a way as to set England on a path of economic growth (Levinson 2009). Newton looked to harness more technological innovation to transform money.

Money of the past Money of the future Physical money Money that exists, at least in part, in a physical means of exchange Electronic money Money that has no physical medium of exchange Cash Money that can be passed from person to person Electronic cash Electronic money that can be passed from person to person Mundane currency Physical money that is a unit of account Virtual currency Electronic money that is a unit of account but only in a virtual world Analogue currency Physical money that is a unit of account Digital currency Electronic money that is a unit of account in mundane and virtual transactions Fiat currency Analogue currency whose value is maintained by the reputation of the issuer Crypto currency Money without an issuer: a currency whose value is maintained by cryptography We are at a similar point now, with a mismatch between the mentality and the institutions of paper money in the industrial age and a new, post-industrial economy with a different technological basis for money. In a generation or so there will be a completely new set of monetary arrangements in place. Just as that machine-made, uniform, mechanized coinage introduced by Isaac Newton in 1696 better matched the commerce of the Industrial Revolution, so we can expect some form of digital money to better match the commerce of the information age (Birch 2001). Mentally, we’re still in the present. But can we look around in the present to find the distributed building blocks of the future?

We are at a similar cusp now, with a mismatch between the mentality and the institutions of paper money from the industrial age and a new, post-industrial economy with a different technological basis for money. In a generation or so there will be a completely new set of monetary arrangements in place and completely new institutions will manage them. Just as the machine-made, uniform, mechanized coinage introduced by Isaac Newton in 1696 better matched the commerce of the Industrial Revolution, so I have long maintained that we should expect some form of digital money that will better match the commerce of the information age (Birch 2001). But what will it look like? Are we looking at a world of multiple, overlapping communities with a similar variety of values-based currencies?


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The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

Scientific breakthroughs usually rest on a multitude of advances made by researchers building on earlier findings, learning from each other’s mistakes, testing rival theories, adding their own piece to the puzzle. The aim of Philosophical Transactions was to spread scientific knowledge so that hunches, theories and flashes of inspiration could cross-pollinate. One early contributor to the journal, Sir Isaac Newton, summed up the importance of leaning on peers and predecessors in a letter to a rival in 1676. “If I have seen farther,” he wrote, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” That remains true today. Study after study suggests that scientists solve problems better when they work together. Nobel laureates collaborate more than less garlanded colleagues.

Sometimes you just want to find a diamond in the rough, that one person in the crowd armed with a killer app. In the early 18th century Britain’s Royal Navy lost many ships at sea because crews had no way to measure longitude while sailing. Some of the finest scientific minds of the day, including Sir Isaac Newton, had tried in vain to solve this problem. Desperate for a solution, Britain set aside its cosy assumptions about social class and turned to the crowd. In 1714 an Act of Parliament offered £20,000, a vast sum at the time, to anyone who invented a “Practicable and Useful” way of calculating longitude at sea.

Picasso talked of remaining child-like in order to paint. Henri Matisse noted that “a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play” is the hallmark of creative heavyweights. In science, too, a playful testing of the boundaries is often the first step towards the lightning bolts of genius that win Nobel prizes. Sir Isaac Newton once wrote that “to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Albert Einstein put it more pithily: “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the child-like inclination for play.”


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The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

In fact, there are further options. It is possible for the matter to be infinite in extent, but only finite in total mass if matter thins out gradually, leaving space empty beyond a particular distance from the centre (see Figure 7.8). Fig 7.8 The Aristotelian, Stoic, and Epicurean models of the universe. Fig 7.9 Isaac Newton’s seventeenth-century picture of the universe.17 Indeed, at the beginning of his work on gravity in the seventeenth century, Newton viewed the Universe as a finite system of stars and planets surrounded by an infinite empty space (Figure 7.9). Others, like Descartes, had argued that where there was no matter there could be no space, but Newton believed that the Divine spirit supported the existence of space in places where there was no matter.

chapter nine Worlds Without End ‘And since space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may be also allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions of Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several parts of the Universe.’ Isaac Newton 1 OTHER WORLDS IN HISTORY ‘“But do you really mean, sir”, said Peter, “that there could be other worlds – all over the place, just around the corner – like that?” “Nothing is more probable”, said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.” ’ C.S.

Einstein taught us that there is a fundamental limit to the speed at which information can be transferred in Nature. There is a cosmic speed limit: the speed at which light moves in a perfect vacuum. This simple idea has many unexpected consequences and it underpins all that we know about the physical world. In the world according to Isaac Newton, we can observe light to travel at many different speeds, just like anything else. Stand by the road side and shine a torch down the street. The light will move at a particular speed relative to you on the street. But what happens if a car drives past with its headlights on (see Figure 10.5)? If you were Newton, you would think that relative to you the light from the car would move at the speed at which it radiates from the light bulb (the same as the speed with which it shines from the torch) plus the speed at which the car is moving.


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The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Donald Trump, feminist movement, forensic accounting, Gary Kildall, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, index fund, Isaac Newton, law of one price, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pepto Bismol, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

CHAPTER 2 The Laws of Truths and Half-Truths LOOKING TO THE SKY on a clear, moonless night, the human eye can detect thousands of twinkling sources of light. Nestled among those haphazardly scattered stars are patterns. A lion here, a dipper there. The ability to detect patterns can be both a strength and a weakness. Isaac Newton pondered the patterns of falling objects and created a law of universal gravitation. Others have noted a spike in their athletic performance when they are wearing dirty socks and thenceforth have refused to wear clean ones. Among all the patterns of nature, how do we distinguish the meaningful ones?

IN 1680 a great comet sailed through our neighborhood of the solar system, close enough that the tiny fraction of sunlight it reflected was sufficient to make it prominent in the night sky of our own planet. It was in that part of earth’s orbit called November that the comet was first spotted, and for months afterward it remained an object of intense scrutiny, its path recorded in great detail. In 1687, Isaac Newton would use these data as an example of his inverse square law of gravity at work. And on one clear night in that parcel of land called Basel, Switzerland, another man destined for greatness was also paying attention. He was a young theologian who, gazing at the bright, hazy light of the comet, realized that it was mathematics, not the church, with which he wanted to occupy his life.8 With that realization sprouted not just Jakob Bernoulli’s own career change but also what would become the greatest family tree in the history of mathematics: in the century and a half between Jakob’s birth and 1800 the Bernoulli family produced a great many offspring, about half of whom were gifted, including eight noted mathematicians, and three (Jakob, his younger brother Johann, and Johann’s son Daniel) who are today counted as among the greatest mathematicians of all times.

The imprecision of measurement became a major issue in the mid-eighteenth century, when one of the primary occupations of those working in celestial physics and mathematics was the problem of reconciling Newton’s laws with the observed motions of the moon and planets. One way to produce a single number from a set of discordant measurements is to take the average, or mean. It seems to have been young Isaac Newton who, in his optical investigations, first employed it for that purpose.2 But as in many things, Newton was an anomaly. Most scientists in Newton’s day, and in the following century, didn’t take the mean. Instead, they chose the single “golden number” from among their measurements—the number they deemed mainly by hunch to be the most reliable result they had.


pages: 595 words: 162,258

Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt

British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, digital map, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, land reform, late capitalism, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Republic of Letters, side project, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The Dundases had played central roles in the Union and they considered themselves to be standard-bearers of the Scottish Enlightenment. His intimacy with this influential family would open up an array of opportunities to the young David Watson. THE ONSET OF an Age of Enlightenment in Britain was enormously helped by two events that had occurred in 1687 and 1688. The publication of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), and the ‘abdication’ of King James II of England, followed by the arrival of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William as joint monarchs, were events that were both widely considered to demonstrate the potential of human powers of reason.

The Dundases’ enthusiasm for geography was such that they even attended the prestigious lectures on surveying that were delivered by the Edinburgh mathematician Colin Maclaurin. A child prodigy who was elected Professor of Mathematics at Aberdeen University at the age of nineteen, Maclaurin had so impressed Isaac Newton with his work that Newton had even offered to pay his salary. At Edinburgh, Maclaurin devised a rigorous course of mathematical education that emphasised the discipline’s practical applications, especially to map-making. The Scots Magazine described how, in his lectures, Maclaurin ‘begins with demonstrating the grounds of vulgar and decimal arithmetic; then proceeds to Euclid; and after … insists on surveying, fortification and other practical parts’.

Lind’s ‘spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom’ was praised by his adoring surrogate son, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (who, it was rumoured, was saved from the asylum by the physician’s intervention), and Lind gladly agreed to Roy’s request. In 1774 Roy had a friendship with a fellow member of the Royal Society whose ambitious project gave the map-maker an opportunity to take his barometer to Scotland in person. The laws of motion that Isaac Newton had laid out in his Principia Mathematica had sparked a widespread interest in geodesy. Without proof or evidence, Newton had assumed that the earth had originally been a homogeneous fluid mass and he claimed that one of the effects of the law of universal gravitation was that the centrifugal force to which the earth was subject meant that it was not a perfect sphere.


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What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

In our perception, each of those registers ascribes certain magical powers to symbols and meaning; each of them generates cultural power based on the inherent tension between reality and representation. The link between spoken language and abstract symbolic systems, particularly mathematics, has created new avenues for mystical connections between numbers, universal truths, and the fundamental structure of reality. Jewish kabbalah, Isaac Newton’s fascination with alchemy, and biological examples of mathematical figures like the Golden Ratio all reinforce a particular metaphysical notion that some logical order, some grammar and symbolic vocabulary, underlies the universe. In debating these questions, philosophers and mathematicians developed increasingly sophisticated understandings of symbolic languages, laying the groundwork for the contemporary era of computation.

Historian Nathan Ensmenger recounts how the academic discipline of computer science coalesced only after its advocates embraced the concept of the algorithm, with one of the field’s founders, Donald Knuth, tracing the field’s origins to al-Khwarizmi in his seminal textbook The Art of Computer Programming.6 The algorithm was an ideal object of study, both easily grasped and endlessly puzzling: By suggesting that the algorithm was as fundamental to the technical activity of computing as Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were to physics, Knuth and his fellow computer scientists could claim full fellowship with the larger community of scientists.7 And yet, as mathematician Yiannis Moschovakis points out, Knuth’s argument about what algorithms actually are is an extremely rare instance where the question is foregrounded.8 For computer scientists the term remains more of an intuitive, unexamined notion than a delineated logical concept grounded in a mathematical theory of computation.

State currencies and central banks added a second layer of trust and directed management to the equation, backing the value of a coin or note with the authority of the state, what in the United States is sometimes called the “full faith and credit” of the federal government.29 Currencies could be supported intrinsically, like Isaac Newton weighing and tracking the precious metals in each British coin, or extrinsically, like a government maintaining a reserve of gold bullion to anchor the value of its paper currency. A state and its central bank might control the introduction of new specie into circulation, manipulate exchange rates, mandate fixed prices for commodities, or simply change its value by fiat (as North Korea did in 2009 by introducing a new currency overnight).


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Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets by John Plender

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, diversification, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, Golden arches theory, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labour market flexibility, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, money market fund, moral hazard, moveable type in China, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

This feedback phenomenon, which has been better understood by novelists and poets than many Chicago economists, was also at work in the South Sea Bubble, as we saw in my initial quotation from Alexander Pope. Pope, incidentally, was himself one of those irresistibly charmed by the South Sea Bubble. So, too, was the greatest genius of the day, Isaac Newton. As Master of the Royal Mint and the man who put England onto the gold standard when he was not busy discovering the physical laws of the universe, he was hardly a novice in finance. Having made an initial 100 per cent profit of £7,000 on his shares in the South Sea Company, he was unlucky enough to go back into the market close to the top and lost £20,000, equivalent to £2.5 million in today’s money.

The dottiness of their enterprise consisted, to my mind, not only in the physical challenge but the nonsensical economics. Since a successful alchemist would have been no more able to keep his formula secret than the first claimant in a gold rush, the prospect of infinite supply would have turned gold into a commodity about as valuable as sand. Yet even Sir Isaac Newton, father of modern physical science, devoted much of his career to alchemical research. Few were more immoderate in their blindness than sixteenth-century European adventurers, whom John Maynard Keynes regarded as the originators of capitalism. We owe the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas to gold, for gold was the probable motive that drove Christopher Columbus westward: his diary of a voyage that lasted less than a hundred days mentions gold sixty-five times.

These great Scottish intellectuals argued that the source of a nation’s wealth was not the amount of gold that its citizens hoarded, but the production of goods and services. Note, though, that for nearly two centuries from 1717, gold provided stable monetary underpinning for the economy after the introduction of the gold standard. This was at the suggestion of Sir Isaac Newton, who persuaded the parliament to fix the price of gold at £3.17s. 10½p an ounce. John Maynard Keynes argued that the success of the gold standard in the nineteenth century was accidental. The supply of gold did not increase in line with economic growth, which was a potential curb on the money supply and thus on economic activity.


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Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

After evidence forced him to give up the beautiful polyhedra, Kepler, in later life, became convinced that the planets play music along their paths. In his 1619 book Harmony of the World he derived the planet’s tunes and concluded that “the Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi.” It wasn’t his best work. But Kepler’s analysis of the planetary orbits laid a basis for the later studies of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), the first scientist to rigorously use mathematics. Newton believed in the existence of a god whose influence he saw in the rules that nature obeyed: “This most beautiful system of the Sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent Being,” he wrote in 1726, “Every newly found truth, every experiment or theorem, is a new mirror of the beauty of God.”4 Since their inception, Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation have been radically overhauled, but they remain valid today as approximations.

Can’t be so hard, I tell myself; he probably has a speech lined up anyway. Vaguely I ask, “What is the relevance of beauty in theoretical physics?” And off he goes. “When we come to unfamiliar realms of reality—the subatomic, quantum realms—everyday intuition is unreliable,” Frank begins. “And the idea of just gathering a lot of data, like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton recommended, that’s just not practical because experiments are so hard now. The way forward that has worked very well in the biggest part of the twentieth century was hoping that the equations would be very beautiful, that they would be symmetric and economical, and deriving consequences and then checking them.

Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press. 3. Quoted in McAllister JW. 1996. Beauty and revolution in science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, p. 178. 4. Newton I. 1729. The general scholium. Motte A, trans. https://isaac-newton.org/general-scholium. 5. Leibniz G. 1686. Discourse on metaphysics. Montgomery GR, trans. In: Leibniz (1902). La Salle, IL: Open Court. 6. Called “the principle of least action.” 7. Quoted by Freeman Dyson in Weyl’s obituary, Nature, March 10, 1956. 8. Rebsdorf S, Kragh H. 2002. “Edward Arthur Milne—the relations of mathematics to science.”


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From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

Then, wherever we went in spacetime, there would be a clock sitting at each point telling us what time it was, once and for all. The real world, as we will see, doesn’t let us construct an absolute universal time coordinate. For a long time people thought it did, under no less an authority than that of Sir Isaac Newton. In Newton’s view of the universe, there was one particular right way to slice up the universe into slices of “space at a particular moment of time.” And we could indeed, at least in a thought-experiment kind of way, send clocks all throughout the universe to set up a time coordinate that would uniquely specify when a certain event was taking place.

The lesson is that clocks are kind of like odometers, keeping track of some measure of distance traveled (through time or through space) along a particular path. If clocks are kind of like odometers, then time is kind of like space. Remember that even before special relativity, if we believed in absolute space and time à la Isaac Newton, there was nothing stopping us from combining them into one entity called “spacetime.” It was still necessary to give four numbers (three to locate a position in space, and one time) to specify an event in the universe. But in a Newtonian world, space and time had completely separate identities.

The right-hand side characterizes all the various forms of stuff that make spacetime curve—energy, momentum, pressure, and so on. In one fell swoop, Einstein’s equation reveals how any particular collection of particles and fields in the universe creates a certain kind of curvature in spacetime. According to Isaac Newton, the source of gravity was mass; heavier objects gave rise to stronger gravitational fields. In Einstein’s universe, things are more complicated. Mass gets replaced by energy, but there are also other properties that go into curving spacetime. Vacuum energy, for example, has not only energy, but also tension—a kind of negative pressure.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

Long Comment Regarding a Proposed Exemption under 17 U.S.C. 1201 (Proposed Class # 21) at 6, Section 1201 Exemptions to Prohibition against Circumvention of Technological Measures Protecting Copyrighted Works: Second Round of Comments, http://copyright.gov/1201/2015/comments-032715/class%2021/John_Deere_Class21_1201_2014.pdf, accessed September 7, 2015. 23. Aro Mfg. Co. v. Convertible Top Replacement Co., 365 U.S. 336 (1961). 24. Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, February 15, 1675, in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Vol. 1 (1661–1675), ed. H. W. Turnbull (London: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 416. 25. Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 2. 26. See Ethan Zuckerman, “Eric von Hippel and 2.9 Million British Innovators,” ... My Heart’s in Accra (blog), September 14, 2010, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2010/09/14/eric-von-hippel-and-2-9-million-british-innovators/, accessed September 7, 2015. 27.

Most obviously, by denying farmers the right to repair—a right entrenched enough that even patent protection can’t disturb it23—John Deere has effectively raised the price of its products for farmers. It has also done serious harm to the market for repair services, which are less competitive since farmers have no real choice of mechanics. Less obvious is the harm locking down tractors can have on innovation. Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”24 Of course, Newton borrowed the phrase from Bernard of Chartres, but that only underscores the point. Innovation is, in nearly every instance, an incremental affair. Small contributions add up, sometimes in unexpected ways.


pages: 400 words: 99,489

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

He went so far as to speculate about extraplanetary mathematics, envisioning tables of sines and logarithms, since “there’s no reason but the old one, of our being better than all the World, to hinder them from being as happy in their Discoveries, and as ingenious in their Inventions as we ourselves are.” * * * — MEANWHILE, AT CAMBRIDGE University, Isaac Newton was developing the basic optics of a new telescope: the reflector. Lenses at the time could not bring red and blue light to the same focus, resulting in a haze of color surrounding bright objects. So instead of a lens, he designed a prototype that collected light by way of a curved metal mirror: six parts copper, two parts tin.

A famous eighteenth-century mineralogist remarked that “in our time it would be unpardonable to consider such fairy tales even probable.” Some believed the bizarre objects were volcanic rocks, lofted like small bombs during an eruption, or rocks that had condensed in hail-filled clouds, or rocks that had been hit by lightning, giving rise to the name “thunderstones.” Isaac Newton’s work, which suggested that no small objects would exist in interplanetary space, wasn’t questioned until the turn of the nineteenth century, when a German physicist first suggested, to great mockery, that meteorites from space caused fireballs and might themselves be “world fragments.” McKay wondered if the rock might in fact be a kind of meteorite called SNC, or “snick”—the shergottite, nakhlites, and chassignites—named for three witnessed falls near the villages of Shergotty in India in 1865, El-Nakhla in Egypt in 1911, and Chassigny in France in 1815.

“THERE’S NO REASON” Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discover’d: Or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets (London: Timothy Childe, 1698; Digitized by Utrecht University). A HAZE OF COLOR This is known as chromatic aberration. THIRTY-FIVE TIMES Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colours of Light (London: William and John Innys at the West End of St. Paul’s, 1721), p. 91. WITHIN A CENTURY In the meantime, with some desperation, astronomers were trying to mitigate the problem of chromatic aberration with increasingly long refracting telescopes.


pages: 325 words: 101,669

The Wine-Dark Sea Within: A Turbulent History of Blood by Dhun Sethna

An Inconvenient Truth, Copley Medal, Fellow of the Royal Society, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

He did use the word circulatio but understood that to mean a to-and-fro movement, as in the rising and falling of fluid: evaporation followed by condensation. PHYSIOLOGY OF CIRCLES The motion of the blood may be called circular in the way that Aristotle says air and rain follow the circular motion of the stars. —William Harvey twenty Prelude to Glory No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess. —Isaac Newton William Harvey was born in a fortunate land at a fortunate time. One may ask whether he was a singular phenomenon, an inexplicable figure of genius that appears only once every few centuries, or whether his arrival was in some sense more explicable. The answer, of course, is both. Harvey was undoubtedly brilliant, but his achievement would have been virtually unthinkable without the Elizabethan culture that surrounded him.

Working alongside chemists at Oxford, he highlighted a possible particulate (corpuscular) component of air as an explanation for the process of combustion and respiration, setting into motion the quest for such a component that combined with blood to generate life. Boyle, the Anglo-Irish “Skeptical Chymist,” as he was called, was a younger contemporary of Isaac Newton and “the chief wonder of the English scientific world” after Newton. The fourteenth child of the second Earl of Cork, a political nouveau riche of the early Stuart period, he was born at Waterford, Ireland, a year before Harvey published De motu cordis. Educated at Eton and then in France, Switzerland, and Italy, he became familiar with the work of the recently deceased Galileo.1 Tall, pale, and emaciated, he showed poor health, weak sight, and a bad memory.

Vain and jealous, he was despised by many contemporaries. But behind those unfriendly sunken eyes and disheveled locks burned the fire of genius. The very fact that he served, in turn, as assistant to “that prodigious young scholar” Christopher Wren (to borrow John Evelyn’s phrase), Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton established his greatness as well as his shortcomings. Hooke was not content to make only half the discoveries of his age; being more sensitive than most of his colleagues regarding the increasing importance of priority in scientific discoveries, he also claimed the other half! When Newton’s Principia was in publication, Hooke was so insistent that part of the work had been stolen from him that Newton, furious at the charge of plagiarism, virtually suppressed a third of the volume.


pages: 190 words: 52,570

The Planets by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, Colonization of Mars, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Suez canal 1869, Thales of Miletus

Over the next several decades, precise measuring devices mounted on improved telescopes helped astronomers pare Mercury close to its acknowledged current size of three thousand fifty miles across, or less than one three-hundredth the actual diameter of the Sun. By the end of the seventeenth century, mystic and magnetic attractions among the Sun and planets had been replaced with the force of gravity, introduced by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 in his book Principia Mathematica. Newton’s calculus and the universal law of gravitation seemed to give astronomers control over the very heavens. The position of any celestial body could now be computed correctly for any hour of any day, and if observed motions differed from predicted motions, then the heavens might be coerced to yield up a new planet to account for the discrepancy.

Together, Jupiter and Saturn implied that Galileo would face ideological crises (such as his later clash with the Inquisition, perhaps) and live in seclusion and solitude (as he did under house arrest his last eight years). The ebullient increase and fertility of Jupiter is tempered, in Galileo’s nativity, by the sobering nearness of Saturn. Jupiter assumed its astrological mantle of benevolence and largesse in Babylonian times, around 1000 B.C.—long before Sir Isaac Newton (a Capricorn) grasped the planet’s true physical enormousness by watching it pull on Galileo’s moons. The ancients had no way to assess the sizes of the planets or the distances between them, so their association of Jupiter with grandeur poses a mystery for astronomy and astrology to share. As befits the planet of expansion, Jupiter more than doubles the mass of the other eight planets combined.


Pocket London Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, death from overwork, G4S, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, Skype

Royal Wedding On 29 April 2011, Prince William married Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey. The couple had chosen the Abbey for the relatively intimate setting of the Sanctuary – because of the Quire, three-quarters of the 1900 or so guests couldn’t see a thing! Sir Isaac Newton’s Tomb On the western side of the cloister is Scientists’ Corner, where you will find Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb; a nearby section of the northern aisle of the nave is known as Musicians’ Aisle, where Baroque composers Henry Purcell and John Blow are buried. Top Tips › Crowds are almost as solid as the Abbey’s unshakeable stonework, so get to the front of the queue first thing in the morning. › Hop on one of the 90-minute tours ( 7654 4834; £3) led by vergers and departing from the north door. › Grab an audio-guide, free with your individual entry tickets at the north door.


pages: 180 words: 55,805

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Error correction is the basis of all intelligence. As Karl Popper (1902–1994), one of the great twentieth-century philosophers of science, said, “All of our knowledge grows only through the correcting of our mistakes.”43 Some of the biggest revolutions in science actually come from small refinements of existing theories. As Sir Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”44 The biggest “giant” for Newton was Galileo: Newton’s work that resulted in the three laws of motion was influenced by Galileo’s work on forces. The printing press recorded and stored information and, with it, delivered the ability to correct errors to a much wider audience.

Simon Neubauer, Jean-Jacques Hublin, and Philipp Gunz, “The Evolution of Modern Human Brain Shape,” Science Advances, January 24, 2018. doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao5961. 42. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book (Verso, 1976). 43. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (Penn, Buckinghamshire, 1965). 44. Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1675. Available at digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/objects/9792. 45. Voltaire, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1752). 46. Karl Popper, as quoted by Mark Damazer, “In Our Time’s Greatest Philosopher Vote,” In Our Time (BBC 4). 47. “The Babbage Engine,” Computer History Museum. computer history.org/babbage. 48.


pages: 523 words: 148,929

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Predictions will always be flawed, but one way to make them as authoritative as possible is to grasp the four fundamental forces in nature that drive the entire universe. Each time one of them was understood and described, it changed human history. The first force to be explained was the force of gravity. Isaac Newton gave us a mechanics that could explain that objects moved via forces, rather than mystical spirits and metaphysics. This helped to pave the way for the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of steam power, especially the locomotive. The second force to be understood was the electromagnetic force, which lights up our cities and powers our appliances.

Lanza believes that as long as an intact cell can be extracted from a long-dead person, it will be possible to bring this person back to life. In Westminster Abbey, we have the carefully preserved bodies of long-dead kings and queens, as well as poets, religious figures, politicians, and even scientists like Isaac Newton. One day, Lanza confided to me, it may be possible to find intact DNA within their bodies and bring them back to life. In the movie The Boys from Brazil, the plot revolves around bringing back Hitler. One should not believe, however, that one will be able to bring back the genius or notoriety of any of these historic figures.

All this, however, was covered up by the excitement and drama of competing with the Russians. Spectacular space stunts by brave astronauts hid the true cost of space travel from view, since nations were willing to pay dearly if their national honor was at stake. But even superpowers cannot sustain such costs over many decades. Sadly, it has been over 300 years since Sir Isaac Newton first wrote down the laws of motion, and we are still dogged by a simple calculation. To hurl an object into near-earth orbit, you have to send it 18,000 miles per hour. And to send it into deep space, beyond the gravity field of the earth, you have to propel it 25,000 miles per hour. (And to reach this magic number of 25,000 miles per hour, we have to use Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

But the timing of the siege was significant. For the late seventeenth century was a time of accelerating change in Europe in two crucial fields: natural philosophy (as science was then known) and political theory. The years after 1683 saw profound changes in the way the Western mind conceived of both nature and government. In 1687 Isaac Newton published his Principia. Three years later, his friend John Locke published his Second Treatise of Government. If one thing came to differentiate the West from the East it was the widely differing degrees to which such new and profound knowledge was systematically pursued and applied. The long Ottoman retreat after 1683 was not economically determined.

Micrographia was a manifesto for the new empiricism, a world away from Faustus’ sorcery. However, the new science was about more than just accurate observation. Beginning with Galileo, it was about systematic experimentation and the identification of mathematical relationships. The possibilities of mathematics were in turn expanded when Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz introduced, respectively, infinitesimal and differential calculus. Finally, the Scientific Revolution was also a revolution in philosophy as René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza overthrew traditional theories about both perception and reason. Without exaggeration, this cascade of intellectual innovation may be said to have given birth to modern anatomy, astronomy, biology, chemistry, geology, geometry, mathematics, mechanics and physics.

.* 1530 Paracelsus pioneers the application of chemistry to physiology and pathology 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium states the heliocentric theory of the solar system Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica supplants Galen’s anatomical textbook 1546 Agricola’s De natura fossilium classifies minerals and introduces the term ‘fossil’ 1572 Tycho Brahe records the first European observation of a supernova 1589 Galileo’s tests of falling bodies (published in De motu) revolutionize the experimental method 1600 William Gilbert’s De magnete, magnetisque corporibus describes the magnetic properties of the earth and electricity 1604 Galileo discovers that a free-falling body increases its distance as the square of the time 1608 Hans Lippershey and Zacharias Jansen independently invent the telescope 1609 1609 Galileo conducts the first telescopic observations of the night sky 1610 Galileo discovers four of Jupiter’s moons and infers that the earth is not at the centre of the universe 1614 John Napier’s Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio introduces logarithms 1628 William Harvey writes Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus, accurately describing the circulation of blood 1637 René Descartes’ ‘La Géométrie’, an appendix to his Discours de la méthode, founds analytic geometry 1638 Galileo’s Discorsi e dimonstrazioni matematiche founds modern mechanics 1640 Pierre de Fermat founds number theory 1654 Fermat and Blaise Pascal found probability theory 1661 Robert Boyle’s Skeptical Chymist defines elements and chemical analysis 1662 Boyle states Boyle’s Law that the volume occupied by a fixed mass of gas in a container is inversely proportional to the pressure it exerts 1669 Isaac Newton’s De analysi per aequationes numero terminorum infinitas presents the first systematic account of the calculus, independently developed by Gottfried Leibniz 1676 Antoni van Leeuwenhoek discovers micro-organisms 1687 Newton’s Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica states the law of universal gravitation and the laws of motion 1735 Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema naturae introduces systematic classification of genera and species of organisms 1738 Daniel Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica states Bernoulli’s Principle and founds the mathematical study of fluid flow and the kinetic theory of gases 1746 Jean-Etienne Guettard prepares the first true geological maps 1755 Joseph Black identifies carbon dioxide 1775 Antoine Lavoisier accurately describes combustion 1785 James Hutton’s ‘Concerning the System of the Earth’ states the uniformitarian view of the earth’s development 1789 Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie states the law of conservation of matter By the mid-1600s this kind of scientific knowledge was spreading as rapidly as had the doctrine of the Protestant Reformers a century before.


pages: 654 words: 204,260

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

He would instead “conceal it for some time, that others might know how to value it.” If he thought any more on the matter, he left no evidence of it. Halley, however, became consumed with finding the answer, to the point that the following year he traveled to Cambridge and boldly called upon the university's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Isaac Newton, in the hope that he could help. Newton was a decidedly odd figure—brilliant beyond measure, but solitary, joyless, prickly to the point of paranoia, famously distracted (upon swinging his feet out of bed in the morning he would reportedly sometimes sit for hours, immobilized by the sudden rush of thoughts to his head), and capable of the most riveting strangeness.

Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn't a single bit of any of us—not so much as a stray molecule—that was part of us nine years ago. It may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all youngsters. The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last encountered squabbling with Isaac Newton over credit for the invention of the inverse square law. Hooke achieved many things in his sixty-eight years—he was both an accomplished theoretician and a dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments—but nothing he did brought him greater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665.

The world was about to get its first real master race, Homo sapiens. Things would never be the same again. 30 GOOD-BYE IN THE EARLY 1680s, at just about the time that Edmond Halley and his friends Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke were settling down in a London coffeehouse and embarking on the casual wager that would result eventually in Isaac Newton's Principia, Henry Cavendish's weighing of the Earth, and many of the other inspired and commendable undertakings that have occupied us for much of the past four hundred pages, a rather less desirable milestone was being passed on the island of Mauritius, far out in the Indian Ocean some eight hundred miles off the east coast of Madagascar.


pages: 32 words: 7,759

8 Day Trips From London by Dee Maldon

Doomsday Book, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, the market place

The first college was Peterhouse, founded in 1284, with the most recent college, Robinson, created in the 1970s. In the Middle Ages, students were expected to pray for their college’s founder. As a result, most of the early colleges have chapels. The university has been home to many academics through the years including Erasmus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and today’s well-known scientist Stephen Hawking. Cambridge University colleges provide the historical backbone of the city, and there have been ‘town and gown’ struggles in the city’s past as townspeople objected to university privileges. Many of the university colleges are clustered along the River Cam, therefore a river punt, or flat-bottomed boat, offers a relaxing and informative journey.


pages: 194 words: 59,488

Frommer's Memorable Walks in London by Richard Jones

Alistair Cooke, British Empire, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Snow's cholera map, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, moral panic

There was a short-lived renaissance in 1851, when geographer James Wyld erected a model of the Earth in a dome-shaped building that filled the entire square. In 1874, a Member of Parliament, Albert Grant, purchased this land and commissioned James Knowles to design a public garden surrounding a memorial to Shakespeare and the busts of four famous residents: physicist Sir Isaac Newton, artists William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds, and surgeon John Hunter. The London plane trees that now tower over the square were planted at this time. In 1975, Leicester Square was permanently closed to traffic, and in 1990, the Westminster County Council had the square renovated. At the center of Leicester Square is: 2.

Reynolds lived and painted at 47 Leicester Fields. Walk counterclockwise around the square. Be sure to look down at the handprints of various film stars embedded in the pavement. Among the imprints are those of Ralph Fiennes, Sir Ian McKellen, Sylvester Stallone, and Billy Crystal. The next gate is Newton Gate, commemorating Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who propounded the laws of motion and universal gravitation. Continue counterclockwise past the Half-Price Ticket Booth, where you can buy discounted same-day theater tickets. The booth is open at noon for tickets to matinees, and from 2:30 to 6:30pm for tickets to evening performances.


pages: 363 words: 108,670

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion

Bubonic plague strikes Florence. 1631 Michelangelo Galilei (brother) dies of plague in Germany. 1632 Galileo publishes Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican. 1633 Galileo stands trial for heresy by the Holy Office of the Inquisition; Dialogue is prohibited. 1634 Suor Maria Celeste Galilei dies in Arcetri on April 2. 1636 Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina is published in Holland, in Latin and Italian. 1637 Galileo discovers lunar libration, loses his eyesight. 1638 Louis Elzevir publishes Galileo’s Two New Sciences in Leiden, Holland. 1641 Vincenzio Galilei draws his father’s design for a pendulum clock. 1642 Galileo dies in Arcetri, January 8. Isaac Newton is born in England, December 25. 1643 Galileo’s student Evangelista Torricelli (1608-47) invents mercury barometer. 1644 Pope Urban VIII dies. 1648 Thirty Years’ War ends. 1649 Vincenzio Galilei (son) dies in Florence, May 15. 1654 Grand Duke Ferdinando II improves on Galileo’s thermometer by closing the glass tube to keep air out. 1655-56 Christiaan Huygens (1629-95) improves telescope, discovers largest of Saturn’s moons, sees Saturn’s “companions” as a ring, patents pendulum clock. 1659 Suor Arcangela dies at San Matteo, June 14. 1665 Jean-Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) discovers and times the rotation of Jupiter and Mars. 1669 Sestilia Bocchineri Galilei dies. 1670 Grand Duke Ferdinando II dies, succeeded by his only surviving son, Cosimo III. 1676 Ole Roemer (1644-1710) uses eclipses of Jupiter’s moons to determine the speed of light; Cassini discovers gap in Saturn’s rings. 1687 Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation are published in his Principia. 1705 Edmond Halley (1656-1742) studies comets, realizes they orbit the Sun, predicts return of a comet later named in his honor. 1714 Daniel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) develops mercury thermometer with accurate scale for scientific purposes. 1718 Halley observes that even the fixed stars move with almost imperceptible “proper motion” over long periods of time. 1728 English astronomer James Bradley (1693-1762) provides first evidence for the Earth’s motion through space based on the aberration of starlight. 1755 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) discerns the true shape of the Milky Way, identifies the Andromeda nebula as a separate galaxy. 1758 “Halley’s comet” returns. 1761 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov (1711-65) realizes Venus has an atmosphere. 1771 Comet hunter Charles Messier (1730-1817) identifies a list of noncometary objects, many of which later prove to be distant galaxies. 1781 William Herschel (1738-1822) discovers the planet Uranus. 1810 Napoleon Bonaparte, having conquered the Papal States, transfers the Roman archives, including those of the Holy Office with all records of Galileo’s trial, to Paris. 1822 Holy Office permits publication of books that teach Earth’s motion. 1835 Galileo’s Dialogue is dropped from Index of Prohibited Books. 1838 Stellar parallax, and with it the distance to the stars, is detected independently by astronomers working in South Africa, Russia, and Germany; Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) publishes the first account of this phenomenon, for the star 61 Cygni. 1843 Galileo’s trial documents are returned to Italy. 1846 Neptune and its largest moon are discovered by predictions and observations of astronomers working in several countries. 1851 Jean-Bernard-Leon Foucault (1819-68) in Paris demonstrates the rotation of the Earth by means of a two-hundred-foot pendulum. 1861 Kingdom of Italy proclaimed, uniting most states and duchies. 1862 French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-95) publishes germ theory of disease. 1877 Asaph Hall (1829-1907) discovers the moons of Mars. 1890-1910 Complete works, Le Opere di Galileo Galilei, are edited and published in Florence by Antonio Favaro. 1892 University of Pisa awards Galileo an honorary degree—250 years after his death. 1893 Providentissimus Deus of Pope Leo XIII cites Saint Augustine, taking the same position Galileo did in his Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina, to show that the Bible did not aim to teach science. 1894 Pasteur’s student Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943) discovers bubonic plague bacillus and prepares serum to combat it. 1905 Albert Einstein (1879-1955) publishes his special theory of relativity, establishing the speed of light as an absolute limit. 1908 George Ellery Hale (1868-1938) discerns the magnetic nature of sunspots. 1917 Willem de Sitter (1872-1934) intuits the expansion of the universe from Einstein’s equations. 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) finds evidence for expanding universe. 1930 Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino is canonized as Saint Robert Bellarmine by Pope Pius XI. 1935 Pope Pius XI inaugurates Vatican Observatory and Astrophysical Laboratory at Castel Gandolfo. 1950 Humani generis of Pope Pius XII discusses the treatment of unproven scientific theories that may relate to Scripture; reaches same conclusion as Galileo’s Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina. 1959 Unmanned Russian Luna 3 spacecraft radios first views of the Moon’s far side from lunar orbit. 1966 Index of Prohibited Books is abolished following the Second Vatican Council. 1969 American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the Moon. 1971 Apollo 15 commander David R.

What Galileo saw in 1604 would today be termed a “supernova”—the fireball explosion of a dying star. * Given the longevity of the council, its membership naturally changed considerably over the years, while ultimate approval of its decisions passed from Paul III to Julius III to Pius IV. * His successor, Sir Isaac Newton, born the year Galileo died (1642), dignified the idea of action at a distance in 1687 when he published his law of universal gravitation. In fact, the Moon’s gravity would create tides in the Earth’s oceans even if the Earth itself did not rotate or revolve. * No clear, close-up view of any comet could be obtained until 1986, when several spacecraft observed Halley’s comet during its recent return.

Visitors to the Impruneta church, which was rebuilt following bomb hits during World War II, must content themselves with simply being near the icon, as it reposes inside a marble shrine, behind a blue gilt-embroidered curtain. * Galileo’s last book, Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences indeed ignited later physicists: Sir Isaac Newton transformed Galileo’s ideas into laws of motion and universal gravitation. * The English translations of these Latin phrases, respectively, are “from the book of the living” and “No one is accepted [as] prophet in his own country.” * Later, Galileo thanked him by dedicating Two New Sciences “To the very illustrious nobleman, my Lord the Count de Noailles, Councilor to his Most Christian Majesty; Knight of the Holy Ghost; Field Marshal of the Armies,” et cetera, et cetera


pages: 406 words: 109,794

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Atul Gawande, Checklist Manifesto, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deliberate practice, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, functional fixedness, game design, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, knowledge economy, language acquisition, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, messenger bag, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, multi-armed bandit, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, precision agriculture, prediction markets, premature optimization, pre–internet, random walk, randomized controlled trial, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, young professional

For the best performers, they wrote, problem solving “begins with the typing of the problem.” As education pioneer John Dewey put it in Logic, The Theory of Inquiry, “a problem well put is half-solved.” * * * • • • Before he began his tortuous march of analogies toward reimagining the universe, Kepler had to get very confused on his homework. Unlike Galileo and Isaac Newton, he documented his confusion. “What matters to me,” Kepler wrote, “is not merely to impart to the reader what I have to say, but above all to convey to him the reasons, subterfuges, and lucky hazards which led me to my discoveries.” Kepler was a young man when he showed up to work at Tycho Brahe’s observatory—so cutting edge at the time that it cost 1 percent of the national budget of Denmark.

To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge. * * * • • • Casadevall leads by example. A single conversation with him is liable to include Anna Karenina, the Federalist Papers, the fact that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz were philosophers as well as scientists, why the Roman Empire wasn’t more innovative, and a point about mentoring in the form of a description of the character Mentor from Homer’s Odyssey. “I work at it,” he said, smirking. “I always advise my people to read outside your field, everyday something.

Markman, “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity,” American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997): 45–56. Also, Kepler read a new publication on magnetism: A. Caswell, “Lectures on Astronomy,” Smithsonian Lectures on Astronomy, 1858 (British Museum collection). “the moon’s dominion over the waters”: J. Gleick, Isaac Newton (New York: Vintage, 2007). no concept of gravity as a force; “Ye physicists”: A. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe (New York: Penguin Classics, 2017). “I especially love analogies”: B. Vickers, “Analogy Versus Identity,” in: Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed.


pages: 335 words: 107,779

Some Remarks by Neal Stephenson

airport security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cable laying ship, call centre, cellular automata, edge city, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker Ethic, high-speed rail, impulse control, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, megaproject, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, packet switching, pirate software, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social web, Socratic dialogue, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, X Prize

They will keep on going in parallel, and all of this will get sorted out in time. Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715–2010 (2012) This philosophy is a gift of God to this old world, to serve as the only plank, as it were, which pious and prudent people may use to escape the shipwreck of atheism which now threatens us. —LEIBNIZ, IN A 1669 LETTER TO THOMASIUS Isaac Newton was slow to join to the Royal Society—in the Charter Book that lives in the Society’s vault, his signature does not appear until the ninth page—but by the second decade of the Eighteenth Century he had become its President. His unquestioned status as the greatest mind of his generation, combined with his political connections as Master of the Mint and his ruthlessness toward those he perceived as rivals, had given him an unusual degree of power.

The 69-year-old Leibniz, who had become unfashionable and, because of the dispute over the calculus, something of a political problem, had been left behind in Germany. He wrote a short letter to Caroline, warning her that religion was declining in England; that John Locke did not believe in the immortality of the soul; and that Sir Isaac Newton held to some strange views about the relationship between God and the physical universe. Anyone who has blithely forwarded a private email to a corporate mailing list, with incalculable consequences, will recognize what happened next: Caroline made Leibniz’s letter known, and one Samuel Clarke stepped forward to rebut Leibniz’s charges.

“Quicksilver,” written by hand with a fountain pen in an alcove lined with a huge map of early 18th-century London, immersed the author and his legions of devoted readers in one of the most intellectually exciting and politically momentous periods of history. It was the age of such scientific geniuses as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and the undersung polymath Robert Hooke, and also the time when our modern economic systems began to take form. Unusual subjects for fiction, perhaps, but Stephenson makes the “Baroque Cycle” a weirdly effective mix of high-octane tutorial and ripping yarn. To balance such cerebral characters as Newton and Daniel Waterhouse (Puritan ancestor of the Waterhouses, crack mathematicians and programmers, in “Cryptonomicon”), he introduces Jack Shaftoe, aka the King of the Vagabonds and his sometime-paramour turned countess and financial whiz, Eliza.


pages: 382 words: 105,166

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations by Jacob Soll

accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, delayed gratification, demand response, discounted cash flows, double entry bookkeeping, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, God and Mammon, High speed trading, Honoré de Balzac, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Scientific racism, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route

It helps explain why, with all its possibilities, genius, and might, France stalled and began to crumble. By Louis XIV’s death in 1715, France was bankrupt, with no effective accounting system. Seventy-five years of financial crisis and a great reckoning awaited the French. CHAPTER 7 THE FIRST BAILOUT I can calculate the orbit of heavenly bodies, not the madness of people. —SIR ISAAC NEWTON, 1721 Like the French, the English in the seventeenth century struggled with government accounting reform. Even in the country of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary oversight, financial accountability came slowly, met fierce resistance, and remained a fragile political tradition. The whole idea of a constitutional monarchy was accountability to Parliament, yet it would take the English more than 150 years to establish oversight of royal finance.1 As early as 1644, following public calls for inquiry into the management of state revenue, Parliament established a Commission of Accounts.

For this reason, Walpole, a Whig, had initially been a foe of the company. In spite of interparty debate over the debt scheme and an admission that he had, at first, found the South Sea scheme “a chimera,” Walpole eventually embraced it. If it seems surprising that Walpole would have gotten entangled in the South Sea bubble, it should be remembered that even Isaac Newton, the great astronomer, lost the immense sum of £20,000 speculating at the height of the scheme. Walpole believed in the scheme in spite of public financial data that put it into question. He was no less shrewd than Newton, but he very well could have been blinded by greed. In 1720, at the very moment Walpole was both supporting and investing in the South Sea scheme, the lawyer and MP Archibald Hutcheson made a fairly accurate calculation of South Sea stock value.

They were imbued with ideals of happiness, self-discipline, scientific progress, and salvation—the heady and unique mix of British Enlightenment Protestantism that Max Weber would idealize as the Protestant work ethic. Their belief in accounting was inspired by religious fervor. Dissenters followed the old English tradition of attempting to marry scientific rationalism and the natural sciences with Christianity. Their beliefs rested on Isaac Newton’s ideals of order, harmony, and progress as revealed by mathematics. For these divinely inspired people of discipline and profit, accounting was a tool of personal industriousness, as well as for realizing political freedom and faithfully watching over the God-given gift of prosperity.5 Private academies not only afforded Dissenters income but also were a place where they could apply their unique brand of scientific, mercantile learning.


pages: 428 words: 103,544

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

The use of experiments does not explain why chemistry flourished and alchemy died. Perhaps, then, it was down to the characters involved? Perhaps the great early scientists such as Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton were sharper, wiser, more creative men than the alchemists they replaced? This is a spectacularly unpersuasive explanation. Two of the leading alchemists of the 1600s were Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. They were energetic, even fervent, practitioners of alchemy, which thankfully did not prevent their enormous contributions to modern science.25 No, the alchemists were often the very same people using the same experimental methods to try to understand the world around them.

Sabine Hossenfelder, “Blaise Pascal, Florin Périer, and the Puy de Dôme Experiment,” BackRe(Action) (blog), November 21, 2007, http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/blaise-pascal-florin-p-and-puy-de-d.html; and David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2015), chap. 8. 25. See, for example, Louis Trenchard More, “Boyle as Alchemist,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2, no. 1 (January 1941), 61–76; and Adam Mann, “The Strange, Secret History of Isaac Newton’s Papers,” Q&A with Sarah Dry, Wired, May 14, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/05/newton-papers-q-and-a/. 26. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 340. 27. James Burke, Connections (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978; repr. 1995), 74. 28. Wootton, The Invention of Science, 357. 29. Jeff Larson et al., “How We Analyzed the COMPAS Recidivism Algorithm,” ProPublica, May 23, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compas-recidivism-algorithm. 30.


CRISPR People by Henry T. Greely

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, clean water, CRISPR, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Gregor Mendel, Ian Bogost, Isaac Newton, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, special economic zone, stem cell, synthetic biology, traumatic brain injury, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

., “Multiplex Genome Engineering Using CRISPR/Cas Systems,” Science 339, no. 6121 (2013): 819–824. 27. Prashant Mali, Luhan Yang, Kevin M. Esvelt, et al., “RNA-Guided Human Genome Engineering via Cas9,” Science 339, no. 6121 (2013): 823–826, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1232033. 28. Most commonly attributed to Isaac Newton. See Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke (1675), in The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: 1661–1675, Volume 1, ed. H. W. Turnbull (London: The Royal Society at the University Press, 1959), 416. See also Maria Popova, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Story behind Newton’s Famous Metaphor of How Knowledge Progresses,” Brain Pickings, February 16, 2016, https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/16/newton-standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants. 29.


pages: 219 words: 61,334

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

Top Ten Great Britons 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Winston Churchill – 456,498 votes (28.1 per cent) Isambard Kingdom Brunel – 398,526 votes (24.6 per cent) Diana, Princess of Wales – 225,584 votes (13.9 per cent) Charles Darwin – 112,496 votes (6.9 per cent) William Shakespeare – 109,919 votes (6.8 per cent) Isaac Newton – 84,628 votes (5.2 per cent) Queen Elizabeth 1 – 71,928 votes (4.4 per cent) John Lennon – 68,445 votes (4.2 per cent) Horatio Nelson – 49,171 votes (3 per cent) Oliver Cromwell – 45,083 votes (2.8 per cent) The nation’s ‘greatest Briton’, attracting over 28 per cent of the votes cast, was Winston Churchill.

Contrary to the tabloid, middle-brow view that there is a creeping tendency for British culture to be overwhelmed by film stars, sporting 97 BRITONS TODAY legends and pop idols, only 22 of the top 100 are living; and of those only twelve are from the fields of pop music, film and sport. For every Boy George, David Beckham, Bono or Cliff Richard, there is a Stephen Hawking, Tony Benn or J. K. Rowling. Three out of the top ten are engineers and natural scientists (Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton). Indeed, the poll suggests that the British value their scientists above their artists. The British are frequently dismissed as a philistine people, narrowly inured to respect practical knowledge, pragmatism and money-making activities, rather than abstract theory, philosophy and pure research.


pages: 202 words: 62,199

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto

After eight weeks of almost solitary confinement, he was able to get the project done. To me, it is a little sad that this executive was driven to such measures. Yet while his methods may have been extreme, I can’t argue with his intention. He knew that making his highest point of contribution on a task required that he create the space for unencumbered thought. Think of Sir Isaac Newton. He spent two years working on what became Principia Mathematica, his famous writings on universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. This period of almost solitary confinement proved critical in what became a true breakthrough that shaped scientific thinking for the next three hundred years.

David Sedaris, “Laugh, Kookaburra,” The New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/24/090824fa_fact_sedaris. 5. ESCAPE 1. Frank O’Brien, “Do-Not-Call Mondays.” 2. Scott Doorley and Scott Witthoft, Make Space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2012), 132. 3. Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 105. 4. Jeff Weiner, “The Importance of Scheduling Nothing,” LinkedIn, April 3, 2013, https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130403215758-22330283-the-importance-of-scheduling-nothing. 5. I am indebted here to an excellent first-person account of Bill Gates’s Think Week by Robert A.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Soon those watching the novel phenomenon of economic development put into circulation descriptions of how people behaved in their market transactions. They started to depict men and women as having an inherent disposition toward the producing, selling, and buying that drove the market’s expansion. These observations, scattered in pamphlets, how-to books, broadsides, and learned tomes, many of them written by such luminaries as John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Daniel Defoe, converged on the universal appeal of making money. The initiatives of ordinary people, such as floating a meadow to gain a head start on spring planting or carrying locally made cheese to a distant market, mattered most. This no longer appeared as peculiar conduct; being responsive in their commercial dealings was treated as a newly discovered human capacity.

In creating government, people had acted to protect their life, liberty, and property, and they chose government as a convenient means to do that. Locke gave the English a naturalistic theory of political obligations wrapped around an inaccurate description of the money mechanism. More than three hundred pamphleteers, including Isaac Newton and Daniel Defoe, entered the ensuing debate over the proposed recoinage. The issue was whether or not the clipped coins should be reminted with the official silver content or lowered to match the devaluation by chisel. Sharply divided, the antagonists carried the conceptualization of money to a new level of sophistication.

There was never any thought of importing slaves into Great Britain, but the high cost of workers’ wages proved to be a powerful incentive to find alternative sources of energy. This gave a push to inventors who began a technological saga that has only accelerated with time. Drawing on seventeenth-century scientific experiments in hydraulics and hydrostatics, these pioneer engineers designed mechanical slaves, machines that could harness energy. Isaac Newton’s brilliant calculations of how gravity kept the planets in place prompted a new respect for human reason. As Alexander Pope wrote: Nature and nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; GOD said, Let Newton be! And all was Light.” Thomas Newcomen, Richard Arkwright, and James Watt demonstrated that lesser mortals could take the Promethean fire from Newton and build engines that could work a lot harder than human beings and their animals.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

—Phil Fisher Failure to ignore and avoid the temptation that comes from watching other people get rich thanks to a sharp rise in the prices of their stock holdings may lead to the destruction of your wealth, if you fall prey to the fear of missing out. Even the legendary Isaac Newton succumbed to this bias during the South Sea Bubble of 1720 (figure 31.1). He had invested in South Sea stock before its euphoric rise and had exited with a handsome profit of more than 100 percent in a few months. Lured by social proof—his friends continued to make even bigger returns on the stock after his exit—he caved and bought the stock again near its peak. I’ll bet you can guess what happened next. FIGURE 31.1 South Sea Stock, December 1718–December 1721. Source: “Isaac Newton’s Nightmare During the South Sea Stock Bubble (Dec 1718 – Dec 1721),” Bamboo Innovator (blog), https://bambooinnovator.com/2013/04/04/isaac-newtons-nightmare-during-the-south-sea-stock-bubble-dec-1718-dec-1721/.

Source: “Isaac Newton’s Nightmare During the South Sea Stock Bubble (Dec 1718 – Dec 1721),” Bamboo Innovator (blog), https://bambooinnovator.com/2013/04/04/isaac-newtons-nightmare-during-the-south-sea-stock-bubble-dec-1718-dec-1721/. I wish I had known this story earlier. In late 2015, I bought shares of Capital Trust only because a close friend recently had made more than 150 percent on it in less than a year. As Charles Kindleberger says, “There is nothing so disturbing to one’s well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.”4 I did not want to get left behind in this competitive race with my close friend, so I bought the stock of Capital Trust even though I did not properly understand its underlying business.

Seneca, Aurelius, Epictetus, and Ryan Holiday enlightened me on the virtues of stoicism and of being in control of our personal reaction to any event in our lives. Will Durant, Ariel Durant, and Yuval Noah Harari educated me on the history of human civilization. Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling instilled great optimism in me about the constant, ongoing improvements in our world on a daily basis. My life truly epitomizes Isaac Newton’s saying: “If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” The Joys of Compounding is my heartfelt tribute to all of my teachers who helped me achieve financial independence, become a better and wiser person, and embark on the path to a fulfilling and meaningful life. Over the years, I have learned vicariously through the writings and speeches of others.


Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control by Kenneth L. Grant

backtesting, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, George Santayana, global macro, implied volatility, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market design, Myron Scholes, performance metric, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Freud would endorse this approach, and it might even pay us over the long run. But now, having put off the matter longer than I had intended, I find I must revert to the numeric. Statistics I have promised, and statistics I will deliver. A Tribute to Sir Isaac Newton To fortify us in this exceedingly daunting enterprise, I will call on the spirit of Sir Isaac Newton. It seems to me that Newton would have made a great trader; history tells us he had all of the tools. He spent his early days observing certain patterns of motion in the universe, generalized them into a theory that is certainly the basis for all modern physics, and invented the 54 TRADING RISK mathematical science of calculus as a means of explaining his theories.1 As the world eventually found out, this latter discovery was not only perfectly applicable to the description of the physical universe, but also proved itself to be enormously handy in modeling the social sciences, most notably (at least for our purposes) economics.

ISBN 0-471-65091-9 Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents PREFACE ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS CHAPTER 1 The Risk Management Investment CHAPTER 2 Setting Performance Objectives Optimal Target Return Nominal Target Return Stop-Out Level The Beach CHAPTER 3 Understanding the Profit/Loss Patterns over Time And Now to Statistics, but First a Word (or More) about Time Series Construction Time Units Time Spans Graphical Representation of Daily P/L Histogram of P/L Observations Statistics A Tribute to Sir Isaac Newton Average P/L Standard Deviation Sharpe Ratio Median P/L Percentage of Winning Days Performance Ratio, Average P/L, Winning Days versus Losing Days xiv 1 19 21 24 26 32 37 39 40 43 48 51 53 53 56 57 65 68 68 69 v vi CONTENTS Drawdown Correlations 70 73 Putting It All Together CHAPTER 4 The Risk Components of an Individual Portfolio Historical Volatility Options Implied Volatility Correlation Value at Risk (VaR) Justification for VaR Calculations Types of VaR Calculations Testing VaR Accuracy Setting VaR Parameters Use of VaR Calculation in Portfolio Management Scenario Analysis Technical Analysis CHAPTER 5 Setting Appropriate Exposure Levels (Rule 1) Determining the Appropriate Ranges of Exposure Method 1: Inverted Sharpe Ratio Method 2: Managing Volatility as a Percentage of Trading Capital Drawdowns and Netting Risk Asymmetric Payoff Function CHAPTER 6 Adjusting Portfolio Exposure (Rule 2) Size of Individual Positions Directional Bias Position Level Volatility Time Horizon Diversification Leverage Optionality Nonlinear Pricing Dynamics Relationship between Strike Price and Underlying Price (Moneyness) 79 81 84 86 90 91 92 94 98 99 102 104 106 109 110 111 114 129 130 133 134 135 141 142 144 146 148 149 149 vii Contents Implied Volatility Asymmetric Payoff Functions Leverage Characteristics Summary CHAPTER 7 150 150 151 154 The Risk Components of an Individual Trade Your Transaction Performance Key Components of a Transactions-Level Database Defining a Transaction Position Snapshot Statistics Core Transactions-Level Statistics Trade Level P/L Holding Period Average P/L P/L per Dollar Invested (Weighted Average P/L) Average Holding Period P/L by Security (P/L Attribution) Long Side P/L versus Short Side P/L Correlation Analysis Number of Daily Transactions Capital Invested Net Market Value (Raw) Net Market Value (Absolute Value) Number of Positions Holding Periods Volatility/VaR Other Correlations Final Word on Correlation Performance Success Metrics Methods for Improving Performance Ratios Performance Ratio Components Maximizing Your P/L Profitability Concentration (90/10) Ratio 155 156 157 158 160 161 162 162 163 164 164 165 166 168 170 171 172 173 174 175 177 179 179 184 189 190 192 200 Putting It All Together 208 CHAPTER 8 213 Bringin’ It on Home Make a Plan and Stick to It If the Plan’s Not Working, Change the Plan Seek to Trade with an “Edge” 214 218 219 viii CONTENTS Structural Inefficiencies Methodological Inefficiencies 220 223 Play Your P/L Avoid Surprises—Especially to Yourself Seek to Maximize Your Performance at the Margin Seek Nonmonetary Benefits Apply Liberal Doses of Humility and Humor Be Healthy/Cultivate Other Interests 236 237 242 244 APPENDIX 245 Optimal f and Risk of Ruin 226 234 Optimal f Risk of Ruin 246 250 INDEX 253 Contents Preface Make voyages.


Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go by Emily Cockayne

Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, card file, Charles Babbage, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Morris worm, New Journalism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, paper trading, planned obsolescence, South Sea Bubble

In September 1891 the Irish-born bishop of Edinburgh, John Dowden, picked at a copy of the 1637 prayer book, rummaging through the leather binding and pulling out older versions of the text. He encouraged others to do likewise, ‘to sacrifice [the covers], though it be with a pang, to the advancement of liturgical inquiry’.4 In the turbulent years spanning the 1630s through to the 1720s, roughly the lifespan of Isaac Newton (1642–1727), whom we encounter soon, many later recycling and reuse practices were developed. Materials were stretched in the British civil wars, also known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–51), during which Charles I was executed in 1649. The English Civil War saw the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell (the ‘Roundheads’) pitted against the Royalists (the ‘Cavaliers’), who were loyal to the monarchy.

These suggestions appear particularly altruistic when Bush’s employment, as a draper, is factored in: his own business would be undercut by a reduction in cloth sales.24 Bush died by the end of the year, and the bells survived mostly intact. A portion of the plate held by families and institutions survived the civil wars unscathed only to be liquidated during the Great Recoinage of 1696, at a time when Isaac Newton was warden of the mint. Recoinage was complete by the time Newton became the master of the mint at the end of 1699. Citizens were induced to sell their plate and bullion to the state. Recoinage was needed because people had lost faith in their coins, which were often clipped or damaged. The bad coins drove the good ones from circulation and into hoards.

Have you ever started a new notebook, with pages put speculatively aside, often alphabetically, for future jottings? I have. Finding that I had left scant space for one category, and too much for others (nothing at the end, under X, Y and Z), I was afflicted with pangs of guilt for my wastefulness. Paper was sufficiently affordable in 1612 for Isaac Newton’s stepfather, Revd Barnabas Smith, to have done just this, to keep track of his theological musings. Many of the hundreds of pages were left blank, and Smith did not find much to say about ‘Frugalitas’, beyond one line from Proverbs 6: 6. Momentarily abandoning alphabetic order, Smith skipped to ‘Prodigalitus’ for his next category, which remains blank – one leaf of wasted paper.


pages: 240 words: 65,363

Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, call centre, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fail fast, food miles, gamification, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, information security, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, medical residency, Metcalfe’s law, microbiome, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sunk-cost fallacy, Tony Hsieh, transatlantic slave trade, Wayback Machine, éminence grise

Sure, there are some truly brilliant people out there and they probably should think big. For the rest of us, thinking big means you’ll spend a lot of time tilting at windmills. While thinking small won’t win you many points with the typical big thinker, there are at least a few noteworthy advocates of our approach. Sir Isaac Newton, for instance. “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age,” he wrote. “Tis much better to do a little with certainty and leave the rest for others that come after than to explain all things by conjecture without making sure of any thing.” Maybe the two of us are biased.

Warren, Sharyn Leis, Rosa Surace, and Ori Ashman, “Treatment of Ulcerative Colitis Using Fecal Bacteriotherapy,” Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology 37, no. 1 (July 2003). CHAPTER 5: THINK LIKE A CHILD 88 “SOPHISTICATION” AND THE SOPHISTS (FOOTNOTE): Drawn from the “Sophisticated” entry on worldwidewords.org, by the excellent British etymologist Michael Quinion. 89 “TO EXPLAIN ALL NATURE IS TOO DIFFICULT A TASK . . .”: See Isaac Newton and J. E. McGuire, “Newton’s ‘Principles of Philosophy’: An Intended Preface for the 1704 ‘Opticks’ and a Related Draft Fragment,” The British Journal for the History of Science 5, no. 2 (December 1970); hat tip to Freakonomics Radio producer Katherine Wells, who scripted this for Stephen J. Dubner, “The Truth Is Out There . . .


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Thinking in Numbers by Daniel Tammet

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, computer age, dematerialisation, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Paul Erdős, Searching for Interstellar Communications, Vilfredo Pareto

Always resistant to the thinking of his day, he denounced historians as hero worshippers. In War and Peace, over one thousand pages long, he launched his most sustained attack. His primary weapon was drawn from mathematics. Calculus was by no means a novel idea in Tolstoy’s time. Its ‘inventors’, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, in the late-seventeenth century, were refining theories that had been in development since the time of the ancient Greeks. As geometers study shape, the student of calculus examines change: the mathematics of how an object transforms from one state into another, as when describing the motion of a ball or bullet through space, is rendered pictorial in its graphs’ curves.

The mathematician takes ideas that are valid in one area and ‘transplants’ them into another hoping that they will take, and not be rejected by the recipient domain. The creator of ‘noncommutative geometry’, Connes himself has applied geometrical ideas to quantum mechanics. Metaphors, he argued, are the essence of mathematical thought. Sir Michael Atiyah, a former director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, used his four minutes to speak about mathematical ideas ‘like visions, pictures before the eyes.’ As if painting a picture or dreaming up a scene in a novel, the mathematician creates and explores these visions using intuition and imagination. Atiyah’s voice, soft and earnest, made attentive listeners of everyone in the room.


pages: 226 words: 66,188

Adventures in Human Being (Wellcome) by Gavin Francis

Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, Ralph Waldo Emerson, stem cell, traveling salesman

Astronomers, whose very business was the elucidation and understanding of light, were peering into the eye in order to better comprehend the stars. The astronomer-mystic Johannes Kepler was the first to write about how an image of the world was projected upside down and back to front onto the retina. When Isaac Newton was working out the motion of the planets around the sun he embarked on dramatic experiments to test the reliability of his own vision. Inserting a long blunt needle (a ‘bodkin’) into his own eye socket between the bone and the eyeball, he described how wiggling it around distorted his vision.

He still thought that kidneys filter blood in some way; he just admitted he didn’t know how they did it. No one would come closer to the true mechanism until microscopes became commonplace a hundred and fifty years later, following advances in lens and prism technology. In the 1660s, lenses were achieving transformations in the understanding of both inner and outer space: near Cambridge, Isaac Newton, in quarantine from the plague, used his time to demonstrate how sunlight can be broken into colours by a prism, and formulated his laws of gravity. In London, Robert Hooke published his Micrographia, which showed the astonishing intricacy of tiny, everyday structures, such as body lice, pieces of cork, and flies’ eyes (he coined the word ‘cell’ as the basic unit of life, because under the microscope they resembled a series of monks’ cells).


pages: 270 words: 71,659

The Right Side of History by Ben Shapiro

Abraham Maslow, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, classic study, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, microaggression, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, Ronald Reagan, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, W. E. B. Du Bois, white picket fence, women in the workforce

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, explained: “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”5 Kepler routinely described his own physics as part and parcel of Aristotelian metaphysics, and explained that the laws of nature “are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”6 Kepler’s philosophy was also that of Isaac Newton (1642–1726): “Opposite to [God] is Atheism in profession & Idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors.”7 SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS, CONTINUED The progress of science was motivated by a determination to know God’s universe, but it became increasingly clear that one significant by-product of that quest for knowledge was the betterment of man’s material status.

CHAPTER 5: ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATORS 1.Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2014), 175–77. 2.Steph Solis, “Copernicus and the Church: What the History Books Don’t Say,” CSMonitor.com, February 19, 2013, https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0219/Copernicus-and-the-Church-What-the-history-books-don-t-say. 3.Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, “Vatican Admits Galileo Was Right,” NewScientist.com, November 7, 1992, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13618460.600-vatican-admits-galileo-was-right-/. 4.Del Ratzsch, “The Religious Roots of Science,” in Melville Y. Stewart, Science and Religion in Dialogue, vol. 1 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell 2009), 59. 5.Stark, How the West Won, 317. 6.Ratzsch, “The Religious Roots of Science,” 59. 7.Isaac Newton, Keynes Ms. 7, King’s College, Cambridge UK, http://www.newtonproject.ox.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00007. 8.Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (New York: Pocket Books, 1926), 129. 9.B. H. G. Wormald, Francis Bacon: History, Politics & Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 262. 10.


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The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Buckminster Fuller, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, false memory syndrome, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, phenotype, Richard Feynman, the scientific method

We can’t get very far with that explanation until we have looked at what makes heavenly bodies orbit other heavenly bodies in the first place. So that’s what we’ll do next. Into orbit Why do the planets stay in orbit around the sun? Why does anything stay in orbit around anything else? This was first understood in the seventeenth century by Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists who ever lived. Newton showed that all orbits were controlled by gravity – the same force of gravity that pulls falling apples towards the ground, but on a larger scale. (Alas, the story that Newton got the idea when an apple bounced off his head is probably not really true.)

It’s an illusion – but a fascinating illusion, and understanding it leads on to all sorts of interesting things, some of which we’ll come to in the next chapter. What light is made of First, we need to understand about something called the spectrum. It was discovered in the time of King Charles II – that’s about 350 years ago – by Isaac Newton, who may well have been the greatest scientist ever (he discovered lots of other things besides the spectrum, as we saw in the chapter on night and day). Newton discovered that white light is really a mixture of all the different colours. To a scientist, that’s what white means. How did Newton find this out?


pages: 229 words: 67,599

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age by Paul J. Nahin

air gap, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket

Enough, in fact, that he was asked to give an address (on February 5, 1835, only a few months past his nineteenth birthday) on Newton during the presentation ceremony of a bust of Newton to the Institute, and that address was soon after published as a pamphlet, On the Genius and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, now quite rare. 3. An amazing example of what Gregory’s Journal would publish that almost certainly would not have been accepted in a more established publication was the first paper ever written by William Thomson (1824–1907), later Lord Kelvin. In 1837 the Anglican cleric and mathematician Philip Kelland (1808–1879) published the book Theory of Heat, in which he took sharp exception to central results in Fourier’s 1822 theory of the possibility of expanding periodic functions in terms of sinusoids (a routine mathematical tool today: see my Dr.

When used this way, the XOR is often called a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, and we’ll see it and a more sophisticated version (a controlled-controlled-NOT) in Chapter 10. 8 Sequential-State Digital Circuits Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. —From Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), showing that the idea of a physical system changing state long predates the invention of digital circuitry 8.1 TWO SEQUENTIAL-STATE PROBLEMS What is a sequential-state problem? This is a question that is most directly answered by giving some specific examples. One can, I should admit, formulate a theoretical, mathematical definition, but examples are both more illuminating and, even more importantly, I think, more fun.


Prime Obsession:: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Turing machine, Turing test

Since the integral of 1 ⁄ x is log x, I hope it won’t be too much of a stretch to believe—I shall not pause to prove it—that the integral of 1 ⁄ (1 – x) is −log(1 − x). The right-hand side is even easier. I can just integrate term by term, using the rules for integrating powers that I gave in Table 7-2. Here is the result (which was first obtained by Sir Isaac Newton). x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 + + + + + +L 2 3 4 5 6 7 It will be a little handier, as you can see in Expression 9-3, if I multiply both sides by −1. − log(1 − x ) = x + x2 x3 x4 x5 x6 x7 − − − − − −L 2 3 4 5 6 7 Expression 9-3 log(1 − x ) = − x − Oddly, though it makes little difference to the way I shall apply it, Expression 9-3 is true when x = −1, even though the expression I started with, Expression 9-2, isn’t.

Only seven British mathematicians showed up at the Paris Congress, ranking Britain below France (90), Germany (25), the U.S.A. (17), Italy (15), Belgium (13), Russia (9), Austria, and Switzerland (8 each). Mathematically, Britain in 1900 was a backwater. Even a backwater, of course, has some pockets of vitality. Trinity College, Cambridge, where Littlewood was in residence, maintained a strong mathematical tradition. It had been Sir Isaac Newton’s college, 1661−1693, and counted several geniuses of mathematics and physics among its nineteenth-century alumni: Charles Babbage, generally credited with inventing the computer; the astronomer George Airy, after whom a family of mathematical functions is named; 226 PRIME OBSESSION Augustus de Morgan, the logician; Arthur Cayley, the algebraist; James Clerk Maxwell, and some lesser lights.

From Power Rule 9, which says that log (a × b) = log a + log b, ζ (s ) = 1 PRIME OBSESSION 304   1 log ζ (s ) = log  1 1− s  2    1   + log  1 1− s   3    1 + log  1 1− s  11 Since log    1   + log  1 1− s   5     1   + log  1 1− s   7         K +   1 = − log a by Power Rule 10, this is a 1 1 1 1     − log 1 − s  − log 1 − s  − log 1 − s  − log 1 − s   2   3   5   7  1   − log 1 − s  − K  11  Now recall Sir Isaac Newton’s infinite series for log (1 − x) in Chapter 9.vii. It applied to x between −1 and +1, which is certainly the case here, so long as s is positive. So I can expand each log as an infinite series as shown in Expression 19-3. 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 2s  2 22s   3 23s   4 24s   5 25s   6 26s  + 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 3s  2 32s   3 33s   4 34s   5 35s   6 36s  + 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 5s  2 52s   3 53s   4 54s   5 55s   6 56s  + 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +  ×  +L 7s  2 72s   3 73s   4 74s   5 75s   6 76s  TURNING + THE GOLDEN KEY 305 1 1 1  1 1  1 1  1 1  +  × 2s  +  × 3s  +  × 4s  +  × 5s  s 11  2 11   3 11   4 11   5 11  1  1 +  × 6s  + L  6 11  +L Expression 19-3 This is an infinite sum of infinite sums—a bit startling at first sight, I suppose, but not actually an unusual situation in math.


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The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy by Tyler Cowen

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, behavioural economics, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Flynn Effect, folksonomy, framing effect, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, informal economy, Isaac Newton, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, Naomi Klein, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, Richard Thaler, selection bias, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, the medium is the message, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tyler Cowen

It turns out she has developed a system for remembering people by their clothes and that she applied her system very conscientiously and consistently; without the system she would be lost. People such as myself, who have normal face-recognition abilities, usually have no such system. The result was that this woman—some might call her “handicapped”—had a much better sense of the crowd than I did. Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Samuel Johnson, Vincent van Gogh, Thomas Jefferson, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Swift, Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Glenn Gould, Steven Spielberg, and Bill Gates, among many others, are all on the rather lengthy list of famous figures who have been identified as possibly autistic or Asperger’s. I do not think we can “diagnose” individuals from such a distance, so we should be cautious in making any very particular claims.

If you’re wondering, a typical list of historical figures claimed to be on the autism spectrum includes Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Herman Melville, George Orwell, Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Bela Bartók, Bob Dylan, Glenn Gould, Vincent van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Mozart, Gregor Mendel, Charles Darwin, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Henry Cavendish, Samuel Johnson, Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Paul Dirac, Emily Dickinson, Michelangelo, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Isaac Newton, and Willard Van Orman Quine, among others. When it comes to any individual life, I have my worries about making any firm judgments. First, for some of these lives I know a bit about, such as Mozart’s, I just don’t see the evidence for autism. Mozart for instance may well have been neurodiverse in the broad sense of the word (arguably an ordinary mind could not have composed his extraordinary music) but that’s not the same as placing him on the autism spectrum.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

Based on Vieweg’s now-public sales records, Hermann and Dorothea went on to be a best seller, earning tens of thousands of talers for Vieweg and nary a penny more for poor Goethe. You can have the best-designed mechanism, but it doesn’t do you the least bit of good if the process is corrupted. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss Vickrey’s innovations based on their conspicuous absence from today’s auction markets. It’s like saying that Isaac Newton’s contributions to physics were pointless because he never anticipated the theory of relativity. First, just as Newton’s physics prove to be good enough for a range of circumstances, there are enormously important markets where variants on Vickrey’s original design exist today. Most notable among these is Google’s system for selling off search ads, AdWords, which instructs prospective advertisers to bid “the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for each click on your ad (though the final amount you’re charged per click—your actual CPC—could end up being less).”

A bridge that stands in theory may, in practice, sink into the riverbed or ripple with wave-like undulations when the wind blows just so. (If you want to see a dramatic example, go to YouTube and watch the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse.) Every bridge presents its own unique design challenges—the soil, the way the river flows, the weather, the wear and tear of cars and trucks speeding to and fro. You start with Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler, but had better take into account the complexities of each situation even if it doesn’t allow you to derive a simple “final answer.” That makes bridge engineering a messier process, involving extended computer simulations, site visits to scope out the river-bank, analysis of soil samples, and stress testing scale models in a wind tunnel.


pages: 240 words: 73,209

The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment by Guy Spier

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, book value, Checklist Manifesto, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, NetJets, pattern recognition, pre–internet, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, two and twenty, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

He spoke with tender admiration about her kindness, recalling how she had taken terminally ill AIDS patients into her home and given them her own bedroom, seeking to ease their pain in their final days. He told Mohnish’s children that choosing the right person to marry would be the most important decision of their lives. For three hours, we relished the most wonderfully wide-ranging conversation. For example, Harina and Mohnish asked Warren about Sir Isaac Newton, since he had once remarked that Newton was the historical figure with whom he’d most like to have lunch. He explained to us that Newton was “probably the smartest human in history” but joked that he’d thought this through some more and would actually prefer to have lunch with Sophia Loren. He said Charlie Munger would most like to share a meal with Ben Franklin, since “Newton was smarter, but Franklin was wiser.”

Today there are substantial parts of our mental apparatus that evolved to help us survive in the wilderness that was home to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These primitive survival routines embedded in our brains are easily capable of bypassing the neocortex. We might like to perceive ourselves as potential Isaac Newtons, but it’s perilous to forget that we also have this other aspect of our nature. Indeed, Newton himself would have been better off if he’d recognized this, given that he was an infamously dumb investor who lost his life savings in the South Sea Bubble. As Newton wryly observed: “I can calculate the movement of stars, but not the madness of men.”


pages: 246 words: 74,341

Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation With Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis by Johan Norberg

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, millennium bug, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, Northern Rock, Own Your Own Home, precautionary principle, price stability, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail

CASTLES IN THE AIR 23 3. HOW TO BUILD FINANCIAL WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION 45 4. HURRICANE SEASON 69 5. MADLY IN ALL DIRECTIONS 99 6. TOMORROW CAPITALISM? 129 MY DEBTS 157 NOTES 159 REFERENCES 167 INDEX 179 Preface I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. -Isaac Newton, after losing a fortune in the South Sea Bubble in 1720 In the fall of 1991, a high-pressure system from northern Canada collided with a powerful low-pressure system over the coast of New England. The large temperature contrast in such a small area gave rise to a cyclone. The cyclone, in turn, absorbed a nearby dying hurricane, which created an enormously powerful storm.

The best outcome to be hoped for is that they will prevent market players from making exactly the same mistake they made last time-that is, the mistake everybody is focusing on avoiding anyway. And on top of that, you also get a whole new battery of regulations that may well make the next crisis considerably worse. We do not know where the next crisis will come from. From history we learn that we do not learn from history. Even Isaac Newton, one of the greatest geniuses of all time, lost a fortune in the South Sea Bubble. Not even those whose job it is to make forecasts know what will happen next. One of those who did that best, Economic Cycle Research Institute founder Geoffrey Moore, told his students that someone who can predict a recession at the exact time when it starts is a very successful forecaster.


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Candidates are judged on how valiantly they struggle with the bar raiser’s near-impossible questions. That’s becoming a common strategy in these desperate times for job seekers. Another notable example of the impossible question genre asks ? Can you swim faster through water or syrup? It turns out that Sir Isaac Newton pondered this question more than three hundred years ago. Newton’s answer was wrong. Fortunately, he never tried to get a job in Silicon Valley. Salvaging a Doomed Interview I have given many examples of how to answer tough questions in this book. Sooner or later, you’ll meet up with a question you can’t answer.

They actually touch and overlap in the sky. That’s as close as a pair of stars can get. How do you find the closest pair? The astronomer’s answer is that eclipsing binaries are identified by their regularly varying brightness and spectroscopic signatures. Chapter Ten ? Can you swim faster through water or syrup? Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens debated this question in the 1600s, without resolving it. Three centuries later, two University of Minnesota chemists, Brian Gettelfinger and Edward Cussler, did a syrup-versus-water experiment. Maybe it’s not so surprising that it took so long. Cussler said he had to obtain twenty-two approvals, including permission to pour massive quantities of syrup down a drain.


pages: 280 words: 75,820

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, do what you love, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, fundamental attribution error, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Grit clearly involves motivation and perseverance in the pursuit of a goal despite setbacks, but its less obvious component is closely bound up with attention: maintaining consistent interest in a project or idea over time. Given a hard problem to figure out—the nature of gravity, perhaps—most people might think about it for a while, then get tired and forget about it. A genius such as Isaac Newton, however, has enough “mental energy” to pay rapt attention to the same thing for a long time without wavering: “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait until the first dawnings open little by little before me into the full light.” His modern successor, Richard Feynman, had a similarly protean absorption in his subject.

.), Achievement and Motivation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. p.178. Why some very focused individuals have lots of the stick-to-itiveness: A. L. Duckworth et al., “Grit: Perseverance and Passion for Long-Term Goals.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, 2007. p.179. A genius such as Isaac Newton, however, has enough “mental energy”: David Lykken, “Mental Energy.” Intelligence 33, 2005. p.182. In a less dramatic illustration of a hidden motivation’s power: Gráinne M. Fitzsimons and John A. Bargh, “Thinking of You: Nonconscious Pursuit of Interpersonal Goals Associated with Relationship Partners.”


pages: 281 words: 78,317

But What if We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, British Empire, citizen journalism, cosmological constant, dark matter, data science, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, George Santayana, Gerolamo Cardano, ghettoisation, Golden age of television, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, Large Hadron Collider, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, obamacare, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Y2K

In fact, that’s the one arena where I would think that most of our contemporary evidence is circumstantial, and that the way we think about gravity will be very different.” These are the words of Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University who writes books with titles like Icarus at the Edge of Time. He’s the kind of physicist famous enough to guest star on a CBS sitcom, assuming that sitcom is The Big Bang Theory. “For two hundred years, Isaac Newton had gravity down. There was almost no change in our thinking until 1907. And then from 1907 to 1915, Einstein radically changes our understanding of gravity: No longer is gravity just a force, but a warping of space and time. And now we realize quantum mechanics must have an impact on how we describe gravity within very short distances.

Jimi Hendrix imagined such a scenario, but only because he was an electric philosopher (as opposed to a pocket calculator). “In physics, when we say we know something, it’s very simple,” Tyson reiterates. “Can we predict the outcome? If we can predict the outcome, we’re good to go, and we’re on to the next problem. There are philosophers who care about the understanding of why that was the outcome. Isaac Newton [essentially] said, ‘I have an equation that says why the moon is in orbit. I have no fucking idea how the Earth talks to the moon. It’s empty space—there’s no hand reaching out.’ He was uncomfortable about this idea of action at a distance. And he was criticized for having such ideas, because it was preposterous that one physical object could talk to another physical object.


pages: 279 words: 75,527

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Like a well-designed electronic dog collar it allows some wandering away from the house but discourages fleeing the whole property. While scientists like Boyle, Dalton, and Mendeleyev focused on discovering the ingredients that make up our world, others tried to map out and understand the invisible forces that govern how things interact and transform. Born on Christmas Day in 1642, Sir Isaac Newton possessed an extraordinary gift for finding patterns in nature and discerning the basic rules underlying its dynamics. Newton’s laws of mechanics transformed physical science from a cluttered notebook of sundry observations to a methodical masterwork of unprecedented predictive power. They describe how forces—pushes and pulls—affect the journeys through space of all things in creation.

Clinton, Letter to the House Committee on Appropriations, June 16, 1993. 4 Lyn Evans, “First Beam in the LHC—Accelerating Science,” CERN press release, September 10, 2008, press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2008/PR08.08E.html (accessed March 2, 2009). 5 Peter Higgs, in “In Search of the God Particle,” Independent, April 8, 2008, www.independent.co.uk/news/science/in-search-of-the-god-particle-805757.html (accessed April 18, 2008). 6 Lyn Evans in “Meet Evans the Atom, Who Will End the World on Wednesday,” Daily Mail, September 7, 2008, www.mailonsunday.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1053091/Meet-Evans-Atom-end-world-Wednesday.html (accessed March 4, 2009). 7 J. P. Blaizot et al., “Study of Potentially Dangerous Events during Heavy-Ion Collisions at the LHC: Report of the LHC Safety Study Group,” CERN Report 2003-001, February 28, 2003, p. 10. 1. The Secrets of Creation 1 Isaac Newton, Opticks, 4th ed. (London: William Innys, 1730), p. 400. 2. The Quest for a Theory of Everything 1 L. M. Brown et al., “Spontaneous Breaking of Symmetry,” in Lillian Hoddeson et al., eds., The Rise of the Standard Model: Particle Physics in the 1960s and 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 508. 3.


pages: 330 words: 77,729

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes by Mark Skousen

Albert Einstein, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, experimental economics, financial independence, Financial Instability Hypothesis, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, liberation theology, liquidity trap, low interest rates, means of production, Meghnad Desai, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, pushing on a string, rent control, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school choice, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, Tragedy of the Commons, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

Adam Smith Faces a Major Obstacle After taking twelve long years to write his big book, Smith was convinced he had discovered the right kind of economics to create "universal opulence." He called his model the "system of natural liberty." Today economists call it the "classical model." Smith's model was inspired by Sir Isaac Newton, whose model of natural science Smith greatly admired as universal and harmonious. Smith's biggest hurdle would be convincing others to accept his system, especially legislators. His purpose in writing The Wealth of Nations was not simply to educate, but to persuade. Very little progress had been achieved over the centuries in England and Europe because of the entrenched system known as mercantilism.

Some Keynesians, such as Charles Hession and John Kenneth Galbraith, emphatically insist that the correct title is The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, without the comma. True, no commas were used on the cover of the original, but in the preface, Keynes added a comma after "employment." Keynes identified with the great scientists of the past. Adam Smith and Roger Babson compared their analytical systems to those of Sir Isaac Newton, and Keynes emulated Albert Einstein. Keynes's book title refers to Einstein's general theory of relativity. His book, he said, created a "general" theory of economic behavior while he relegated the classical model to a "special" case and treated classical economists as "Euclidean geometers in a non-Euclidean world" (Skidelsky 1992, 487).


pages: 265 words: 76,875

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

Most of the nearly 4,000 verified exoplanets have been found by the two major search techniques, the radial-­velocity and transit methods, both of which find planets through the close observation of their stars. 14 Early Quests for Exoplanets Mea­sur­ing the Motions of Stars with Precision Understanding astronomers’ approaches to finding exoplanets begins by contrasting two related approaches: astrometry, which has so far produced few positive results, and the radial-­velocity method, which has opened the gates of exoplanetary research.2 Both of ­these techniques rely on the fact, first demonstrated by Isaac Newton, that whenever a less massive object orbits a more massive one, both objects actually move in orbit around their common center of mass.3 This center of mass lies along the imaginary line that connects the objects’ centers, and the ratio of the objects’ distances from the center of mass equals the inverse ratio of the objects’ masses.

The amount of the elongation of the star’s orbit, which astronomers denote as the orbital eccentricity, exactly equals the eccentricity of the planet’s much larger orbit, whose shape and orbital period must match the star’s.1 In addition to furnishing us with the planet’s orbital period and eccentricity, radial-­velocity observations provide a third key property of the planet’s orbit: its mass. As Johannes Kepler realized four centuries ago from his studies of the planets in the solar system, and as Isaac Newton showed how to generalize to other objects in orbit, the length of time required for a less massive object to complete an orbit around a more massive one depends on the average distance between the two objects. More distant objects, which feel less gravitational force, move more slowly in orbit and 37 EXOPLANETS must travel farther to complete an orbit.


The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

Of course, some people go to the show just to enjoy the beauty of garden design, but many go to understand the plants, using if-and-then logic to learn when and where they can be planted, and with what effect. We can systemize anything, from the menstrual cycle and its link to fertility, to predicting when volcanos will erupt, to classifying rocks by how they were formed.38 Consider how Sir Isaac Newton inferred gravity as a cause from seeing an apple fall from a tree (in my college, Trinity, in Cambridge): if an apple is unsupported, and there is a gravitational force, then it will fall toward the Earth.39 The ocean’s tides are another aspect of nature we systemize via observation. The discovery that tidal patterns are caused by the moon, for example, was documented at least 3,000 years ago.40 The tide information available at the seaside is usually in the form of a table or spreadsheet, reflecting the systematic organization of the information in the mind of a strong systemizer.

Dunnington, “The menstrual cycle and sleep,” SleepHub, August 17, 2015, sleephub.com.au/menstrual-cycle-and-sleep/. Here’s the algorithm for systemizing rocks: if it’s an old rock, and it has been squeezed but not melted, then it’s metamorphic. See “Identifying rocks,” Science 6 at FMS, June 7, 2012, fitz6.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/identifying-rocks/. 39. Some biographical research suggests that Isaac Newton and other outstanding physicists and scientists may have been autistic—long before the diagnosis was available. Retrospective diagnosis when the person is no longer alive is replete with difficulties, as the evidence may be fragmentary and the person or their family cannot give complete accounts.


pages: 643 words: 131,673

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, George Santayana, germ theory of disease, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, megastructure, minimum viable product, moveable type in China, placebo effect, safety bicycle, sugar pill, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

These were thermo-scopes (a way to see temperature), rather than thermo-meters (a way to measure it). Knowing humanity’s track record as you now do, you will not be surprised that it took more than a hundred years after thermoscopes were invented for anyone to think of applying a fixed scale to them. Two men (Isaac Newton and Ole Rømer) finally came up with this idea independently in 1701 CE, but Rømer’s scale was better: Newton used a lot of subjective temperature references (“the heat at midday about the month of July”: what the heck, Newton?) while Rømer at least used constants like the freezing and boiling points of water as the basis for his temperature scale.* There’s another problem: since the water in a thermoscope is open to the air, it’s also susceptible to changes in pressure, which actually makes this invention a combination thermoscope and barometer, or “thermobaroscope.”

* That comes from classical mechanics, a field of study that you’re about to invent right here in this very footnote! Classical mechanics is concerned with describing how objects respond to forces that act upon them, and the three laws we’re about to describe are its foundation. Before they were formalized in 1686 CE by Isaac Newton, people had a less-perfect understanding of why and how things moved, and had to make do with worse theories like “Rocks love the ground and smoke loves the sky, so that’s how come smoke rises and rocks don’t” (Aristotle, 300 BCE). The three laws of motion are: (1) Objects at rest remain at rest, and objects in motion remain in motion, unless acted on by a force. (2) The rate of change of an object’s momentum is directly proportional to the force applied, and is in the direction of the applied force. (3) For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction: as you push a box forward, the box also pushes you back.

“Dark-brown heat” was good for glazing pastries, slightly cooler “light-brown heat” was good for pie crusts, “dark-yellow heat” was best for larger pastries, and the coolest “light-yellow heat” for meringues. * You can build a temperature scale around anything (as some of Newton’s whimsically useless temperature references illustrate), but physical constants are better. They’ll make your measurements consistent and reproducible, even if for some reason you don’t have access to Isaac Newton’s backyard, in summer, on an Earth whose climate approximates what it was like in England in 1701 CE. See Section 4 to reproduce the centigrade scale of measurement used in this book. * It’s also why you can use lakes to cool your buildings, when your civilization gets to that point! When water reaches around 4°C (3.98 degrees, if we’re being exact) it’s at its maximum density.


pages: 670 words: 194,502

The Intelligent Investor (Collins Business Essentials) by Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig

3Com Palm IPO, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, corporate governance, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, George Santayana, hiring and firing, index fund, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, price stability, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, the market place, the rule of 72, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, Y2K, Yogi Berra

For the rest of his life, he forbade anyone to speak the words “South Sea” in his presence. 4 Sir Isaac Newton was one of the most intelligent people who ever lived, as most of us would define intelligence. But, in Graham’s terms, Newton was far from an intelligent investor. By letting the roar of the crowd override his own judgment, the world’s greatest scientist acted like a fool. In short, if you’ve failed at investing so far, it’s not because you’re stupid. It’s because, like Sir Isaac Newton, you haven’t developed the emotional discipline that successful investing requires. In Chapter 8, Graham describes how to enhance your intelligence by harnessing your emotions and refusing to stoop to the market’s level of irrationality.

., a hedge fund run by a battalion of mathematicians, computer scientists, and two Nobel Prize–winning economists, lost more than $2 billion in a matter of weeks on a huge bet that the bond market would return to “normal.” But the bond market kept right on becoming more and more abnormal—and LTCM had borrowed so much money that its collapse nearly capsized the global financial system. 3 And back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he “could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people.” Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000.

As Graham puts it, “while enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster.” By letting themselves get carried away—on Internet stocks, on big “growth” stocks, on stocks as a whole—many people made the same stupid mistakes as Sir Isaac Newton. They let other investors’ judgments determine their own. They ignored Graham’s warning that “the really dreadful losses” always occur after “the buyer forgot to ask ‘How much?’” Most painfully of all, by losing their self-control just when they needed it the most, these people proved Graham’s assertion that “the investor’s chief problem—and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself.”


pages: 71 words: 20,766

Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Becky Smethurst

Apollo 13, Cepheid variable, dark matter, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Stephen Hawking

It’s an island of gas, dust, and stars, more than a million trillion kilometers across. At the center of the Milky Way star system there’s a black hole four million times more massive than the Sun. That’s something we call a supermassive black hole, and like the Sun in our solar system, it’s in the gravitational driving seat of our whole galaxy. Isaac Newton discovered the law that governs gravity some centuries ago: two objects will attract each other proportional to how heavy each object is. The lighter object will be affected more by the force between the two objects. The force also depends on how far apart the two objects are: the farther apart they are, the weaker the force between them.


pages: 294 words: 82,438

Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World by Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Apollo 13, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, complexity theory, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, diversification, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, machine translation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, Network effects, obamacare, Paul Graham, performance metric, price anchoring, RAND corporation, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Startup school, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Wall-E, web application, Y Combinator, Zipcar

As if spurring on three scientific revolutions were not enough, Weaver also pioneered the study of complexity. In his 1948 article, Weaver described science as progressing through successive eras, defined by the three types of problems—simple, uncertain, and complex—that they solved. Simple problems address a few variables that can be reduced to a deterministic formula. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion (force = mass x acceleration, for example) were powerful tools to solve simple problems, such as how a satellite orbits the Earth or what happens when two billiard balls collide. Simple problems occupied scientists for most of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, and their solutions yielded life-changing inventions ranging from the telephone to the diesel engine.

Under pressure from merchants who refused to accept debased currency, some princes transferred their right of coinage to autonomous city councils, a forerunner of the modern central bank, some of which relied on simple rules to regulate currency. The rules used to manage monetary policy grew more sophisticated over time. As England’s master of the mint in 1717, Sir Isaac Newton decreed the “golden rule” that paper currency must be convertible to an equivalent amount of gold. Eight decades later, England abandoned Newton’s golden rule and proceeded to print pounds to fund the Napoleonic wars. The financial chaos that followed inspired English bankers to develop new rules to stabilize England’s economy: (1) limit the amount of paper money, (2) never reduce circulating cash but “vibrate within limits,” (3) expand cash as trade expands, and (4) allow temporary increases in emergencies.


pages: 261 words: 81,802

The Trouble With Billionaires by Linda McQuaig

"World Economic Forum" Davos, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, carried interest, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, employer provided health coverage, financial deregulation, fixed income, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John Bogle, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, lateral thinking, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, minimum wage unemployment, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, very high income, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Indeed, as the curtain came down at the end of the production, it would be hard to imagine Gates getting a curtain call or receiving the lion’s share of the applause, let alone walking away with the entire box office take. • • • Among other things, the story of the personal computer suggests that inventions and innovations are the result of an evolutionary process involving many players, rather than being the product of one brilliant individual. As Isaac Newton famously remarked in a letter to scientific rival Robert Hooke: ‘What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much several ways…If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Indeed, an invention typically occurs when the scientific body of evidence has accumulated to the point that the breakthrough is almost apparent – at least to the scientists closely engaged in the field.

In the overall picture, one person’s contribution would still inevitably be infinitesimally small. If this seems to underestimate the importance of individual greatness, consider some of the most outstanding minds in history and try to imagine how far they would have got without the benefit of society and all the knowledge accumulated before them. Alperovitz and Daly put it well: ‘If [Isaac] Newton, in his lifetime, had to learn everything humanity had learned from the time of the caveman to the late seventeenth century – if he had no knowledge inheritance whatsoever to work with – he could not have contributed much more than an insightful ‌caveman could in his lifetime.’19 And Bill Gates, stranded on a deserted island, would have his work cut out just figuring how to keep himself warm. ‌6 ‌Why Other Billionaires Are Even Less Deserving It was late in 2006 when an ageing, little-known economic consultant named Gary Shilling arrived at a well-appointed office in New York’s Upper East Side for a meeting with hedge fund manager John Paulson and his team of high-powered analysts.


pages: 300 words: 84,762

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases by Paul A. Offit

1960s counterculture, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, discovery of penicillin, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan

If being sick at the right time with the right virus helped—great.” One reporter later wrote, “Jeryl recovered from mumps virus, but mumps virus never recovered from infecting Jeryl.” CHAPTER 3 Eight Doors “If I have seen farther than others, it was because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.” SIR ISAAC NEWTON What possessed Maurice Hilleman to take his daughter’s mumps virus and inject it into hen’s eggs and minced chick embryos? Why did he cut off the chicks’ heads before using them? And most importantly, why in the 1960s did he resort to a process so seemingly crude, arcane, and convoluted? Eight critical experiments performed during the previous century determined Hilleman’s choices.

Wistar wrote the first textbook on anatomy in the early 1800s and developed a series of anatomical teaching aids that included wax-preserved human limbs and organs. The institute’s museum of anatomy contained a cyclops; Siamese twins; two Indian mummies; seven wax-injected human hearts; the death masks of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, and Voltaire; and the largest number of human and animal skeletons in the world. A massive whale skeleton hung from the ceiling. Although the Wistar Institute had been founded to advance studies of anatomy, by the early 1960s Hilary Koprowski had made it one of the world’s leading institutions for the study of cancer and viruses.


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Paul’s Cathedral in July 1981. American artist Mark Tansey incorporated Diana in his 1986 painting Achilles and the Tortoise. She is shown planting a hemlock, a sapling version of the mature tree behind her. Diana was often photographed planting trees, among them an apple tree she planted in honor of Isaac Newton. In 1993 Diana came to the attention of American astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III. Gott had devised a mathematical formula for predicting the future. He wanted to test it on a celebrity marriage, and he chose Charles and Diana’s because a magazine reported they were the most famous couple of the time.

(I don’t bother to mention the year-based median prediction of 200,000 years. Nobody would care.) I have noticed that hardly anyone contests the 760 years figure as tinfoil-hat crazy. The chart below suggests why. It summarizes some popular and expert estimates of the date of human extinction. There is a lot of overlap. In a 1704 letter, Isaac Newton used the book of Daniel to predict that the end of the world would come in AD 2060. That was then 356 years in the future. Newton offered his forecast in the hope that it would “put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the end of time.” Fat chance of that.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

Google is the successful embodiment, through technology, of the earlier dream of the memory palace. For many centuries the idea of an algorithmic path toward greater knowledge was an obsession in Western thought and religion; it infused the Kabbalah, many of the medieval scholastics, and scientists such as Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler. It fell out of favor as it was increasingly regarded as ridiculous, but guess what? These visions made perfect sense but just didn’t yet have the right technologies to make them work. For a long time the memory tradition in Western thought appeared to be a dead end and indeed few people today use memory theatres or other memory tricks; the technology never seemed practical for most of us.

The overall picture is a daunting one for the ability of the individual human mind to comprehend the science of how our world works. Specialization As science progresses, each new marginal discovery is more the result of specialization and less the result of general breakthroughs, compared to earlier times. There probably won’t be another Isaac Newton, Adam Smith, or Euclid, because the most fundamental contributions in those fields have already been made. New fundamental contributions are hardly over, but they will come in dribs and drabs and they are more likely to come from research teams than from lone geniuses in major, unexpected bursts.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

—Samuel Butler, nineteenth-century English poet and author More than any other time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. —Woody Allen I. J. Good didn’t invent the intelligence explosion any more than Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity. All he did was observe that an event he considered both inevitable and a net positive for mankind was certain to yield the kind of “ultraintelligence” we humans need to solve problems that are too difficult for us. Then, after he’d lived three more decades, Good changed his mind.

It’s just too hard.” Goertzel, for example, responded to this by looking at me as if I’d started preaching intelligent design. A sometime mathematics professor, like Vinge, Goertzel draws lessons for AI’s future from the history of calculus. “If you look at how mathematicians did calculus before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz, they would take a hundred pages to calculate the derivative of a cubic polynomial. They did it with triangles, similar triangles and weird diagrams and so on. It was oppressive. But now that we have a more refined theory of calculus any idiot in high school can take the derivative of a cubic polynomial.


pages: 285 words: 83,682

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah

affirmative action, assortative mating, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, four colour theorem, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Parler "social media", precariat, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Suez canal 1869, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, zero-sum game

He then had to travel another few hundred miles to Wolfenbüttel, the home of Anton Ulrich, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Anton Ulrich was a major patron of the European Enlightenment. His librarian was Gottfried Leibniz, one of the leading philosophers, mathematicians, and inventors of his era, and cocreator, with Isaac Newton, of calculus; and the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel housed one of the most magnificent book collections in the world. The child had apparently been offered as a “gift” to the duke, who, in turn, handed the boy on to his son, August Wilhelm; and we first hear of him as a member of August Wilhelm’s household.

(Or, conversely, if Amo had been sent, like his brother, to work as a slave in the sugarcane fields of Suriname?) It is, perhaps, worth noting that the discovery that not a single Negro was good at philosophy wouldn’t have justified black slavery. As Thomas Jefferson admitted, in responding to the Abbé Grégoire, “Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others.”15 The slanders against the Negro race may have salved some Christian consciences, but they could never have justified what had been done in enslaving millions of black people. Still, ideology—enlisted by forms of domination from slavery to colonization—does help explain why, at a time when scientists were discarding notions like phlogiston, supposedly the substance of fire, they made extraordinary efforts to assert the reality of race.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

“On Jan. 13, 1920,” the paper explained, it published an article that “dismissed the notion that a rocket could function in a vacuum.” The original article teased the scientist who “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” Now the paper teased itself. “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.” Using frames to see what’s not there (yet) is common in the sciences. In 1846 scholars predicted the existence of an eighth planet, Neptune, based on their model of planetary motion and data gathered from observing Uranus, its planetary neighbor.

Bush and Congress explaining why it was vital to bail out AIG—not to rescue the company but to save the economy. As he looked out the window, he took a contemplative moment to rethink his decision to bring the machinery of the Fed directly into the markets. People have long understood the economy in terms of causality. But the frames they used were at times ill-fitting. In the late 1600s Isaac Newton’s principles of inertia and gravity were adapted to explain market competition. In the mid-1700s in France a clique of economists who had initially studied to be physicians called themselves physiocrats. They saw the flow of money through the economy like blood in the body’s circulation system.


Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

By Rowbotham’s time, schools had long been teaching a fairly modern model of the solar system. Rowbotham claimed he never took to his school’s teachings, and that he tried sneaking out of a school astronomy lesson, which he believed was bogus. Those doubts compounded when he searched the Bible for confirmation of his beliefs. He concluded that if Sir Isaac Newton’s model of the solar system—round planets orbiting a round sun—was true, then God was dead. “Again and again, the feeling came over me that as the Newtonian system appeared so plausible and so grand in its extent and comprehensiveness, it might after all be correct,” Rowbotham later wrote of his path to Flat Earth, “and, if so, there could be no heaven for man’s future enjoyment; no higher existence than on this earth; no spiritual and immortal creatures, and therefore no God or Creator.”

“Time was, they said the Earth was flat; but now they say it’s round!” begins an introductory poem. “But strange enough, though true, it is, no PROOF has yet been found.” Carpenter took up Rowbotham’s biblical arguments and found new places to poke at established science. Legendary astronomers Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton had all estimated different distances between Earth and sun. Carpenter claimed the discrepancy should call the entire field of modern astronomy into question. (Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton never had the chance to compare notes because none of them lived at 26 OFF THE EDGE the same time, and all were using inexact estimation methods.)


Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, means of production, Multics, packet switching, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, trade route, wikimedia commons

The Roman term for a pound in weight was libra pondo, where libra means “scales” or “balances” (from which the constellation takes its name) and where pondo comes from the verb pendere, “to weigh.”3 The tautological flavor of this pairing is borne out by the fact that both libra and pondo were also used singly to mean the same thing—one pound in weight—and it is from these twin roots that the # gets both its form and its oldest name.4 Sometime in the late fourteenth century the abbreviation “lb” for libra entered English,* and according to common scribal practice it was accessorized with a line—known as a “tittle,” or “tilde,” and for which the modern “∼” is named—drawn just above the letters’ x-height to denote the use of a contraction.6 The barred form of “lb” was originally so common that some early printers cut the paired letters onto a single, combined punch, but it has since been overtaken by both its predecessor and its descendant: jotted down in haste (as seen in Isaac Newton’s elegant scrawl in image 3.1), was transformed into # by the carelessly rushing pens of successive scribes, while the naked “lb” soldiers on to this day.7 The has become a missing link, a vital evolutionary step buried out of sight in the paleographic fossil record.† In tandem with the development of the # symbol, libra’s estranged partner pondo was also changing.

Whereas libra had become “lb” and then # through the urgency of the scribe’s pen, pondo was instead subjected to the vagaries of spoken language. The Latin pondo became first the Old English pund (sharing a common root with the German Pfund) and later the modern word “pound.”9 Libra and pondo were reunited: #, the “pound sign,” was born. Figure 3.1 as an abbreviation for libra, or “pound in weight,” from the pen of Isaac Newton. Courtesy of the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library, CHF. Figure 3.2 A detail from Johann Conrad Barchusen’s Pyrosophia (1698) showing printed symbols crossed by a tittle to show that they are abbreviations. Courtesy of the Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library, CHF. * * * The # is but one of the relics of the phrase libra pondo, which spawned a dynasty of intertwined signs, words, and concepts that are still evident today.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

America is “but in her infancy with regard to manufactures: a few iron works, several glass houses, some tan yards, a considerable number of trifling and imperfect manufactories of kerseymere [a coarse kind of knitting] and, in some places, of cotton . . . point out the feeble efforts that have hitherto been made [to] furnish the country with manufactured articles of daily consumption.”5 America’s financial system was primitive compared with the mother country’s. Britain established its national bank in 1694, when it gave the governor and company of the Bank of England a monopoly of issuing banknotes, and introduced the gold standard in 1717, when the master of the mint, Sir Isaac Newton, defined the pound in terms of gold weight (£4.25 per troy ounce). America didn’t have any banks whatsoever until the 1780s, when Robert Morris chartered the Bank of North America (1781), Alexander Hamilton established the Bank of New York (1784), and John Hancock and Samuel Adams chartered the Massachusetts Bank (1784).

The gold standard thus became self-vindicating: pleas that the gold standard was harming the economy were treated as proof that it was “working.”9 Critics of the gold standard have likened this worship of the yellow metal to a primitive fetish. But it is much more than this. The exchange value of gold as a percentage of a fixed basket of goods and services had remained stable since Sir Isaac Newton, master of the British mint, in 1717, set the pound sterling at 4.25 per ounce of gold. The price remained at that level until 1931, when Britain abandoned the gold standard. The United States followed in 1933. One of the most remarkable things about the economic expansion of the second half of the nineteenth century was that it took place without the distraction of inflation.

The real economy suffered because Britain at its old exchange rate was uncompetitive, leading to unnecessary agonies as industry was squeezed, export industries such as coal mining contracted, unemployment soared, and the trade unions organized a general strike. In 1931, with 22 percent of the workforce unemployed, the British government, with its gold reserves rapidly depleting, took sterling off the gold standard for the first time in peacetime since Sir Isaac Newton established the gold parity in 1717. The pound fell by more than a third against the dollar (from $4.86 to $3.25), forcing other countries to follow suit, first the Scandinavian and Baltic states, with their close ties to the British market, then Japan, then much of Latin America. For all Keynes’s adumbrations against the “barbarous relic,” the problem was not the gold standard in the abstract but the decision by almost all the developed world to fix their postwar currencies against the dollar at the prewar noncompetitive exchange rates, despite significant costs of storage and loss of interest.


pages: 449 words: 123,459

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

Whereas the force of gravity controls the motion of the latter, it is the electrical attraction of opposite charges— positively charged nucleus and negatively charged electrons—that holds atoms together. Analogies can be dangerous if stretched too far, and the case of the planetary electrons is a cautionary example: Atoms built like that could not survive for a moment if they obeyed Isaac Newton’s laws of mechanics. The same force of gravity that governs the motion of the planets is degrading their orbits over the eons. The solar system is vast and gravity relatively feeble; as a result, the erosion of the orbits is so gradual even the most sensitive measurements cannot detect it.10 Atoms, by contrast, are very tiny, and the electrical forces are much more powerful than gravity.

He was, in effect, redesigning quantum mechanics from the bottom up, led by intuition as much as by formal mathematics. feynman’s action The challenge of classical mechanics, such as determining the motion of planets, is that if you know where some objects are now, where will they be at some future moment? In the seventeen century Isaac Newton stated 38 the infinity puzzle the laws of motion: If no forces act, bodies move at a constant velocity, whereas a force gives them acceleration. This inspired the concept of energy, such as the energy associated with motion—“kinetic energy”—and latent or “potential” energy, where the situation of a body gives it the potential to gain kinetic energy, the sum of the potential and kinetic energies being constant.

In 1940 he entered Hanley High School and the present of a chemistry set two years later sparked his interest in science, or at least in verifying whether the information about explosives, in the school textbooks, was correct. A physics teacher, who had noticed his remarkable natural talent, enrolled him for the entrance scholarship exam at Trinity College, Cambridge. The choice of Trinity appears to have been entirely because the teacher admired Isaac Newton, the college’s most distinguished alumnus. Shaw arrived there in 1949 and moved into room K9, overlooking Jesus Lane. There is nothing particularly special about this room other than the coincidence that its previous occupant was Freeman Dyson. Trinity has always hosted a galaxy of stars, and that year was no exception.


The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Despite the hardship of his early surroundings, he went to Oxford University and embarked on an ecclesiastical career. But religion seems to have been a means to an end for Desaguliers, who became notorious for his tedious sermons. His real interests lay in his flourishing career as a scientist, public lecturer and showman. As a student at Oxford, he had fallen under the spell of Sir Isaac Newton, and he developed a zeal for demonstrating Newton’s theories in striking experiments. In Enlightenment England, especially London, there was an audience prepared to pay well for such entertainment. Thanks to Newton, without disbursing the usual membership fee, Dr Desaguliers was invited to join the Royal Society, where commoners and aristocrats mixed in the shared pursuit of scientific knowledge and the prestige that went with it.

In 1716 he became chaplain to James Brydges, soon to become 1st Duke of Chandos, a Whig grandee whose patronage would be crucial in his rise. His network of contacts quickly spread deep into the community of scientists and their aristocratic patrons. One indicator is the list of godparents he managed to secure for his children in the 1720s. Apart from Sir Isaac Newton, they included the Marquis of Carnarvon, who was the eldest surviving son of the Duke of Chandos, and the Earl of Macclesfield–a fabulously wealthy Whig courtier and Lord Chancellor who would later be prosecuted for taking enormous bribes. It was mightily impressive for the son of a refugee like Desaguliers to have such traction in high places.

Nor should it strike us as strange that a man of science like Dr Desaguliers was drawn to a Brotherhood so wedded to pre-scientific beliefs as the Freemasons. Certainly, he performed famous experiments to prove the inanity of myths like the perpetual-motion machine. Yet he lived in an age where the boundaries between science and superstition were still far from clearly demarcated. Sir Isaac Newton himself believed in the alchemical search for the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life; the great man was no Accepted Mason, but he pored over the design of Solomon’s Temple in the search for ancient truths. For Desaguliers, Freemasonry was all of a piece with his personal ambition, his politics and his intellectual passions.


Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

For Thomas Willis, the Anglican clergyman and Cambridge professor who coined the term “neurology,” the entire universe was a bodying-forth of a soul, alive and self-actualizing, not designed from without but generated from within by “moving animal spirits.” Willis’s colleague Ralph Cudworth postulated a teleological force, driving toward greater complexity and variety in an organized fashion, operating immanently in natural things and “Magically and Sympathetically” producing the diversity of forms that makes up the natural world. Isaac Newton himself combined precise observation and measurement with the postulation of mysterious invisible forces, notably gravity. Throughout the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers in all areas of inquiry were beset by the growing suspicion that “there must be something more than dead matter,” as the historians Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman have shown—some vivifying principle that pervaded the cosmos, linking humans with other animals and the rest of creation.

A report, industriously spread, that Spain was willing to concede four ports, on the coasts of Chili [sic] and Peru, for the purposes of traffic, increased the general confidence; and for many years the South Sea Company’s stock was in high favour. When these cheerful prospects all proved illusory, the speculative bubble finally burst in 1720. One of the investors was Isaac Newton, who had stood aghast as the company’s share prices soared. As the mathematician reportedly said, he could “calculate the movement of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Rational calculation could not comprehend the emotions that animated speculative finance. The “Money’d Man” marveled at how completely wealth had become decoupled from familiar markers of worth: How from all Corners of the Nation The Wise, Fools, Cits, and Folk of Fashion Repair promiscuous to the Alley To lose or gain more Money daily: Say how, and by what means, a Lord, On sudden, turns out not worth a T__d; While, from a Dunghill to a Coach, A Rascal rises in a Touch.

THE MADNESS AND MILDNESS OF MONEY “one very often trades”: Commercial writer, cited in James Buchan, John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century (2018), 58. “a Money’d Man”: A Familiar Epistle to Mr. Mitchell Containing a Seasonable SATIRE, Written in the Style of Modern Poetic Beggars (1720), 8. “visionary ideas”: Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), 46–47. “calculate the movement”: Isaac Newton, cited in Andrew Odlyzko, “Newton’s Financial Misadventures in the South Sea Bubble,” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science (2018), doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2018.0018. “How from all Corners”: A Familiar Epistle, 4–5. “invincible patience”: Paula Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: His Life (1989), 11.


pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

Von Neumann’s 1928 article on parlor games was the first successful attempt to derive logical and mathematical rules about rivalries.15 Just as Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, great scientists have often looked for clues to vast and complex problems in the small, familiar phenomena of daily life. Isaac Newton reached insights about the heavens by juggling wooden balls. Einstein contemplated a boat paddling upriver. Von Neumann pondered the game of poker. A seemingly trivial and playful pursuit like poker, von Neumann argued, might hold the key to more serious human affairs for two reasons. Both poker and economic competition require a certain type of reasoning, namely the rational calculation of advantage and disadvantage based on some internally consistent system of values (“more is better than less”).

His genius also won him love. He had married a beautiful young physics student who adored him, and fathered a child. It was a brilliant strategy, this genius, this life. A seemingly perfect adaptation. Many great scientists and philosophers, among them René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities.20 An emotionally detached, inward-looking temperament can be especially conducive to scientific creativity, psychiatrists and biographers have long observed, just as fiery fluctuations in mood may sometimes be linked to artistic expression.

The symptoms can be “slightly, moderately, severely, or absolutely disabling,” according to Irving Gottesman, a leading contemporary researcher.38 Though Nash succumbed at age thirty, the illness can appear at any time from adolescence to advanced middle age.39 The first episode can last a few weeks or months or several years.40 The life history of someone with the disease can include only one or two episodes.41 Isaac Newton, always an eccentric and solitary soul, apparently suffered a psychotic breakdown with paranoid delusions at age fifty-one.42 The episode, which may have been precipitated by an unhappy attachment to a younger man and the failure of his alchemy experiments, marked the end of Newton’s academic career.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

The big breakthrough Paul Romer made when he launched the endogenous growth theory in the 1980s was conceptual and mathematical. The mathematical part is of no interest here and the conceptual part is so simple it is hard to believe no one had thought of it before Romer. In fact, it is related to Isaac Newton’s well-known phrase, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”2 Or in today’s more prosaic phraseology, knowledge creation generates “spillovers” that make future innovation easier. Think of each innovation as creating two types of knowledge. The first bit is quite specific and directly remunerated—call it a “patent.”

The next step is to get distance into the story line so that we can think about the growth implication of falling trade costs (in the first unbundling) and falling communications cost (in the second unbundling). Romer’s framework had no distance lever for globalization to pull, but more recent work has bolted on a few such levers. Growth in a Global Economy Distance matters for innovation and growth; Isaac Newton’s innovators can’t get up onto the shoulders of giants if the giants are too far away. Putting this sort of consideration into the framework was done when Gene Grossman and Elhanan Helpman took endogenous growth theory to an international setting in their 1991 book Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy.4 Again, the key insight is simplicity itself.


pages: 310 words: 89,838

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

In the early fourteenth century, the Parisian philosopher Jean Buridan drew on the concept of mass when he described how throwing an object gave it an impetus that depended on how much matter it contained and the speed at which it was lobbed.3 The sixteenth-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler took things further, arguing that planets stayed true to their orbits and didn’t hurtle around space like scattered snooker balls thanks to the inertia arising from their enormous masses. Despite the valuable work of early philosophers and astronomers, the term “mass” was not used systematically until 1687, when Isaac Newton laid the foundations of classical mechanics in a great but wholly impenetrable work, the Principia.4 Newton said mass was a quantity of matter that arose from an object’s volume and density. An object’s mass governed its inertia, or how much it resisted being pushed around, and also how strongly it felt the force of gravity.

The Allied and Axis powers both knew that with the right expertise it was possible to create a chain reaction and release an enormous amount of energy from countless atoms in one devastating blast. Paul Dirac spent the war years at Cambridge as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the job that Isaac Newton had held more than 250 years earlier and that Stephen Hawking would assume 40 years later. Dirac worked briefly on confidential techniques to make weapons-grade uranium, which fed into the Manhattan Project, the U.S. atomic bomb effort led by Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.


pages: 330 words: 88,445

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

He just jumped out of the wave, dropped to the bottom, and rode off. Nothing to it.” Of course, there was something to it and it was the exact same kind of something that saved Hamilton’s ass on the Millennium Wave—a moment of sudden, creative insight. Often these moments are important enough to make history. Isaac Newton sees an apple fall and BAMMO: the theory of gravity arrives fully formed in his brain; Archimedes climbs into the bathtub and SHAZAM: the solution to the mathematical puzzle of volume pops into his head. But, seriously, Newton was lazing around an orchard and Archimedes was having a hot soak. Hamilton, meanwhile, had his creative insight while riding down the gullet of Godzilla.

The general reaction is “Sure, that’s amazing, but just imagine what Schaar’s going to be able to do when he’s twenty.” Alex Honnold is the answer to that question. He’s climbing’s version of Tom Schaar, only all grown up. He was born into a world where both his baseline for reality and his spectrum for possibility were a quantum leap forward from the previous generation and he took full advantage. Isaac Newton wasn’t wrong. We all see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants. In other words, asking what the future would hold if flow became central to culture is another way of asking how good the view is from Honnold’s shoulders. Again, it’s hard to say for certain, but it’s worth pointing out that in 2012 Honnold repeated his Half Dome solo.


pages: 314 words: 91,652

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, Ian Hacking

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, business cycle, cuban missile crisis, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (London, 1954), p. 16. 2. Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (Madison, Wis., 1959), Parts II–III. A. Koyré displays a number of medieval elements in Galileo’s thought in his Etudes Galiléennes (Paris, 1939), particularly Vol. I. 3. For Newton, see T. S. Kuhn, “Newton’s Optical Papers,” in Isaac Newton’s Papers and Letters in Natural Philosophy, ed. I. B. Cohen (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 27–45. For the prelude to the wave theory, see E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, I (2d ed.; London, 1951), 94–109; and W. Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences (rev. ed.; London, 1847), II, 396–466. 4.

The detailed history of the gradual changes in measurements of chemical composition and of atomic weights has yet to be written, but Partington, op. cit., provides many useful leads to it. XI. The Invisibility of Revolutions 1. L. K. Nash, “The Origins of Dalton’s Chemical Atomic Theory,” Isis, XLVII (1956), 101–16. 2. For Newton’s remark, see Florian Cajori (ed.), Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World (Berkeley, Calif., 1946), p. 21. The passage should be compared with Galileo’s own discussion in his Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, trans. H. Crew and A. de Salvio (Evanston, Ill., 1946), pp. 154–76. 3. T. S. Kuhn, “Robert Boyle and Structural Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century,” Isis, XLIII (1952), 26–29. 4.


pages: 395 words: 94,764

I Never Knew That About London by Christopher Winn

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Clapham omnibus, Desert Island Discs, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869

Bonnie Prince Charlie paid a secret visit to St Mary’s in 1750, converting to the Anglican faith in an attempt to boost his claim to the English throne. This upset the Pope, who withdrew his support for the Prince’s campaign. Charles Dickens’s parents were married here in 1809. Beside the church was LONDON’S FIRST HACKNEY CARRIAGE RANK, established in 1634, while on the green in front of the church was a tall maypole. Sir Isaac Newton purchased this in 1718 and had it erected it in Wanstead Park as a stand for Europe’s highest telescope. St Mary-le-Strand Somerset House Riverside Palace THE ORIGINAL SOMERSET House was THE FIRST RENAISSANCE PALACE IN ENGLAND, and was built on land belonging to the Bishops of Worcester and Chester which was given to the Lord Protector Somerset by Henry VIII at the Dissolution.

When both front legs are shown raised, it means that the rider died in battle, and if all four legs are on the ground, then the rider died of old age. Well, I never knew this ABOUT ST JAMES’S JERMYN STREET is named after Henry Jermyn, the 1st Earl of St Albans, who laid out St James’s Square in the 17th century. Sir Isaac Newton lived at No. 86 from 1696 until 1710, and the poet Thomas Gray, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Nelson all had lodgings in the street. At No. 93 Jermyn Street is PAXTON AND WHITFIELD, BRITAIN’S OLDEST CHEESE SHOP, founded in 1742. Stilton cheese was first sold in London here, and Paxton & Whitfield is where the Queen gets her cheeses from.


pages: 316 words: 90,165

You Are Here: From the Compass to GPS, the History and Future of How We Find Ourselves by Hiawatha Bray

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, digital map, don't be evil, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Edward Snowden, Firefox, game design, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, license plate recognition, lone genius, openstreetmap, polynesian navigation, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Thales of Miletus, trade route, turn-by-turn navigation, uranium enrichment, urban planning, Zipcar

And in 2001, when some scientists from Sonoma State University hung a pendulum very close to latitude 90 degrees south—the South Pole—it made the circuit in twenty-four hours and fifty minutes, only counterclockwise.2 What Foucault’s experiment showed was that the arc of the pendulum did not change its direction at all. Centuries earlier, Sir Isaac Newton had explained why, in his principle of inertia. Once set in motion, the pendulum would keep moving in the same direction, unless some force altered its course. No such force existed for Foucault’s pendulum. As the pendulum swung, the planet itself was shifting beneath it. At the North or South Pole, the shift would synchronize with the earth’s rotation around its axis.

In reality, it would take considerably longer to solve the gravity problem. Four more Transit satellites went up between June 1960 and November 1961. These were prototypes that were not intended to provide navigational aid to navy ships. Instead, they were mainly used to map the world’s gravitational irregularities. Isaac Newton had long ago surmised that, far from being perfectly spherical, the earth had an oblate shape—flatter at the poles and thicker at the equator than a perfect sphere. Transit observations confirmed and refined Newton’s theory. Researchers who had studied the orbit of an earlier US satellite, Vanguard I, concluded that the earth was actually pear shaped, with the Northern Hemisphere somewhat longer than the Southern.


pages: 335 words: 95,280

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

Once serious minds began to investigate in detail the hidden nature of the universe, it took over four centuries for them to fully resolve the question What is light? Perhaps the most serious modern mind, although certainly not the first, to ask this question was also one of the most famous—and oddest—scientists in history: Isaac Newton. It is not inappropriate to classify Newton as a modern mind—after all, his seventeenth-century Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy uncovered the classical laws of motion and laid the basis for his theory of gravity, both of which form the foundation of much of modern physics.

That alone would have made him memorable, but in his spare time he also was one of the first to help decipher the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta stone. He developed the physics of elastic materials, associated with what is now called Young’s modulus, and helped first elucidate the physiology of color vision. And his brave demonstration of the wave nature of light (which argued against Isaac Newton’s powerful claim that light was made of particles) was so compelling that it helped lay the basis of Maxwell’s discovery of electromagnetic waves. Young’s experiment is simple. Let’s return to Plato’s cave and consider a screen placed in front of the back wall of the cave. Place two slits in the screen as shown below (as seen from above): If the light is made of particles, then those light rays that pierce the slits would form two bright lines on the wall behind these two slits: However, it was well known that waves, unlike particles, diffract around barriers and narrow slits and would produce a very different pattern on the wall.


pages: 342 words: 94,762

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

Silver suggested some possible uses: maybe a sticky spray, or an adhesive bulletin board where notices could be easily posted and removed. Fry was fascinated, but he didn’t think those applications made sense, and at that moment he couldn’t come up with any others.8 We like eureka stories. Popular lore is filled with this kind of thing. One warm evening, Isaac Newton is sitting under an apple tree in his garden when an apple falls and bonks him on the head; he instantly discovers gravity.9 Thomas Edison is staying up all night at Menlo Park, frantically experimenting, when suddenly he creates a new lightbulb that glows continuously for thirteen-and-a-half hours.10 Tim Berners-Lee is helping some scientists share data when out of the blue an idea hits him and he invents the World Wide Web.11 But these stories are rarely accurate.

Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 38. 6. “Podcast: Art Fry’s Invention Has a Way of Sticking Around,” Smithsonian Lemelson Center, May 20, 2008, http://invention.smithsonian.org/video/vid-popup.aspx?clip=1&id=518. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. The story originates from a passage in a biography of Newton, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, written by one of his contemporaries, William Stukeley, and published more than two decades after Newton’s death. The relevant passages from the book are available online at The Royal Society, “Newton’s Apple,” http://royalsociety.org/library/moments/newton-apple/. 10. Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, “Young Edison,” http://www.menloparkmuseum.org/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park (excerpted from Westfield Architects and Preservation Consultants, Preservation Master Plan, Edison Memorial Tower, Museum, and Site (2007). 11.


pages: 313 words: 91,098

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, attribution theory, bitcoin, Black Swan, Cass Sunstein, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dmitri Mendeleev, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Flynn Effect, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, hive mind, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Peoples Temple, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, seminal paper, single-payer health, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Vernor Vinge, web application, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Most people think it’s going to take a curved path (the right side of the figure). In fact, Newton’s laws dictate that it will fly off in a straight path (toward your brother if you’re lucky). We don’t always expect objects to behave according to Newton’s laws because everyday observations often don’t appear to follow them. (This is one reason it took such insight for Isaac Newton to discover them in the first place.) For example, Newton’s first law states that a body in motion tends to remain in motion at the same speed and in the same direction. But usually we don’t observe this. If you push a brick across the floor it will stop pretty quickly. Physicists correctly attribute this phenomenon to friction.

The World Is Your Computer As we’ve already focused on baseball in this chapter, let’s stick with the theme to further illustrate the point that we are not engaged in intensive computation inside our heads. Imagine a fly ball has been hit straight toward you. How do you go about deciding where you should be to catch it? The traditional cognitive science answer is that the little Isaac Newton inside you takes over. You start calculating trajectories and predicting where the ball is going to fall using everything you know about physics. You may have forgotten much of the calculus that you learned in high school, but it’s possible that your motor system knows what it needs to: that, when hit, the path a ball takes has the shape of a parabola (neglecting wind and friction).


pages: 293 words: 91,110

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

But his father’s death, when J.J. was sixteen, left the Thomsons unable to pay the fees engineers charged for training apprentices. The boy won a scholarship at a local college and quickly came under the spell of mathematics and physics. The timing was perfect—Thomson’s professional career spanned the most fertile era in physics since Isaac Newton’s day—but nobody knew that during his college days. Quite the contrary, in fact: in the 1870s, there was a general sense that the interesting part of physics was over, and all that remained was refining the measurements. After all, everyone knew that all matter was made of indivisible particles called atoms, and that differences among elements were due to differences in their atoms.

In his memoirs he notes with great pride that twenty-seven of his students (including his son) were elected to the Royal Academy; as an aside, he mentions that seven of them (including his son) also picked up Nobel Prizes. J.J.’s own Nobel Prize, in 1906, seems to have satisfied him less than the knighthood he received two years later. When he died, at eighty-four, in 1940, he was buried in Westminster Abbey near the grave of Isaac Newton. Physicists talk about Thomson’s cathode ray experiment of 1897 the way architects talk about the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The approach was elegant, the conclusion bold and stunning, and the result left an indelible mark on everything that came after. Thomson was determined to find out everything he could about that electric beam shooting through the cathode ray tube.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

Creating constantly looks for improvements and ways to generate emotional energy. “With manufacturing, most of the thinking is done prior to the work. With creating, the thinking is done during the work.” Meandering messily towards Aha! The path to a creative breakthrough is messy. It’s tempting to think of the moment that an apple fell on Sir Isaac Newton’s head and suppose that as it bounced to the ground he muttered, “well, gee!” and wrote down the theory of gravity. Our love of causal sequences presses us to believe that Newton’s law of gravity truly came like a bolt out of the blue – somehow the causal result of “apple-strikes-head, therefore…” But as with Darwin’s theory of evolution and Edison’s invention of the lightbulb, the epiphanic moment is usually a long time coming.


pages: 740 words: 236,681

The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Christopher Hitchens

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, index card, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, phenotype, Plato's cave, risk tolerance, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics

I ’s safe to say that without the devoted skill of Lori Hobkirk as copy editor and project editor and Cliff Corcoran as copyright and permissions editor, the scope and range of the collection would have been considerably less than it is. When accused—probably correctly—of scientific plagiarism, Sir Isaac Newton was careful to say (again plagiarizing from an ancient acknowledgement) that he had “stood on the shoulders of giants.” I am, in this effort as in all my other ones, immensely indebted to a small but growing group of devoted rationalists, who reject the absurd and wicked claims of the religious and who look for answers in the marvels and complexities of science, as well as in the higher and deeper reaches of literature.

There is also (and here I make a slightly different stress than does Dawkins) no special reason to credit “science” as the father or godfather of reason. As in the case of the doctors mentioned earlier, a commitment to experiment and find evidence is no guarantee of immunity to superstition and worse. Sir Isaac Newton was prey to the most idiotic opinions about alchemy. Joseph Priestley, the courageous Unitarian and skeptic who discovered oxygen, was a believer in the phlogiston theory. Alfred Russel Wallace, one of Darwin’s greatest collaborators and progenitors, was a dedicated attender of spiritualist sessions where “ectoplasm” was produced by frauds to the applause of morons.

Our wildest wrong is part of His great Right, Our weakness is the shadow of His might, Our sins are His, forgiven long ago, To make His mercy more exceeding bright. When first the stars were made and planets seven, Already was it told of me in Heaven That God had chosen me to sing His Vine, And in my dust had thrown the vinous leaven. Of Religion From Leviathan THOMAS HOBBES Atomist ideas began to revive in the seventeenth century. Sir Isaac Newton included ninety lines of De Rerum Natura in the early drafts of his Principia. Galileo’s 1623 work, Saggiatore, was so infused with the atomic theory that its friends and critics both referred to it as an Epicurean book. However, at no time was it other than extremely dangerous to profess any public doubt about religious orthodoxy.


pages: 347 words: 97,721

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

As described by the consulting firm McKinsey, “These techniques give computers the ability to draw conclusions from patterns they discern within massive data sets (anything from all legal cases of the past 20 years to data concerning the way in which molecular compounds react with one another).”7 For humans, advancing learning down a narrow path of specialization isn’t usually an exercise in gaining a broad enough perspective thanks to the accumulation of “big data” to spot patterns others have not seen. That much data in a narrow field simply doesn’t exist in most cases. The approach is more akin to Isaac Newton’s method of standing on the shoulders of giants, squinting in one direction, and trying to see just that little bit farther than others. You want to choose an area in which there isn’t a lot of data and in which there won’t be a lot for a while. Stepping narrowly means pushing ever deeper into a subject, with all the force of past achievement helping you, and learning the next thing about it through the kind of focused consideration and experimentation machines can’t manage.

McKinsey Global Institute, “Disruptive Technologies: Advances That Will Transform Life, Business, and the Global Economy,” May 2013, file:///C:/Users/jkirby/Downloads/MGI_Disruptive_technologies_Full_report_May2013%20(2).pdf. 8. Syd Field, Four Screenplays: Studies in the American Screenplay (New York: Delta, 1994). 9. Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (New York: Harper Perennial, 2012). 10. Greg Farrell and Andrew Martin, “How Goldman Banker Became NFL’s Go-To Stadium-Finance Guy,” BloombergBusiness, January 29, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-29/how-goldman-banker-became-nfl-s-go-to-stadium-finance-guy.


pages: 356 words: 102,224

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

But what if these facts contradict the beliefs of those who hold their religion incapable of making mistakes? The princes of the Church threatened the aged astronomer with torture if he persisted in teaching the abominable doctrine that the Earth moved. He was sentenced to a kind of house arrest for the remainder of his life. A generation or two later, by the time Isaac Newton demonstrated that simple and elegant physics could quantitatively explain—and predict—all the observed lunar and planetary motions (provided you assumed the Sun at the center of the Solar System), the geocentrist conceit eroded further. In 1725, in an attempt to discover stellar parallax, the painstaking English amateur astronomer James Bradley stumbled on the aberration of light.

Passionate and curious humans wished to understand their actual circumstances, how unique or pedestrian they and their world are, their ultimate origins and destinies, how the Universe works. Surprisingly, some of these debates have yielded the most profound practical benefits. The very method of mathematical reasoning that Isaac Newton 36 introduced to explain the motion of the planets around the Sun has led to most of the technology Of our modern world. The Industrial Revolution, for all its shortcomings, is still the global model of how an agricultural nation can emerge from poverty. These debates have bread-and-butter consequences.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

So when English and French ships began to skirmish in the English Channel in 1337, the Ideal Chronicler might have noted that a war of some kind seemed likely, but it could not have recorded the observation “The Hundred Years War began today.” Not only was the extent of the conflict between the two countries unknown at the time, but the term “Hundred Years War” was only invented long after it ended as shorthand to describe what was in actuality a series of intermittent conflicts from 1337 to 1453. Likewise, when Isaac Newton published his masterpiece, Principia, the Ideal Chronicler might have been able to say it was a major contribution to celestial mechanics, and even predicted that it would revolutionize science. But to claim that Newton was laying the foundation for what became modern science, or was playing a key role in the Enlightenment, would be beyond the IC.

CHAPTER 10 The Proper Study of Mankind Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man. —Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man” When Alexander Pope published his “Essay on Man” in 1732 our understanding of the world was very different from what it is today. Written just decades after Isaac Newton’s masterpiece, Principia, had laid out the mathematical principles of planetary motion, Pope’s essay arrived when intellectuals were still wrapping their heads around a concept that must have been staggering at the time—that the laws governing the motion of everyday objects here on Earth were exactly the same laws as those governing the heavenly spheres.


pages: 330 words: 99,226

Extraterrestrial Civilizations by Isaac Asimov

Albert Einstein, Cepheid variable, Columbine, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Future Shock, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, invention of radio, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, time dilation

Starlight is a mixture of light of all wavelengths. The light can be spread out in order of wavelength from the short waves of violet light to the long waves of red light, and the result is a “spectrum.” The instrument by which the spectrum is produced is the “spectroscope.” The spectrum was first demonstrated in the case of sunlight by Isaac Newton in 1665. In 1814, the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) showed that the Solar spectrum was crossed by numerous dark lines, which, it was eventually realized, represented missing wavelengths. They were wavelengths of light that were absorbed by atoms in the Sun’s atmosphere before they could reach the Earth.

The Moon, after all, is so close to Earth that it takes only 3 days to reach it, as compared with the 7 weeks it took Columbus to cross the Atlantic Ocean. In reaching the Moon, we have made only the most microscopic dent in the true vastness of space. Indeed, we have not really left Earth, since the Moon is as much a slave to Earth’s gravitational influence as an apple on a tree—something Isaac Newton perceived three centuries ago. To be sure, there are small bodies that occasionally come to within a few million kilometers of the Earth, 10 to 50 times the distance of the Moon—an occasional asteroid or comet. The nearest sizable body other than the Moon, however, is the planet Venus. Even when Venus is at its closest to Earth, it is 40 million kilometers (25 million miles) away in a straight line, and is 105 times the distance of the Moon.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

Release from ceaseless labor, provided by science and technology, is for them a means and not an end. The Prophets of Progress: Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Comte The empiricism of Bacon (that is, his belief in the significance of experience in the acquisition of knowledge)—along with the The European Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics 55 scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton, the rationalism of Rene Descartes, and the circulation of many other intellectual currents— fostered a belief in “natural law,” a confidence in human reason, and a faith in progress. Together these fed into the Enlightenment. Two works by Condorcet, a leading Enlightenment philosopher, broke radically with the notion of utopia as a means of contemplating and worshipping God and with many other characteristics of previous utopias.

Meanwhile, rivals to the Kindle have inevitably come about, above all the Apple iPad, released in 2010. This tablet computer offers not only books and periodicals but also games, movies, music, and the Internet. Its origins can be traced back to Apple’s first tablet computer, the Newton Message Pad of 1993 (discontinued in 1998), named, of course, after Isaac Newton. Like Apple’s extremely popular iPhone and iPod Touch, the iPad uses a multi-touch finger-sensitive touchscreen—a vast improvement over the pressure-triggered stylus used in previous tablet computers. Studies of human interaction with these devices indicate that touchscreens have become integral components of our daily lives much sooner than other “technological behaviors” because they The Resurgence of Utopianism 219 are “so natural, intimate, and intuitive.”


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

When they meet, their styles mix and create a quadratic speedup of creativity. Yin and yang crystallized. The villain they’re fighting is inertia. The status quo. They find scientists to create companies to solve important world problems. But it’s hard. Capitalism fights back. One might say they are up against Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion, which says the bigger the mess, the easier it is to just keep going the same way we’ve always done it. Unexpectedly, over the course of the two years, a classic Hollywood role reversal transforms them both. Arvind learns to think slower to build bigger. Po learns to act faster to see further.

And while maybe Inertia wouldn’t make the best Bond film after all, it is the villain we fight day after day. The Turow coal mine is just one of many heists that illustrate the role that Inertia plays in our real world. The only explanation for increasing coal production in the year 2019, with the climate crisis in full swing, is Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion. The bigger the mess, the easier it is to just keep going the same way we’ve always done it. And the Turow mine is a big mess. I follow the road several miles around the coal pit to visit the town of Bogatynia, which is nestled right up against the mine’s fifteen-foot concrete wall.


pages: 1,773 words: 486,685

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, friendly fire, Google Earth, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mercator projection, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, South China Sea, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Nehemiah Wallington, a London craftsman who heard (and recorded) this exhortation, rejoiced that ‘by God's mercy I practice it already’, and between 1637 and 1654 he filled eight volumes with his nightly ‘introspections’ on the public and private events that, he believed, reflected ‘God's little mercies’ towards him and those who shared his faith. In 1660 Samuel Pepys began his celebrated Diary as a spiritual journal and balance sheet, while at Whitsunday 1662, Isaac Newton (then a 19-year-old student at Cambridge) compiled a list of the 49 sins he could remember committing to that date – most of them involved disrespecting the Sabbath in some way, and beating people. (Interestingly, both Pepys and Newton compiled his record in shorthand, no doubt ‘to conceal thoughts that he wished to set down for his own edification alone’.)22 A generation later, the Reverend Gervase Disney saw no need for concealment, noting in his diary in longhand the ‘mercies’ and misfortunes of each day.

The last (and most popular) work written by Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, contained a chapter on telepathy, wart-charming and witchcraft; William Harvey carried out ‘experiments’ to see whether or not those who claimed to be witches had supernumerary nipples or ‘familiars’ who performed supernatural tricks; while Robert Boyle sponsored a treatise to prove the existence of witchcraft (like Bacon, the last book he wrote examined the supernatural). Even Isaac Newton, knighted by the queen of England for his services to science, bought many books on magic, conducted alchemical experiments, and calculated from the Book of Daniel that the world ‘will end A.C. [AD] 2060. It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.’67 The appearance of two comets in 1664–5 spawned well over 100 publications, most of them filled with dire predictions of war, plague, famine, drought, gales, floods, the death of princes, the downfall of governments, and perhaps the end of the world.

It was only because ‘we that live in America know but little of the great motions of Europe, much less in Africa and Asia, until a long time afterwards’ that news of yet more catastrophic consequences had not reached Boston.71 Exactly half a century before, Descartes had expressed the hope that someone would publish in a single book all ‘the observations of comets, with a table of the paths of each one’. He predicted that ‘such a work would be of greater public utility than it might seem at first sight’, but (he continued with a sigh) ‘I have no hope that anyone will do it’ because ‘I think it is a skill beyond the reach of the human mind’. Isaac Newton took up this challenge in the 1680s, carefully copying into his notebooks the descriptions of comets that he found in Aristotle, medieval chronicles and more modern accounts, as well as the observations made by his contemporaries – not only Edmond Halley (who travelled to several European observatories to check their records) and John Flamsteed (the astronomer royal) but also the Jesuit Valentin Stansel from Brazil, the Harvard astronomer Thomas Brattle and his former schoolmate Arthur Storer, now a planter slave-owner in Calvert County, Maryland, who transmitted outstanding observations of the 1682 comet.


pages: 113 words: 36,039

The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla

Berlin Wall, Charlie Hebdo massacre, classic study, coherent worldview, creative destruction, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, liberation theology, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, urban planning, women in the workforce

The reactionary is the last remaining “other” consigned to the margins of respectable intellectual inquiry. We do not know him. The term “reaction” has an interesting history. It first entered the vocabulary of European political thought in the eighteenth century, when it was taken over from the scientific treatises of Isaac Newton. In his highly influential work The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu portrayed political life in dynamic terms as an endless series of actions and reactions. He recognized revolution as one such political act, but considered it rare and unforeseeable. One revolution might transform a monarchy into a democracy, another might turn a democracy into an oligarchy.


pages: 397 words: 109,631

Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking by Richard E. Nisbett

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, big-box store, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, endowment effect, experimental subject, feminist movement, fixed income, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Henri Poincaré, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Shai Danziger, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, William of Occam, Yitang Zhang, Zipcar

KISS and Tell We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible. —Claudius Ptolemy It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer. —William of Occam To the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes. —Isaac Newton Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities. —Bertrand Russell What counts as knowledge, and what qualifies as an explanation, are two of the main questions discussed in this book. They are also central concerns for philosophers of science.

What defense is possible against such nihilism? What can be said to people who assert that “reality” is mere socially constructed fiction? Paradigm Shifts Five years after Lord Kelvin’s pronouncement about the boring future of physics, Einstein published his paper on special relativity. Relativity theory literally replaced Isaac Newton’s mechanics—the laws describing motion and force that had stood unchallenged for two centuries. Einstein’s theory was not a mere new development in physics. It heralded a new physics. Fifty years after Einstein’s paper was published, the philosopher and sociologist of science Thomas Kuhn shook the scientific community by announcing in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science doesn’t always consist of an earnest slog through theory followed by collection of data followed by adjustment of theory.


pages: 442 words: 110,704

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Miss Farrar dutifully introduced Mrs. Fleming to the plates of stellar spectra, and taught her how to measure the hordes of tiny lines. Mrs. Fleming could have taught Miss Farrar a thing or two about marriage and childbirth, but on the subject of the spectrum she had everything to learn. • • • THE YOUNG ISAAC NEWTON coined the word spectrum in 1666, to describe the rainbow colors that arose like ghostly apparitions when daylight passed through cut glass or crystal. Although his contemporaries thought glass corrupted the purity of light by imparting color to it, Newton held that colors belonged to light itself.

Those stars heralded the coming of distance markers in the farther reaches of space. As soon as astronomers learned the key to the stellar code—the degree of brightness linked to each period—they could determine the stellar magnitudes by watching a clock, then leap the interstellar distances on the wings of Isaac Newton’s inverse square law: a variable only one-quarter as bright as another of the same period must lie twice as far away. Ejnar Hertzsprung in Denmark seized on Miss Leavitt’s period-luminosity relation. He, too, had been drawing graphs, plotting one stellar characteristic against another to test their interdependence.


pages: 398 words: 111,333

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham by Joe Carlen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business intelligence, discounted cash flows, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, full employment, index card, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, laissez-faire capitalism, margin call, means of production, Norman Mailer, oil shock, post-industrial society, price anchoring, price stability, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, the scientific method, Vanguard fund, young professional

Considering that it wasn't until the early 1940s when such conditions were treated with penicillin, a diagnosis of bacterial meningitis was usually a death sentence for children in the 1920s. (To illustrate, Boston Children's Hospital data from that decade pertaining to two forms of bacterial meningitis reveal that the mortality rate was 98.7 percent for one and 100 percent for the other.30) Tragically, not only did Isaac Newton Graham pass away just days before his ninth birthday, but, as the infection consumed and debilitated him in progressive stages, the last weeks of his life were an unspeakable horror for his parents. As Graham wrote in his memoirs, “Many painful incidents connected with Newton's illness and death are engraved on my memory, but I don't have the courage to recount them—for which the reader may indeed be grateful.”31 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the Graham family burial plot north of New York City is the fact that Graham himself is not buried next to his mother, one of his brothers, or his second son, Newton II (who, like the first Newton, passed on long before his father did).

According to the CFA Institute (the current incarnation of the federation), the award is presented to “those individuals who have made outstanding contributions of such significance as to change the direction of the [financial-analyst] profession and to raise it to higher standards of accomplishment.”42 A QUIET EXIT Almost two years to the day after his acclaimed “Renaissance of Value” address, Graham died peacefully in his sleep on September 21, 1976, at Malou's home in Aix-en-Provence. According to the Hamburgers, a death mask was made of Graham's face (presumably kept by Malou) before he was cremated. Graham's remains were sent back to America, where they were buried beside his “sweetest, bravest, most beloved” Isaac Newton Graham (or Newton I) in a Jewish cemetery north of New York City. (Newton II is interred in the Graham family plot in the same cemetery, as are Graham's brothers, mother, and various other relatives.) On October 10 of that year, Irving Kahn organized a memorial service for Graham at Columbia University, a place of immense significance in Graham's life.


pages: 361 words: 110,905

Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the Moon by Robert Kurson

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, built by the lowest bidder, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

Anders’s instinct was to find a camera and photograph the alien wonder, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away as it rose higher and then, about eighteen inches from his chest, split like the atoms he’d seen in science films, one wobbling part headed this way, the other wobbling in the perfect opposite direction. Anders thought, That’s Isaac Newton. That’s conservation of momentum. Now one of the pieces was heading toward Lovell, who could do no more than watch it, eyes narrowing as it hit him in the chest and spread like an uncooked egg against the white cloth of his coveralls. Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders’s troubles were only starting.

“You can’t beat a deal like that,” Anders replied. “How was Christmas at your house today?” “Early and busy as usual,” Collins said. “I told Michael you guys are up there, and he said, ‘Who’s driving?’ ” Michael was Collins’s five-year-old son. “That’s a good question,” Anders replied. “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.” Collins informed the crew that Borman’s family was at Mission Control. Susan did not want to distract her husband; instead, she and her boys, and Frank’s parents, just beamed their grins to Collins. “You’ve got a whole row of smiling faces in the back room, Frank,” he said.


pages: 316 words: 106,321

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening by John Elder Robison

Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, cognitive dissonance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Minecraft, mirror neurons, neurotypical, placebo effect, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

Maybe we’ve just got the gift of harnessing it in a particular way. “Do you think my ability to visualize musical waves is like the calendar-calculating ability some other autistic people have?” I asked Alvaro. “I don’t know,” he answered. “We don’t know how that works either, so it’s impossible to tell if they are the same or related.” Consider Isaac Newton, widely acclaimed as the inventor of calculus. Several recent articles suggest that he was autistic, as they point to signs of autism in accounts of his behaviour. We can’t ever know that for sure, but I had a flash of insight into how he perhaps “invented” calculus. Maybe he saw waves in his head, like I do.

As Howard Gardner first wrote decades ago in Multiple Intelligences, there are a variety of distinct intellectual capacities and orientations that contribute to our understanding of ourselves and our place in society. Sometimes, a touch of disability is what makes us great. Consider a few historical figures who were touched by autism, serious eccentricity, or some other disability in addition to their well-recognized gifts: Leonardo da Vinci Michelangelo Ludwig van Beethoven Isaac Newton Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Albert Einstein Today, we might add to the list folks like Bill Gates and Dan Aykroyd.* Where would we be if we’d made those people “normal” in childhood? As Temple Grandin says, “We’d be living in caves and using our social skills to tell each other jokes by firelight.”


pages: 376 words: 109,092

Paper Promises by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, fear of failure, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, paradox of thrift, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, tulip mania, value at risk, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

The system developed in a higgledy-piggledy fashion with different countries adopting the metal at different times; it was not set up by some eighteenth-century equivalent of the United Nations. Indeed, you could argue that, like the British Empire, the gold standard was a result of a ‘fit of absent-mindedness’. In Britain, the system came about thanks to a decision by Sir Isaac Newton who, as master of the Royal Mint, was in charge of the nation’s currency. Both gold and silver were in circulation at the time and a conversion rate had to be set between the two. In 1717, the great physicist set the conversion rate at a level that seemed to undervalue silver. Gresham’s Law duly kicked in.

Buyers do not believe prices are justified but think they will find a gullible buyer willing to pay even more. They buy apartments sight unseen and purchase Internet stocks with no dividends or even revenues. Investors who take part in such bubbles will usually feel much more sophisticated than the naïve fools who fall for pyramid schemes, but they are making a similar mistake. Even Isaac Newton lost money in the South Sea bubble of the early eighteenth century, declaring afterwards, ‘I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’ In the long run, the value of an asset must be linked to the income that can be generated from it (rent in the case of property, dividends in the case of shares).


pages: 338 words: 106,936

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Even as Goldman’s triage saved the day, however, explanations were difficult to come by. The fund managers went about their business, nervously hoping that the week from hell had been some strange fluke, a squall that had passed. Many recalled a quote from a much earlier physicist. After losing his hat in a market collapse in seventeenth-century England, Isaac Newton despaired: “I can calculate the movements of stars, but not the madness of men.” The quant funds limped their way to the end of the year, hit again in November and December by ghosts of the August disaster. Some, but not all, managed to recover their losses by the end of the year. On average, hedge funds returned about 10% in 2007 — less than many other, apparently less sophisticated investments.

.”: This history of the 2007 quant crisis, including numbers cited below, comes from Patterson (2010), from news articles from August/September 2007 (Patterson and Raghavan 2007; Lahart 2007; Nocera 2007; Ahrens 2007), as well as from academic work on the topic (Gorton 2010; Khandani and Lo 2011). “Isaac Newton despaired . . .”: While it is known that Newton suffered some losses in the South Seas bubble, this quote is sometimes disputed. The attribution seems to originate with Spence (1820, p. 368). “On average . . .”: These numbers come from Sourd (2008). The Medallion returns are from Willoughby (2008).


pages: 465 words: 103,303

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

I wondered how many of them were going from the stadium with its third-hand smoke to the urologist for a prostate test. I had picked the location because it was near Dana-Farber, where I had an appointment to interview Franziska Michor, who had recently been chosen as one of “the best and brightest” by Esquire magazine. She was described as “the Isaac Newton of biology.” Michor had a PhD from Harvard in evolutionary biology and her thesis was titled “Evolutionary Dynamics of Cancer.” After all the talks about translational science, what I expected to learn about now was the most theoretical of research, vital to understanding the phenomenon of cancer but many stories removed from the clinic.

Urologists offer free tickets: The examples are from Gary Schwitzer, “Cheerleading, Shibboleths and Uncertainty,” a presentation on April 23, 2012, Science Writing in the Age of Denial, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI. The urinal example was provided to Schwitzer by Ivan Oransky, the executive editor of Reuters Health. 46. one of “the best and brightest”: Tom Junod, “Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology,” Esquire, November 20, 2007. [http://www.esquire.com/features/michor1207] 47. uncovered some of the early clues: See, for example, J. C. Fisher, “Multiple-Mutation Theory of Carcinogenesis,” Nature 181 (March 1, 1958): 651–52 [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v181/n4609/abs/181651b0.html]; P.


pages: 407 words: 104,622

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, financial engineering, Flash crash, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, illegal immigration, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Monty Hall problem, More Guns, Less Crime, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, off-the-grid, p-value, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Two Sigma

Simons bought a book on the subject and took it home for the summer, reading and thinking for hours at a time. Finally, it clicked. Simons aced subsequent algebra classes. Though he received a D in an upper-level calculus course in his sophomore year, the professor allowed him to enroll in the next level’s class, which discussed Stokes’ theorem, a generalization of Isaac Newton’s fundamental theorem of calculus that relates line integrals to surface integrals in three dimensions. The young man was fascinated—a theorem involving calculus, algebra, and geometry seemed to produce simple, unexpected harmony. Simons did so well in the class that students came to him seeking help.

It didn’t feel like much of a setback, because Simons was finally making progress in his research on minimal varieties, the subfield of differential geometry that had long captivated him. Differential equations—which are used in physics, biology, finance, sociology, and many other fields—describe the derivatives of mathematical quantities, or their relative rates of change. Isaac Newton’s famous physics equation—the net force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration—is a differential equation because acceleration is a second derivative with respect to time. Equations involving derivatives with respect to time and space are examples of partial differential equations and can be used to describe elasticity, heat, and sound, among other things.


pages: 378 words: 107,957

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

But even if the majority view is in most respects correct, and the view being censored mostly wrong, permitting open debate is still crucial for allowing the majority view to be refined and improved. Mill’s second harm is more subtle, but no less important, and to illustrate it he takes an example from a sphere that is ordinarily less contentious than politics or religion: namely, science. Isaac Newton founded modern physics in 1687, writing the equations of what came to be called Newtonian mechanics and which are nowadays taught in every freshman physics course. Over the next century, scientists accumulated overwhelming evidence, from both terrestrial and astronomical observations, that Newtonian physics was correct (even to the point of predicting accurately, in 1846, the existence and precise location of the hitherto-unknown planet Neptune).

Dowd, The Man Question: Male Subordination and Privilege (New York University Press, 2016). 51.Eric Anderson, Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 2012). 52.This idea is often attributed to the feminist and postcolonial scholar Sandra Harding’s book Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996). Harding was perhaps most influential for developing the idea of “strong objectivity” in standpoint theory and is perhaps most famous for referring to Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica as a “rape manual” in her 1986 book, The Science Question in Feminism, which she later claimed to have regretted writing. Sandra G. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 53.Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress (Penguin Books, 2019). 54.Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle, “Relationship of Gender Differences in Preferences to Economic Development and Gender Equality,” Science 362, no. 6412 (2018): eaas9899. 7 Disability and Fat Studies 1.This strange notation is relatively common in disciplines that use postmodern methods and means.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

How many more business leaders, politicians and others in positions of power have excuses from economic imperialists being whispered in their ears? 7 Everyone Has a Price In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor, an aristocratic Philadelphian, published The Principles of Scientific Management. Later dubbed ‘the Isaac Newton of the science of work’ by 1970s management guru Peter Drucker, Taylor was arguably the world’s first management consultant. His book paved the way for what are now mainstream management techniques to improve worker efficiency. But Taylorism, as it became known, had a shaky start. The Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts was a US Army-run facility used mainly as a factory for manufacturing artillery-gun carriages.

Similarly, while Apple were lauded and rewarded for introducing a computer mouse to accompany their Mac desktop in 1984, it was Douglas Engelbart and Bill English who, with funding from the US Air Force, had invented the computer mouse back in the early 1960s.fn1 When, in popular mythology, a single individual is strongly associated with a new product, invention or breakthrough, it is exactly that – a myth. Trying to tease out one person’s contributions is a hopeless task. Professions of intellectual modesty tend to be more accurate than hero myths, a point well understood by one genius who changed the world. As Isaac Newton wrote to his rival Robert Hooke: ‘You have added much several ways … If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.’ Moving from the individual perspective to the whole economy, the point stands. Attempts to trace the source of economic growth find that most of it is due neither to increases in labour productivity nor to investment.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

As Buffett explained, the US cannot “have a debt crisis of any kind as long as we keep issuing our notes in our own currency.”10 Buffett also understood that the Greek debt crisis happened because “Greece lost the power to print their money. If they could print drachmas, they would have other problems, but they would not have a debt problem.”11 Still, isn’t there some limit? As Isaac Newton taught us, “what goes up must come down.” Surely the debt can’t go on rising forever. If the government never pays it down, then it has to keep finding new buyers for its bonds.12 It seems risky. As Margaret Thatcher famously quipped, the problem is that “eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

The equation looks like this: Government financial balance + Nongovernment financial balance = Zero Because it’s not a theory, it doesn’t rest on any set of assumptions that might not hold in the real world. It’s an ironclad accounting identity that will always produce an accurate statement of fact. You can think of it as a twist on Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, which states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the Godley model, we can see that for every deficit that exists in one part of the economy, there is an equal and opposite surplus in some other part. There’s just no way around it. If one part of the economy is paying out more dollars than it’s receiving, the other part must be receiving exactly that many dollars.


pages: 446 words: 109,157

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Over time, as evidence and arguments accumulate, scientists figure out how to resolve impasses, or at least bypass them for the time being. Before Hutton, arguments about geology had surfaced many interesting notions but made little progress. That was not because thinkers were stupid or dogmatic; it was because they lacked systematic ways to compile and test ideas and then build upon and reconcile those ideas. Isaac Newton was a genius, by any measure. But the world had seen geniuses before. And not all of Newton’s insights were sound; far from being like a modern physicist, he was an alchemist and a mystic. What empowered Newton’s genius? The world of alchemists, as the philosopher of science Noretta Koertge has noted, was “loose knit and closeted.”14 Their findings (such as they were) were held close and shared only with a few adepts, and so could not be falsified or developed.

But as an example of setting up professional bodies to develop standards and bring order from chaos, it resembled the establishment of the Royal Society, the American Medical Association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and countless others. In other words, Facebook was doing what the reality-based community has been doing since Isaac Newton’s day. Another example of institutionalizing truth-friendliness online was less prominent but might turn out to be more important. It had to do with the organizing question of the Constitution of Knowledge: what is a fact, and who decides? When I was trained as a journalist in the 1980s, the standard practice was to seek multiple points of view about every controversy in an effort to cover both sides (or all sides) of the story.


The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel

Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, British Empire, computer age, Copley Medal, creative destruction, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, the market place, upwardly mobile

And yet, somehow, out of such a place, from a poor family, came a mathematician so alive with genius that the English had practically hand-delivered him to Cambridge, there to share his gifts with the scholars of Trinity College and learn whatever they could teach him. Among the colleges of Cambridge University, Trinity was the largest, with the most lustrous heritage, home to kings, poets, geniuses. Isaac Newton himself had studied there; since 1755, his marble likeness, holding the prism he’d used to explore the polychromatic nature of light, stood in its chapel. Lord Byron had gone to Trinity. So had Tennyson, Thackeray, and Fitzgerald. So had the historian Macaulay, and the physicist Rutherford, and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Jacob Bernoulli was among the first in a line of eminent seventeenth-and eighteenth-century mathematicians derived from a merchant family that had fled anti-Protestant massacres in Antwerp and settled in Switzerland. He helped extend calculus, the powerful set of mathematical tools for dealing with continuously varying quantities, beyond the point that Germany’s Gottfried von Leibniz, along with England’s Sir Isaac Newton, had taken it two decades before. Along the way, he derived the numbers that have since borne his name. Bernoulli numbers are intimately tied to the quantity e which, like π, is a number whose special properties make it ubiquitous in mathematics. It is defined as Now, when a particular algebraic expression involving e is expressed as an infinite series, the coefficients of each term turn out to have special significance.

“But a great deal that was important was going on outside the garden: it was there that the twentieth-century world was being made”—in mathematics, he might have added, as elsewhere. Since the seventeenth century, Britain had stood, mathematically, with its back toward Europe, scarcely deigning to glance over its shoulder at it. Back then, Isaac Newton and the German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had each, more or less independently, discovered calculus. Controversy over who deserved the credit erupted even while both men lived, then mushroomed after their deaths, with mathematicians in England and on the Continent each championing their compatriots.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

They also have the computing power to crunch vast amounts of data in a way that even thirty years ago would have seemed like fantasy. Scientific inquiry is cumulative, with inventors building on each other’s work. Unlike today, knowledge used to diffuse slowly. In the 1600s, scholars such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke shared their scientific discoveries in letters that took weeks or even months to reach their destination. Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric system, which correctly placed Earth in the orbit of the sun, was developed during the first decade of the sixteenth century.

He was therefore mortified to find that someone else with no scientific education claimed to have invented an equally effective safety lamp at the same time as, or perhaps even before, Davy’s innovation. That other innovator was none other than George Stephenson. Davy, though of humble origin, was very much a product of the Scientific Revolution, standing on the shoulders of Robert Boyle (1627‒1691), Robert Hooke (1635‒1703), and Isaac Newton (1643‒1727), all of whom had been leading lights in the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, founded in November 1660. Davy was a pioneer in the study of the properties of gases, including nitrous oxide. He had also demonstrated how batteries could be used to generate an electric arc, which was a crucial step toward understanding the properties of electricity and artificial lighting.

It is true that in the late sixteenth century, most of the country shifted from Catholicism to Protestantism. In the early 1600s, Galileo’s astronomical work was hindered by Catholic dogma and by an Italian church hierarchy that was determined to preserve its monopoly on interpreting scripture. Working at the far end of the same century, Isaac Newton and his English contemporaries still had to step carefully when it came to religion, even if they did not face the same personal dangers or blockages imposed by the remnants of medieval theocracies. However, there were plenty of other European countries that turned Protestant without adopting industrial technologies early, including Scandinavia, Germany, and what became the Czech Republic.


pages: 140 words: 37,355

Locke: A Very Short Introduction by John Dunn

Isaac Newton, means of production, public intellectual

But it is clear, too, that it was a deeply personal impact. In the course of his life Locke had many close friends and very many more friends who, if less close, were also men and women of great power or wealth or very high intelligence: political grandees like Pembroke and Somers, scientists like Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton, theologians like Limborch. However much he liked and respected Locke as a man, Shaftesbury was, of course, very much master as well as friend. But lop-sided though their friendship plainly was, it did not lack emotional energy; and over those 16 years it is clear that his great patron made Locke into a very different man. 3.


pages: 124 words: 36,360

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

< br > Once inside the building proper, I meet Deb McGregor from the press department—a glamorous person from the school of Money-penny whose rock-hard fist it probably was that knocked you out cold in Jakarta. Our schedule is tight. Deb takes me past a set of windows overlooking a courtyard area to the west, where an apple tree is dozing through the winter. She tells me the tree was grown from a cutting taken from Sir Isaac Newton’s apple orchard. Its variety is the Pride of Kent. So this New Jersey tree is a descendant of the apple tree that dropped the apple that Newton saw falling, triggering the thoughts that became his theory of gravity. Newton dealt with planets and solar systems. What would he have made of the past two hundred years?


pages: 147 words: 39,910

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

From gravity to celestial motion, Newtonian physics was a wide-ranging map. _ Would you be able to use this map to get to Egypt? Then in 1905 Albert Einstein, with his theory of Special Relativity, changed our understanding of the universe in a huge way. He replaced the understanding handed down by Isaac Newton hundreds of years earlier. He created a new map. Newtonian physics is still a very useful model. One can use it very reliably to predict the movement of objects large and small, with some limitations as pointed out by Einstein. And, on the flip side, Einstein’s physics are still not totally complete: With every year that goes by, physicists become increasingly frustrated with their inability to tie it into small-scale quantum physics.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

How best to describe a planet’s orbit? As an ellipse, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) discovered. He derived three laws of planetary motion that made new almanacs accurate to within two-tenths of a degree.* And why, if the Earth really were spinning through space, could no one feel it? Inertia, answered Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727)—and the answer became the first of his Three Laws of Motion. The impact of Copernicus’s work extended far beyond the time horizon of the Renaissance and far beyond astronomy. He laid a fresh foundation atop which all modern physics was built. When genius became general We label this rare class of achievement “genius,” and during the Renaissance, it became startlingly common.

But in the subatomic realm of electrons, quarks and gluons, nature isn’t like that at all. An electron doesn’t occupy a single place. Rather, it occupies all possible places simultaneously—until we look at it, at which moment it does settle in a single place. Where we find it in that moment isn’t set by Isaac Newton’s laws of cause and effect, but rather by laws of probability. Most of the time it’s where Newton would expect, but sometimes it’s not. This weird indeterminacy is completely contrary to our experience and intuition. “God does not play dice,” Albert Einstein, a skeptic of quantum mechanics, famously declared (to which Niels Bohr, a believer, replied, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”).


pages: 374 words: 114,600

The Quants by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Haight Ashbury, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, index fund, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, job automation, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kickstarter, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Mercer, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Sergey Aleynikov, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Predators' Ball, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, éminence grise

Nearly $2 million in proceeds would go to support a math program for New York City’s public schools—a fitting beneficiary, as the players were Wall Street’s glorified mathletes. Muller, Asness, Griffin, and Weinstein were all quants. Math was the very air they breathed. Even the custom-made poker chips at the event were stamped with the names of mathematical river gods such as Isaac Newton. The potent combination of their mathematical brilliance, feverishly competitive natures, and out-on-the-edge gambling instincts led to an almost fanatical obsession with poker—the odds, the looping mental games, the bluffing (if I bet this much, he’ll think that I think that he thinks …). Asness didn’t take the game as seriously as Muller, Weinstein, and Chris did.

Amazingly, not one of the quants, despite their chart-topping IQs, their walls of degrees, their impressive Ph.D.’s, their billions of wealth earned by anticipating every bob and weave the market threw their way, their decades studying every statistical quirk of the market under the sun, saw the train wreck coming. How could they have missed it? What went wrong? A hint to the answer was captured centuries ago by a man whose name emblazoned the poker chips the quants wagered with that night: Isaac Newton. After losing £20,000 on a vast Ponzi scheme known as the South Sea Bubble in 1720, Newton observed: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” Just past 5:00 A.M. on a spring Saturday in 1961, the sun was about to dawn on a small, ratty casino in Reno, Nevada.


pages: 416 words: 118,592

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Government officials tried in vain to restore confidence, and a complete collapse of the public credit was barely averted. Similarly, the price of Mississippi Company shares fell to a pittance as the public realized that an excess of paper currency creates no real wealth, only inflation. Big losers in the South Sea Bubble included Isaac Newton, who exclaimed, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” So much for castles in the air. To protect the public from further abuses, Parliament passed the Bubble Act, which forbade the issuing of stock certificates by companies. For more than a century, until the act was repealed in 1825, there were relatively few share certificates in the British market.

And rental income had been rising far more slowly than land values, indicating a falling rate of return on real estate. Finally, the low interest rates that had been underpinning the market had already begun to rise in 1989. Much to the distress of those speculators who had concluded that the fundamental laws of financial gravity were not applicable to Japan, Isaac Newton arrived there in 1990. Interestingly, it was the government itself that dropped the apple. The Bank of Japan (Japan’s Federal Reserve) saw the ugly specter of a general inflation stirring amid the borrowing frenzy and the liquidity boom underwriting the rise in land and stock prices. And so the central bank restricted credit and engineered a rise in interest rates.


pages: 484 words: 120,507

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

In the High Middle Ages, when even little birds were said to sing “in their own Latin,” Latin was rather the cliché for a universal language, while lingua franca was a striking new turn of phrase. Human life has been moving noticeably faster for some centuries now, opening up possibilities that we know to be unprecedented. We have a sense, absent in the eras of Caesar, Christ, or Isaac Newton, that something really is new under the sun, that inventions are taken up and change ways of life, that innovations accumulate and move life as it is lived all over our planet into quite different pathways. To quote just one example—striking because its elemental significance is already almost forgotten— consider the technology of horsepower.

His protests were in vain, of course.32 This decline of Latin, like the retreat of Sanskrit before the advance of courtly Persian in India, is a classic example of the loss of a lingua-franca through the diminishing influence of the elite that had spoken it. But in this case the motive was social and intellectual, rather than the long-term effect of an alien invasion. No one ever abolished Latin in early modern Europe; even in 1687 Sir Isaac Newton still thought it advisable to have his Principia published in it. But he was the last major British scientist or philos opher to do so. In a time of great politi cal and intellectual change, Latin had remained firmly associated with tradition and the past. Although its use fell away at different speeds in different places, and in different subjects (German mathematicians such as Gauss, for example, were still using Latin until the mid-nineteenth century), it nowhere survived to develop, or even transmit, the radical new ideas that transformed all the natural and life sciences in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.


Discover Great Britain by Lonely Planet

British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, G4S, gentrification, global village, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, New Urbanism, Stephen Hawking

His left hand holds a golden orb, while his right grips not the original sceptre but a table leg, put there by student pranksters and never replaced. As you enter the Great Court , scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 32 Nobel Prize winners. Corpus Christi College College Offline map Google map (www.corpus.cam.ac.uk; King’s Pde; admission £2) Entry to this illustrious college is via the so-called New Court, which dates back a mere 200 years.

Its architect was paid a grand total of 15p for his design and, feeling aggrieved at such a measly fee, it’s said he cut a chunk out of one of the balls adorning the balustrade so the bridge would never be complete. Most curious of all is the flimsy-looking wooden construction joining the two halves of Queen’s College known as the Mathematical Bridge , first built in 1749. Despite what unscrupulous guides may tell you, it wasn’t the handiwork of Sir Isaac Newton (he died in 1727), originally built without nails, or taken apart by students who then couldn’t figure how to put it back together. Tours City Sightseeing Bus Tour (www.city-sightseeing.com; adult/child £13/7; every 20min 10am-4.40pm) Hop-on/hop-off bus tours. Riverboat Georgina Boating Offline map Google map ( 01223-307694; www.georgina.co.uk) One-/two-hour cruises (£6/12) with the option of including lunch or a cream tea.


pages: 419 words: 115,170

The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney

crowdsourcing, Isaac Newton, post-work

There’s no force in the universe, said his teacher (Mr O’Reilly, whose designer spectacles were betrayed by a face mired in 1985), which doesn’t have an opposing force to balance it. Action and reaction, push and pull. That’s the Law, now, kids. Sir Isaac Newton came up with that one. That’s knowledge that came before you and so defines your lives without as much as a by-your-leave. Shit happens, then more shit happens. Ah, but shit happens right up to the point where it’s happening in the face of someone who doesn’t want to see it. That was the truth and the truth had fuck all respect for Sir Isaac Newton and his axioms. So here, Ryan realised, was a case of the pig-headedness of people versus the Laws of Physics, and while flesh and bones have to obey the push and pull of the universe the real meat of men, their thoughts and actions and utter arrogance, ignores the processes the universe has run on for aeons.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

There are a host of natural laws that can help you understand the changes unfolding around you as well as how to adapt to them and even shape them. This chapter highlights many of these natural super models that can help you be more adaptive and manage change. DON’T FIGHT NATURE At some point you have likely heard someone paraphrase Isaac Newton’s first law of motion, often referred to as the law of inertia: “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” Inertia is a physical object’s resistance to changing its current state of motion.

The why now model also explains why there are often concurrent academic discoveries across the world and similar startups independently emerging simultaneously. Wikipedia has a huge list of instances like these, and there is a name for the concept: simultaneous invention, or multiple discovery. Modern calculus was independently formulated around the same time in the seventeenth century by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz. And as we mentioned in Chapter 4, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace jointly published the theory of natural selection after independent discovery. The underlying conditions were ripe for these ideas, and often more than one person will act on the same secret once they have determined the time is right to pursue the opportunity.


pages: 377 words: 115,122

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, emotional labour, game design, hive mind, index card, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, popular electronics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, telemarketer, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, twin studies, Walter Mischel, web application, white flight

* Answer key: exercise: extroverts; commit adultery: extroverts; function well without sleep: introverts; learn from our mistakes: introverts; place big bets: extroverts; delay gratification: introverts; be a good leader: in some cases introverts, in other cases extroverts, depending on the type of leadership called for; ask “what if”: introverts. * Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats, Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, J. M. Barrie, George Orwell, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Charles Schulz, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, J. K. Rowling. * This is an informal quiz, not a scientifically validated personality test. The questions were formulated based on characteristics of introversion often accepted by contemporary researchers.

Morgan, “Perceptions of Intelligence in Leaderless Groups: The Dynamic Effects of Shyness and Acquaintance,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 72, no. 3 (1997): 581–91. 18. one informal study: Laurie Helgoe, Introvert Power: Why Your Inner Life Is Your Hidden Strength (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2008), 3–4. 19. the theory of gravity: Gale E. Christianson, Isaac Newton (Oxford University Press, Lives and Legacies Series, 2005). 20. the theory of relativity: Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 4, 12, 18, 2, 31, etc. 21. W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: Michael Fitzgerald, The Genesis of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2005), 69.


pages: 407 words: 114,478

The Four Pillars of Investing: Lessons for Building a Winning Portfolio by William J. Bernstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, behavioural economics, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, carried interest, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edmond Halley, equity premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the rule of 72, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

This, then, is the essence of a bubble: a brief period of rising prices and suspended disbelief, which, in turn, supplies large numbers of investors willing to invest in dubious enterprises at absurdly low discount rates and high prices. Bubbles streak across the investment heavens, leaving behind financial destruction and disillusionment, respecting neither intelligence nor social class. Probably the most famous dupe of the South Sea episode was none other than Sir Isaac Newton, who famously remarked, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” The Duke’s Failed Romance The first technological marvel that can be properly said to have transformed modern life was the development of large-scale canal transport. In 1758, the Duke of Bridgewater, heartbroken by an unsuccessful romance, concocted the radical notion of building a canal to bring coal from his mines to a group of textile mills 30 miles away.

PILLAR THREE The Psychology of Investing The Analyst’s Couch The biggest obstacle to your investment success is staring out at you from your mirror. Human nature overflows with behavioral traits that will rob you faster than an unlucky nighttime turn in Central Park. We discovered in Chapter 5 that raw brainpower alone is not sufficient for investment success, as demonstrated by Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most notable victims of the South Sea Bubble. We have no historical record of William Shakespeare’s investment returns, but I’m willing to bet that, given his keen eye for human foibles, his returns were far better than Sir Isaac’s. In Chapter 7, we identify the biggest culprits. I guarantee you’ll recognize most of these as the face in the looking glass.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

I was interested in Einstein long before I had any inkling that he might be on the autism spectrum. Why was I so attracted to him when I was in high school? I could sense he wasn’t like other people, and neither was I. Allowing Genius the Opportunity to Develop We have always been fascinated by pondering the nature of genius. We marvel at Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity, and Shakespeare’s poetry and plays. How did these towering achievements come into being? What cultural forces contributed? What individual abilities fuel innovation in arts and science? In my work, I have often observed what I refer to as “Grade A Bookworms.” These are top students who are often lacking in creativity and flexible problem-solving, and sometimes common sense.

“History of Twins.” Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, 1875: 155–73. Gardner, H. Creating Minds. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Gigliotti, J. Who Is Stevie Wonder? New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 2016. “The Girl Who Asked Questions.” Economist, February 29, 2020, 72. Gleick, J. Isaac Newton. New York: Vintage, 2004. Goldberg, E. Creativity: The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Grandin, T. Thinking in Pictures. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Expanded edition. New York: Vintage, 2006. Grant, D. A., and E. Berg. “A Behavioral Analysis of Degree of Reinforcement and Ease of Shifting to New Responses in a Weigl-Type Card-Sorting Problem.”


pages: 297 words: 35,674

Slide:ology: the art and science of creating great presentations by Nancy Duarte

An Inconvenient Truth, fear of failure, Isaac Newton, Menlo Park, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, telepresence, web application, work culture

ome” akesm “j Vicki ins Watk Using Visual Elements: Background, Color, and Text 127 About the Color Wheel Understanding and using the color wheel helps you choose a harmonious palette. The color wheel helps you visualize the relationships that colors have to one another. Microsoft’s PowerPoint and Apple’s Keynote applications base their color wheels on the one that Sir Isaac Newton discovered. The wheel uses three primary colors, red, yellow and blue, spaced evenly apart. Blending those colors creates the full color wheel, as shown on the right-hand page. Each pie slice of the wheel has tints and shades of a single hue (true color). The hue on this wheel is four rings out from the center.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

If that were true, one might think that God still had the choice of creating a variety of different worlds, each corresponding to a different set of initial conditions, but Descartes also denied this. No matter what the arrangement of matter at the beginning of the universe, he argued, over time a world identical to ours would evolve. Moreover, Descartes felt, once God set the world going, he left it entirely alone. A similar position (with some exceptions) was adopted by Isaac Newton (1643–1727). Newton was the person who won widespread acceptance of the modern concept of a scientific law with his three laws of motion and his law of gravity, which accounted for the orbits of the earth, moon, and planets, and explained phenomena such as the tides. The handful of equations he created, and the elaborate mathematical framework we have since derived from them, are still taught today, and employed whenever an architect designs a building, an engineer designs a car, or a physicist calculates how to aim a rocket meant to land on Mars.


pages: 485 words: 126,597

Paper: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, circular economy, clean water, computer age, Edward Snowden, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, lone genius, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, moveable type in China, paper trading, planned obsolescence, trade route, Vannevar Bush

“We cannot, however, approve of any mode of discovery without writing, and when that comes into more general use, we may have further hopes,” he predicted correctly. A generation later, Robert Boyle, founder of the Royal Society in London, introduced the use of a scientific methodology that would lay the foundation for modern chemistry. And another generation later, Isaac Newton, the first modern theoretical physicist, used mathematical calculation and physical observation to lay the foundation for both physics and calculus. He developed theories on gravity and the laws of motion, and built the first true telescope, from which he could observe his theories at work in space.

In 1724 he petitioned the New York Assembly for the right to start a paper mill with an exclusive monopoly in New York for fifteen years. This kind of arrangement was how paper mills had been started in England, and some in the assembly favored the idea. But the New York governor, William Burnet, an aristocratic intellectual who was tutored as a child by Isaac Newton, was a staunch believer in the economics of colonialism—that is, he believed colonies were supposed to enrich the merchants of the mother country, as stated in the Navigation Act of 1663. If Americans wanted paper, he believed, they should buy it from British papermakers, not make it themselves.


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

However, despite the best efforts of the church, such investigations were indeed pursued, and with ever more severe consequences. When Galileo died in 1642, a far more dangerous heretic was born. A man that explained the unexplainable, discovered the unknowable, and motivated a feeding frenzy on the forbidden tree of knowledge that would undermine the very foundations of man’s soul. For in 1687 Isaac Newton published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. This heretical work solved the ancient mystery of the motion of heavenly bodies. It did not merely describe the motion, it actually explained why heavenly bodies move as they do. Newton did this using the following two very simple formulas:f=ma f = G m1 m2 / d2 The first is the law of inertia, the second is the law of gravity.

There is certainly no known reason to believe that wet neurons are required to produce intelligent machines. Time and time again, processes that appear to be beyond our understanding have been understood using scientific methods. To the ancients, the movement of the planets could only be explained as “God’s will”, whereas Isaac Newton showed us that their paths and periods just followed a simple law of gravity. More recently, the great mystery of life itself has been solved, not by reference to undetectable aethers or other mystical properties, but in terms of well-defined principles of carbon chemistry undertaken on a huge scale, all orchestrated by DNA.


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

I have fond memories of playing with a clever Japanese toy called Denshi Burokku. It consisted of analog electronics embedded in plastic cubes that you could arrange and rearrange to build lie detectors and radios.16 By the seventh grade, I was programming an Apple II personal computer. My bookshelves were filled with biographies of Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers as well as titles such as How Things Work and Tell Me Why. One book that left a deep impression on me described Russian efforts to build a fusion reactor. When I was growing up in the 1970s, a series of energy crises caused long lines at gas stations and an adult obsession with turning off lights.

Before the Enlightenment, major civilizations came and went on all the continents except Antarctica. None of them, though, built anything like the rich intellectual edifice on which the modern world was constructed.61 History has its twists and turns, but you can draw a straight line from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the contemporary world. Isaac Newton and others paved a highway for science and technology with their explorations into the laws of motion and electromagnetism. Baruch Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the philosophical cornerstones of modern democracy. John Locke’s arguments for property rights and Adam Smith’s analysis of markets undergird contemporary capitalism.


pages: 482 words: 121,672

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Government officials tried in vain to restore confidence, and a complete collapse of the public credit was barely averted. Similarly, the price of Mississippi Company shares fell to a pittance as the public realized that an excess of paper currency creates no real wealth, only inflation. Big losers in the South Sea Bubble included Isaac Newton, who exclaimed, “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” So much for castles in the air. To protect the public from further abuses, Parliament passed the Bubble Act, which forbade the issuing of stock certificates by companies. For more than a century, until the act was repealed in 1825, there were relatively few share certificates in the British market.

And rental income had been rising far more slowly than land values, indicating a falling rate of return on real estate. Finally, the low interest rates that had been underpinning the market had already begun to rise in 1989. Much to the distress of those speculators who had concluded that the fundamental laws of financial gravity were not applicable to Japan, Isaac Newton arrived there in 1990. Interestingly, it was the government itself that dropped the apple. The Bank of Japan (Japan’s Federal Reserve) saw the ugly specter of a general inflation stirring amid the borrowing frenzy and the liquidity boom underwriting the rise in land and stock prices. And so the central bank restricted credit and engineered a rise in interest rates.


pages: 561 words: 120,899

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, full text search, government statistician, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, longitudinal study, machine readable, machine translation, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, p-value, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, prediction markets, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, speech recognition, statistical model, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, Teledyne, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

During his 40s, Bayes’ interests in mathematics and theology began to tightly intertwine. An Irish-Anglican bishop—George Berkeley, for whom the University of California’s flagship campus is named—published an inflammatory pamphlet attacking Dissenting mathematicians, calculus, abstract mathematics, the revered Isaac Newton, and all other “free-thinkers” and “infidel mathematicians” who believed that reason could illuminate any subject. Berkeley’s pamphlet was the most spectacular event in British mathematics during the 1700s. Leaping into the pamphlet wars again, Bayes published a piece defending and explaining Newton’s calculus.

And he compared three hypotheses about the orbits of 100 comets to confirm what he already knew: that the comets most probably originate within the sun’s sphere of influence. After the fall of Napoleon, France’s new king, Louis XVIII, bestowed the hereditary title of marquis on Laplace, the son of a village innkeeper. And on March 5, 1827, at the age of 78, Laplace died, almost exactly 100 years after his idol, Isaac Newton. Eulogies hailed Laplace as the Newton of France. He had brought modern science to students, governments, and the reading public and had developed probability into a formidable method for handling unknown and complex causes of natural phenomena. And in one small, relatively insignificant portion of his lifework he became the first to express and use what is now called Bayes’ rule.


pages: 456 words: 123,534

The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution by Charles R. Morris

air freight, American ideology, British Empire, business process, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, colonial exploitation, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, if you build it, they will come, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, lone genius, manufacturing employment, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, refrigerator car, Robert Gordon, scientific management, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, undersea cable

If the Greenwich time readings drifted by even very modest amounts, they would add up to disablingly large variations over the weeks or months of a typical sea voyage. Just as challenging, the clock would need to be utterly impervious to the extremities of a sailing-era sea voyage: the sharp temperature changes, the storm batterings, the salt everywhere. In 1721, no less an authority than Isaac Newton declared that it would be all but impossible for a solution to the longitude problem to come from the “Watchmakers.” The “Astronomical” solution, which Newton preferred, was at least as difficult. Sailors long ago learned to fix latitudes because the apparent path of the sun was so readily observed and easily measured.

Charles Babbage If there were a hall of fame of intelligent people, Charles Babbage (1791–1871) would surely have his own plaque. Born into a well-to-do family, he spent most of his career in academia and for a dozen years held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post graced by luminaries from Isaac Newton through Stephen Hawking.24 In Babbage’s day, all calculation-intensive sciences like astronomy were dependent on thick volumes of standard tables—logarithms, sines, and other functions—each incorporating decades of laborious construction. As a newly minted mathematician, Babbage realized that even the best tables were riddled with errors.


Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

The idea occurred to me while on a tour of the Cambridge Botanical Gardens given by their charismatic director. In his company, clouds of stories emanated from even the most unremarkable shrub. One plant, a large apple tree near the entrance, stood out. It grew, we were told, from a cutting taken from a four-hundred-year-old apple tree in the garden of Isaac Newton’s family home, Woolsthorpe Manor. It was the only apple tree that grew there and was old enough to have been around when Newton formulated his theory of universal gravitation. If any tree had dropped an apple that inspired Newton, it was this one. Having been grown from a cutting, the tree in front of us was, the director reminded us, a clone of the famous tree.

New Phytologist 220: 1012–30. Studerus E, Kometer M, Hasler F, Vollenweider FX. 2011. Acute, subacute and long-term subjective effects of psilocybin in healthy humans: a pooled analysis of experimental studies. Journal of Psychopharmacology 25: 1434–452. Stukeley W. 1752. Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life. Unpublished, available from website of the Royal Society: ttp.royalsociety.org/​ttp/​ttp.html?id=1807da00-909a-4abf-b9c1-0279a08e4bf2&type=book [accessed October 29, 2019]. Suarato G, Bertorelli R, Athanassiou A. 2018. Borrowing from nature: biopolymers and biocomposites as smart wound care materials.


England by David Else

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, colonial rule, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, country house hotel, Crossrail, David Attenborough, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, sceptred isle, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, unbiased observer, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Apart from the royal graves, keep an eye out for the many famous commoners interred here, especially in Poet’s Corner where you’ll find the resting places of Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Dr Johnson and Kipling as well as memorials to the other greats (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte etc). Elsewhere you’ll find the graves of Handel and Sir Isaac Newton. The octagonal Chapter House (10.30am-4pm) dates from the 1250s and was where the monks would meet for daily prayer before Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries. Used as a treasury and ‘Royal Wardrobe’, the cryptlike Pyx Chamber (10.30am-4pm) dates from about 1070. The neighbouring Abbey Museum (10.30am-4pm) has as its centrepiece death masks of generations of royalty.

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. Today the university remains one of the top three for research worldwide, and international academics have polled it as the top university in the world for science.

It’s a wonderful introduction to one of Cambridge’s most venerable colleges, and a reminder of who really rules the roost. As you enter the Great Court, scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 31 Nobel Prize winners. The square is also the scene of the run made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – 350m in 43 seconds (the time it takes the clock to strike 12).


pages: 961 words: 302,613

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

The plague began during the spring of 1665, creeping out of the slums of the city and spreading silently—except for the wailing of friends and relatives, before they themselves succumbed—across every district and neighborhood. By summer thousands of men, women, and children were dying each week. Those who could fled the city for the countryside in hopes of eluding the invisible destroyer. (Isaac Newton, sitting out the plague in Woolsthorpe, watched an apple fall from a tree and extrapolated its trajectory into a theory of universal gravitation.) Persons too poor to leave kept to their houses, fearing contact with carriers of the disease. Taverns, inns, and theaters were closed by decree of the frantic civic authorities; a curfew reinforced the popular desire to avoid unnecessary contact with anyone who might be a carrier.

Among these was Bernard Mandeville—“a most facetious entertaining companion,” in Franklin’s words—who had written The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices Public Benefits. This work outraged moralists and made Mandeville a minor hero among those who liked to tweak conventional conscience; not surprisingly, its author saw in Franklin a kindred spirit who might carry the fight forward. Another member of the circle was Henry Pemberton, a friend of Isaac Newton. Pemberton delighted Franklin by promising to introduce him to the great scientist; he disappointed Franklin by failing to fulfill his promise. Even as he gained a reputation as a philosophical wunderkind, Franklin made friends by his other gifts. One of his printing colleagues at Watts’s was a young man named Wygate, a lover of knowledge after Franklin’s heart and a bit of a linguist as well.

If you think any thing in my power whereby I can promote so useful an undertaking I will with much pleasure receive your instructions for that end.” This response encouraged Franklin, especially as it came from one as distinguished as Colden. A physician by training, Colden was surveyor general of New York, and a man almost as catholic in his interests as Franklin would become. Colden refused to be intimidated by the awesome reputation of Isaac Newton, convincing himself that Newton had erred on certain important points. He devoted much of his adult life to correcting the mistakes. Yet the effort hardly exhausted him. He found time to write a history of the Indian tribes in and around the colony of New York, a taxonomy of the flora near his Orange County home (which he rendered in Latin and sent to the Swedish patriarch of plant science and Latin nomenclature, Linneaus, who duly published it), assorted treatises on moral philosophy, medical accounts of major diseases and lesser distempers, and a translation of Cicero’s letters.


pages: 1,088 words: 297,362

The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

1960s counterculture, anti-communist, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Brixton riot, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, Dava Sobel, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Jenner, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, John Snow's cholera map, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Nick Leeson, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, union organizing, V2 rocket

The directors of the South Sea Company took on around three-fifths of the national debt – £9 million – resulting in considerable speculation in company stock, with shares rising in value from £100 to £1,000 and speculators trying to win finance for impossible projects. When the bubble burst in September 1720 many investors were ruined. Isaac Newton, the leading English scientist of the era, had sold £7,000-worth of stock the previous April at 100 per cent profit but had then unwisely re-entered the market and lost £20,000, which led him to comment: ‘I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’ Some of those found guilty were thrown in the Tower.

New Connaught Rooms (former Freemasons Tavern), Nos. 61–65, south side Banqueting rooms with a long and varied history, the New Connaught Rooms stand on the site of the seventeenth-century Conway House, the residency of the Lord Chancellor, whose best-known incumbent of the period, Heneage Finch, hid the Great Seal of England under his pillow to prevent its theft. In 1774 Conway House was replaced by the Freemasons Tavern which soon became a popular venue for public meetings. Thomas Taylor, a vehement opponent of Isaac Newton’s scientific theories, gave a lecture here on the subject of perpetual light, using supposedly ‘everlasting’ lamps filled with phosphorus, but succeeding in little more than setting light to the room. On 28 October 1863 the Football Association was founded here by eleven clubs – Barnes, Blackheath, Black-heath Proprietary School, Crystal Palace, Crusaders, Forest (Leytonstone), Kensington School, No Names Kilburn, Perceval House (Blackheath), Surbiton and War Office.

Named after Henry Jermyn, the seventeenth-century Earl of St Albans – the poet Andrew Marvell claimed he looked like a butcher with ‘drayman’s shoulders’ – who was granted a sixty-year Crown lease on 45 acres of land in St James’s Fields in 1660, the street was laid out in the 1680s, a relief at No. 73 showing Charles II, who was then on the throne, handing the deeds to Jermyn. Past residents of what is now an almost entirely commercial street include the scientist Isaac Newton, who lived at No. 87 from 1696 to 1710, and the poet Thomas Gray. At No.40 is the exclusive nightclub Tramps. The Mall A grand boulevard central to state ceremonies and usually filled with tourists on their way to Buckingham Palace, it was cut through St James’s Park in 1660 by Charles II as a pitch for the game of paille-maille, with two long avenues of trees in the French style.


The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe

Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, complexity theory, Copley Medal, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Thomas Malthus

By then the Theory of Evolution had won the intellectual status battle, even within the ranks of the Anglican Church’s young clergymen. They were turning from clergy into the clerisy themselves. The reviews approached Darwin as an already Great Man. The Annual Register, a yearly survey of British intellectual life, compared him to Isaac Newton, discoverer of the law of gravity and creator of the fields of physics, mechanics, modern astronomy, and the Rules of Scientific Reasoning in the 1600s. The Register’s anonymous reviewer said everyone knew “how profound was the influence of the Newtonian philosophy over the next two or three generations.”


pages: 178 words: 47,457

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne

conceptual framework, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, gentrification, impulse control, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, post scarcity, War on Poverty, working poor

These sources are (i) the recent research in the field of science and (2) the work Stephen Covey has done with personal effectiveness. Margaret Wheatley, in her book Leadership and the New Science (1992), states quite clearly: Scientists in many different disciplines are questioning whether we can adequately explain how the world works by using the machine imagery created in the 17th century, most notably by Sir Isaac Newton. In the machine model, one must understand parts. Things can be taken apart, dissected literally or representationally ... and then put back together without any significant loss ... The Newtonian model of the world is characterized by materialism and reductionism-a focus on things rather than relationships ...


pages: 459 words: 140,010

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer by Michael Swaine, Paul Freiberger

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commoditize, Computer Lib, computer vision, Dennis Ritchie, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Fairchild Semiconductor, Gary Kildall, gentleman farmer, Google Chrome, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, world market for maybe five computers

Starting a Company * * * Figure 58. Apple’s original logo The 1976 logo, designed by Apple cofounder Ron Wayne, features Isaac Newton under an apple tree. (Courtesy of Apple Computer Inc.) They founded the company on April Fool’s Day, 1976 (an appropriate date for two pranksters), together with a third partner, Ron Wayne. An Atari field service engineer, Wayne agreed to help found the company for a 10 percent stake. Wayne immediately started work on a company logo, a drawing of Isaac Newton seated under an apple tree. Jobs sold his Volkswagen microbus and Wozniak sold his two prized HP calculators to pay for the creation of a printed circuit board.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

—George Soros, October 1987, twenty years before the subprime crisis The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.1 —George Soros, February 1995, twelve years before the subprime crisis SIR ISAAC NEWTON was not just the world’s greatest mathematician and scientist. He was also Master of the Royal Mint in London from 1699 to 1727, a period that took in the South Sea Bubble, perhaps the most notorious of all the booms and busts that have punctuated financial history. With his incomparable intellect and his access to what today might be called insider information, he invested in the South Sea Company and cashed out his shares with a 100 percent profit in April 1720, judging that their price had advanced too far.

It seems presumptuous to suggest that some of the most successful and thoughtful financiers of their generation may have misunderstood the nature of an extreme financial cycle. But history shows that such things often happen. If this turns out to be true, Soros and El-Erian would be in excellent company, with Isaac Newton no less. Part II began with the investors’ adage that “this time is different” are the four most expensive words in the English language and noted that all financial booms are created by a belief that the world has changed in a way never seen before. This is a good reason to be suspicious of extravagant claims made at times of financial euphoria.


pages: 411 words: 136,413

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Peter Schwartz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business process, cuban missile crisis, haute cuisine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, medical malpractice, Neil Armstrong, Plato's cave, profit motive, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, source of truth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty

The greatest achievements of science are invisible: they take place in a man’s mind; they occur in the form of a connection integrating a broad range of phenomena. The astronaut of an earlier mission who remarked that his spacecraft was driven by Sir Isaac Newton understood this issue. (And if I may be permitted to amend that remark, I would say that Sir Isaac Newton was the copilot of the flight; the pilot was Aristotle.) In this sense, the lunar landing was a first step, a beginning, in regard to the moon, but it was a last step, an end product, in regard to the earth—the end product of a long, intellectual-scientific development.


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

These events convinced Babson that the information about individual companies he had been trafficking in was less important than “fundamental data” about the economy as a whole. He developed a forecasting tool he called the “Babsonchart,” a one-line composite of economic data through which he drew a smooth trend line.20 He got the idea from one of his MIT professors, who was inspired by Isaac Newton’s law of action and reaction.21 For every period spent above the trend line, the economy—and with it the stock market—would later fall below the trend for a period such that the area below the trend line would equal that above. This happens to be the definition of a trend line, which can only be drawn with certainty after the fact.

Babson also turned bearish in 1926, announcing that the economy had been growing too fast for too long and that an “equal and opposite reaction” was due, although he allowed that it might take two or three years. For the next three years the market continued to rise, but Babson wouldn’t back down. He became an object of mockery. “We could say that his worship of Isaac Newton was an eccentricity,” recalled John Burr Williams, a young investment banker in Boston at the time, “and nothing was proved by his claim that action and reaction were always equal.”33 In September 1929, Babson issued his most dire warning yet. “Sooner or later a crash is coming, and it may be terrific,” he declared at the annual National Business Conference he hosted.


pages: 461 words: 139,924

The Habsburgs: To Rule the World by Martyn Rady

Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, night-watchman state, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

It caught Maximilian II’s son, Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612), in its snares and may have driven him to the episodes of depression and self-imposed isolation that beset his reign. The content of the occult world, as it was imagined in early modern Europe, is best broached through The Emerald Tablet (Tabula Smaragdina). Translated from Latin to Czech in Rudolf’s court, it starts as follows in English, in Sir Isaac Newton’s translation: ’Tis true without lying, certain and most true. That which is below is like that which is above and that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing. And as all things have been and arose from one by the mediation of one: so all things have their birth from this one thing by adaptation.

The success of the ruse owed as much to the person within as to Kempelen’s technical ingenuity.1 Automata had been playthings for several hundred years, but by the middle decades of the eighteenth century they had become more than toys. The machine symbolized humanity’s capture of nature and yet, by the regularity of its movements, its conformity to the laws of a repetitious universe as disclosed by Isaac Newton. The human form might thus be explained in mechanical terms—as, in one contemporary description, ‘a machine which winds itself up, a living picture of perpetual motion.’ One by one, philosophers (Kant, Herder, Rousseau, Bentham) succumbed to the illusion that human beings might themselves be organized as if they were clockwork and, moreover, that there was no sphere in which mechanical solutions might not be applied—the drilling of soldiers, the organization of hospitals, prison and workshop management, and so on.


pages: 909 words: 130,170

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

Not only did the balls evoke the celestial bodies whose movements were described by Galileo, but every time he rested his billiard cue on his hand, he channelled the elemental principles of geometry as outlined by Euclid, Pythagoras and Archimedes. And every time his cue ball, energised by the movement of his arm, struck other balls, they diligently followed the laws on mass, motion and force identified by Sir Isaac Newton nearly a century earlier. They also raised a whole range of questions about friction, elasticity and the transfer of energy. Unsurprisingly, Coriolis’s most important contributions to science and mathematics focused on the effects of motion on rotating spheres: the kinetic energy an object like a billiard ball possesses due to its motion, and the process by which energy is transferred from an arm and through a cue to send billiard balls scuttling around the table.

Influenced by the ‘physiocrats’– a French intellectual movement that, among other things, lobbied for idle aristocrats to shoulder a greater proportion of the king’s extravagant tax demands, and who believed that neither governments nor nobles should meddle in the natural order of the markets – Smith was convinced that reason could reveal the fundamental laws of human economic behaviour in the same way that Isaac Newton had used reason to reveal some of the fundamental laws that governed the movement of celestial bodies. The Wealth of Nations has a biblical quality to it, not least because Smith had a particular genius for presenting complex ideas in the form of neat parables similar in structure to those that were issued from church pulpits across the land every Sunday.


pages: 509 words: 142,456

Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery by Ira Rutkow

augmented reality, Charles Lindbergh, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, New Journalism, Stephen Hawking, trade route, unbiased observer, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

* * * Cheselden’s career was noteworthy for the range of his clinical accomplishments as well as the diversity of his outside interests. He was an architect, artist, litterateur, photographer, pugilist, raconteur, and all-around bon vivant who mixed freely with the luminaries of eighteenth-century London society. Isaac Newton was a close friend, as were Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, and Voltaire, the French writer. Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, was Cheselden’s patient. Alexander Pope, the poet, was an active correspondent. According to the bard, Cheselden was the “most deserving man in the whole profession of Chirurgery and has saved the lives of thousands.”14 In 1710, after a seven-year surgical apprenticeship, twenty-two-year-old Cheselden was admitted to the London Company of Barber-Surgeons and began to teach courses in human anatomy at the group’s hall.

Hunter’s body was autopsied, which confirmed a diseased heart, and then placed in the burial vaults of the church of St. Martin in the Fields in Trafalgar Square. Six decades later, as Hunter’s reputation flourished, he received state honors at a second funeral when his remains were reinterred in the north aisle of the nave at Westminster Abbey, near those of Ben Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton, and, afterwards, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking. * * * Stephen Preston left the Boston VA hospital three days following his hernia operation. His recovery was uneventful and he returned to work four weeks later. As for me, I received my evaluation one month after rotating out of the VA.


pages: 1,737 words: 491,616

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

When you understand things in detail, you can see how they are not alike, and start enthusiastically subtracting edges off your graph. Likewise, the important categories are the ones that do not contain everything in the universe. Good hypotheses can only explain some possible outcomes, and not others. It was perfectly all right for Isaac Newton to explain just gravity, just the way things fall down—and how planets orbit the Sun, and how the Moon generates the tides—but not the role of money in human society or how the heart pumps blood. Sneering at narrowness is rather reminiscent of ancient Greeks who thought that going out and actually looking at things was manual labor, and manual labor was for slaves.

Lyon Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, The Incomplete Enchanter (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1941). 182 Universal Law Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier discovered that breathing (respiration) and fire (combustion) operated on the same principle. It was one of the most startling unifications in the history of science, for it brought together the mundane realm of matter and the sacred realm of life, which humans had divided into separate magisteria. The first great simplification was that of Isaac Newton, who unified the course of the planets with the trajectory of a falling apple. The shock of this discovery was greater by far than Lavoisier’s. It wasn’t just that Newton had dared to unify the Earthly realm of base matter with the obviously different and sacred celestial realm, once thought to be the abode of the gods.

So that’s professional training of a kind, and it works after a fashion—but if social convention is the only reason why seven sheep plus eight sheep equals fifteen sheep, then maybe seven apples plus eight apples equals three apples. Who’s to say that the rules shouldn’t be different for apples? But if you know why the rules work, you can see that addition is the same for sheep and for apples. Isaac Newton is justly revered, not for his outdated theory of gravity, but for discovering that—amazingly, surprisingly—the celestial planets, in the glorious heavens, obeyed just the same rules as falling apples. In the macroscopic world—the everyday ancestral environment—different trees bear different fruits, different customs hold for different people at different times.


pages: 182 words: 51,816

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands

Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, time dilation

It was, indeed, Albert Einstein who, in 1905, first clearly enunciated the profound principles which underlie this new realm of physical endeavor. But there were others before him, most notably Hendrik Antoon Lorentz and Henri Poincaré, who had already appreciated most of the basics of the (then) new physics. Moreover, the great scientists Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, centuries before Einstein, had already pointed out that in the dynamical theories that they themselves were developing, the physics as perceived by an observer in uniform motion would be identical with that perceived by an observer at rest. The key problem with this had arisen only later, with James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery, as published in 1865, of the equations that govern the electric and magnetic fields, and which also control the propagation of light.


Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

But that understanding is unequally distributed. Some people remain stuck in the world of mystery, while others master its heuristics. The beauty of heuristics is that they guide us toward a solution by way of organized exploration of the possibilities. With a heuristic to guide his further thought and consideration, the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton derived precise rules for determining how fast an object will fall under any circumstance. Newton’s rule—that an object dropped from any height will accelerate at a constant rate of 32 feet per second squared—advanced the understanding of gravity to the third stage, the algorithm. An algorithm is an explicit, step-by-step procedure for solving a problem.


pages: 165 words: 50,798

Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville

A Pattern Language, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Black Swan, business process, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Computer Lib, disinformation, disruptive innovation, folksonomy, holacracy, index card, information retrieval, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kanban, Lean Startup, Lyft, messenger bag, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Project Xanadu, quantum entanglement, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single source of truth, source of truth, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Embodiment is heady stuff, so let’s explore a basic example. How about the colors of a rainbow? In school we learn the spectral colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet are produced by the light of a single wavelength, and all are visible to the human eye, except for indigo, which Isaac Newton added so the number of colors would match the number of planets, notes in a major scale, and days in a week. This all makes sense, sort of, until you learn that in Japan, people say traffic lights are red, yellow, and blue, even though ‘Go’ is green.xxvii The distinction gets lost in translation since until the twentieth century, Japanese had only one word, ao, for both blue and green.


pages: 356 words: 51,419

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns by John C. Bogle

asset allocation, backtesting, buy and hold, creative destruction, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial intermediation, fixed income, index fund, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, junk bonds, low interest rates, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, yield management, zero-sum game

They followed the old uncle’s wise advice, returning to their original passive but productive strategy, holding all the stocks of corporate America, and standing pat. That is exactly what an index fund does. . . . and the Gotrocks Family Lived Happily Ever After Adding a fourth law to Sir Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion, the inimitable Warren Buffett puts the moral of his story this way: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases. Accurate as that cryptic statement is, I would add that the parable reflects the profound conflict of interest between those who work in the investment business and those who invest in stocks and bonds.


pages: 183 words: 51,514

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Cycler trajectories are routes used over and over again on paths around the sun. These trajectories are identified by using the laws of celestial mechanics—essentially Newton’s laws. Interestingly, to create 21st-century sustainable space transportation architecture I’m counting on laws of motion compiled by Sir Isaac Newton in his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687. Newton’s laws of motion have led to a trio of physical laws that form the basis for celestial mechanics. They describe the relationship between the forces acting on a body and its motion due to those forces. My cycler design depends on these principles.


pages: 236 words: 50,763

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

And as I observed that in the words “I think, therefore I am”, there is nothing at all which gives me assurance of their truth beyond this, that I see very clearly that in order to think it is necessary to exist, I concluded that I might take, as a general rule, the principle, that all the things which we very clearly and distinctly conceive are true, only observing, however, that there is some difficulty in rightly determining the objects which we distinctly conceive. Descartes, Discourse, Part IV A contemporary of Descartes, Johannes Kepler, examined planetary motion and derived a set of rules that described the path and speed of planets in their orbits. Kepler had no simple description of why planets followed these rules. Isaac Newton applied the principle of Occam’s razor to the physical world. Newton’s famous laws of motion gave very simple rules on how objects react. 1. If no force is applied to an object, an object at rest remains at rest and one in motion remains at a constant velocity. 2. A force applied to an object creates a fixed acceleration in proportion to the size of the force. 3.


pages: 189 words: 48,180

Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain Everything by Tim James

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Dmitri Mendeleev, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Silicon Valley

The Greek scientist Thales (the one who fell down the pit) had already made the discovery that rubbing pieces of amber with wool caused them to gain a crackly property, which sparked under the right circumstances, but the discovery of what we think of as electric current goes to an English experimenter named Stephen Gray. One of the reasons why Gray’s work was overlooked is that he made the mistake of asking another scientist to help him develop it. That scientist was John Flamsteed, who happened to be a mortal enemy of Sir Isaac Newton. Newton was a socially cruel, even malicious character who used his position as head of the Royal Society to discredit and bury the work of people he disliked, including Flamsteed.6 Consequently, much of Flamsteed and Gray’s achievements were ignored. It has to be said that while Newton was one of the greatest minds in history, he was also a jackass sometimes.


pages: 161 words: 49,972

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell

Albert Einstein, feminist movement, Isaac Newton, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, TED Talk, the scientific method, wikimedia commons

Frederick Lindemann—later known as Lord Cherwell—was born in Germany in 1886. His father was a wealthy German engineer. His mother was an American heiress. Lindemann was a physicist and got his PhD in Berlin just before the First World War—at a time when Germany was the center of the world in physics. Colleagues compared his mind to Isaac Newton’s. He had an extraordinary memory for numbers: as a child, Frederick would read newspapers and recite back reams and reams of statistics from memory. He could demolish anyone in an argument. He also spent a considerable amount of time with Albert Einstein. Once, at dinner, Einstein mentioned some mathematical proposition for which he’d never been able to come up with a proof.


pages: 150 words: 50,821

How to Be Human: An Autistic Man's Guide to Life by Jory Fleming

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Isaac Newton, microbiome, neurotypical, public intellectual, Saturday Night Live, Skype, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

I’ve seen very little public consideration for a logical empathy, which is more nuanced, where it’s possible to be good at one part of it and bad at another part of it. LW: There are a lot of lists speculating on different historical and more contemporary figures who may have been autistic. The names include Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Michelangelo, Mozart, Isaac Newton, and Nikola Tesla. What are your thoughts when you see lists like that and people making the case that these individuals also may have been on the autism spectrum? JORY: I don’t particularly know why anybody would be overly concerned about that. To me, Tesla’s scientific accomplishments are interesting, but I wouldn’t be interested in whether he did or didn’t have autism.


The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, business cycle, business process, commoditize, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, pattern recognition, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value

“It was discovered in the 1960s and fully formulated in the early ‘70s. It reached its zenith in practice in the early 1980s with Jack Welch, who 134 THE ART OF PROFITABILITY was its most aggressive, most persistent, most unsparing, and most thoughtful practitioner. “Bruce Henderson is the under-recognized innovator in the discipline—the Isaac Newton of strategy. But he wandered off into biology and Darwinism instead of completing what he started. That’s why he was eclipsed by Michael Porter. Porter filled in the rest of the picture and gave managers methods they could use. “But the whole intellectual underpinning of the thought system was Relative Market Share.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Sound money is the equivalent of scientific integrity: the system must not permit the manipulation of data after the experiment has taken place. Gold achieves irreversibility through its refractory chemistry and the time-based entropy of extraction. As master of the mint in eighteenth-century England, Isaac Newton spent much of his time proving that gold could not be hacked, counterfeited, or reverse-engineered from other elements.2 As Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine has observed, Newton was not an alchemist so much as an “anti-alchemist.”3 Bitcoin and other digital currencies offer similar irreversibility through complex mathematics and software using a time-stamped public “blockchain” of transactions.


pages: 175 words: 54,497

The Naked Eye: How the Revolution of Laser Surgery Has Unshackled the Human Eye by Gerard Sutton, Michael Lawless

Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, Lao Tzu, Mahatma Gandhi, microplastics / micro fibres, Nelson Mandela

Dr Tsutomu Sato carried out the first form of vision correction surgery in the 1930s. It was then a radical experimental procedure, which it remained for many decades, as visionaries like Ridley, Fyodorov and Barraquer worked tirelessly to unlock the secrets to successfully improving the vision of their patients through surgical intervention. Isaac Newton, the English physicist, mathematician and astronomer famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” And so it is with us. In our own humble way we have followed in the footsteps of our ‘giants’, Sato, Ridley, Fyodorov and Barraquer. If they were alive today we believe they would be delighted to see the amazing developments brought about by the surgery they pioneered and would be very proud of the results we are able to achieve for our patients.


pages: 204 words: 54,395

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

And just as Newton's principles can help us explain our physical environment or chart the path of a thrown ball, Motivation 2.0's principles can help us comprehend our social surroundings and predict the trajectory of human behavior. But Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schršdinger's cat things get freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll. Motivation 2.0 is similar in this regard, too. When rewards and punishments encounter our third drive, something akin to behavioral quantum mechanics seems to take over and strange things begin to happen. Of course, the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: People have to earn a living.


pages: 185 words: 55,639

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking

Many physicists now believe that they are on the verge of explaining the way all the particles and forces of nature work within one set of equations—a ‘theory of everything’ involving a phenomenon known as supersymmetry, or SUSY. The story of the search for SUSY begins with the realization, early in the twentieth century, that subatomic particles such as electrons do not obey the laws of physics which apply, as Isaac Newton discovered three centuries ago, to the world of objects such as billiard balls, apples, and the Moon. Instead, they obey the laws of the world of quantum physics, where particles blur into waves, nothing is certain, and probability rules. Chapter One Quantum Physics for Beginners Before 1900, physicists thought of the material world as being composed of little, hard objects—atoms and molecules which interacted with one another to produce the variety of materials, living and non-living, that we see around us.


pages: 168 words: 56,211

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

Abraham Maslow, Donald Trump, flag carrier, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spice trade, supply-chain management, Vilfredo Pareto

Somewhere inside this white-coated man, there must have remained vestigial urges to dominate, shout, master, blow up and attack, but how carefully such instincts had been contained, by what cautious laboratory rules his urges had been governed, how quiet modern omnipotence could be. 7. The satellite and its launch vehicle were practical achievements no doubt, but they were also, and perhaps primarily, the products of revolutionary changes in belief systems. Isaac Newton (whose namesake street was home to Kourou’s only travel agency) was the first to postulate the theories on which the launch itself would be based, when he speculated that if a cannonball could be fired at a tremendous speed from a great height, the top of an implausibly tall mountain, for instance, it would orbit right around the earth, for gravity would pull it downwards at the same rate at which the planet spun away from it.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

Take the billion-year history of ice ages, and what they teach us about growing your money. Our scientific knowledge of Earth is younger than you might think. Understanding how the world works often involves drilling deep below its surface, something we haven’t been able to do until fairly recently. Isaac Newton calculated the movement of the stars hundreds of years before we understood some of the basics of our planet. It was not until the 19th century that scientists agreed that Earth had, on multiple occasions, been covered in ice.¹⁵ There was too much evidence to argue otherwise. All over the world sat fingerprints of a previously frozen world: huge boulders strewn in random locations; rock beds scraped down to thin layers.


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

It’s suggestive of so much: the Garden of Eden, and the humanity—both good and bad—resulting from Eve’s bite of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; Johnny Appleseed, the great sower of plentitude from American myth; the Beatles and their own record label, a connection that would lead to litigation years later; Isaac Newton, the plummeting apple, and the spark of an idea; American as apple pie; the legend of William Tell, who saved his own life and that of his son by using his crossbow to pierce an apple perched on the son’s head; wholesomeness, fecundity, and, of course, the natural world. Apple is not a word for geeks, unlike Asus, Compaq, Control Data, Data General, DEC, IBM, Sperry Rand, Texas Instruments, or Wipro, to mention some less felicitously named computer companies.

Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before. Of course, Steve’s gut could also betray him, as it did when he fell in love with Apple’s first corporate logo. It was a pen-and-ink drawing, detailed in the way of an etching, of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree. It was the kind of overworked, precious image that a young calligraphy student might find enchanting, but far too esoteric for a company with big mainstream ambitions. This graphic rendition was drawn by Ronald Wayne, a former Atari engineer whom Steve had recruited to join the team.


pages: 473 words: 156,146

They Gave Me a Seafire by Commander R 'Mike' Crosley Dsc Rn

friendly fire, IFF: identification friend or foe, Isaac Newton, traveling salesman

We could then stay in the air for about three and a half hours and, except for bombs or rockets, take part in all the strikes and all operations on a par with the Corsairs and Hellcats in the other carriers. Chapter 22 The Final Onslaught During the next few days at Manus we collected eight new pilots. Only two of these new pilots could be trained up and made use of in time for the forthcoming operations. They were S/Lts Jimmy Sheeran and ‘Isaac’ Newton. They had already been acclimatised at Puttalam in Ceylon. On 25 June we steamed out of Manus yet again and, taking on a few replacement Seafires and Fireflies from Ponam, we set course for the south. We were making our second rendezvous with Admiral Vian who was coming up from Sydney in Formidable.

As this was only enough for seven minutes aviation, I asked the Yanks for a quick pancake. They replied: “Limey chickens, join Eagle 1 (Essex) traffic now. You will be number one to land. Over.” “Eagle 1, Limey Seafire Leader. We have only two. Over.” “Limey chicken leader, we’ll take any number you have in mind. Come straight in. Out.” So Mike (‘Iron Swede’) Banyard and ‘Isaac’ Newton landed aboard Essex. (His story of life aboard an American carrier is at Appendix 12.) I turned out early next morning 11 August and consulted the oracle in the Ops room. Two hours later at 0530, it became clear that we should have to supply two Seafires all day as ‘strapped-in’ deck standby.


pages: 632 words: 159,454

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt by Kwasi Kwarteng

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labour market flexibility, land bank, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, market bubble, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, quantitative easing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, War on Poverty, Yom Kippur War

The already phenomenally rich Duke of Marlborough, the greatest general of the age, had, on the urging of his canny wife Sarah, sold his £27,000 holding for £100,000.33 The Duchess of Portland shrewdly instructed her broker to buy as much as he could with the money she gave him and to ‘sell it out again next week’.34 Many were ruined, however. The Duke of Chandos lost a paper fortune of £700,000, while, more grievously still, Sir Justus Beck, a director of the Bank of England, went bankrupt owing £347,000; Sir Isaac Newton, the great scientist, lost £20,000 by selling too early and then buying back into the shares at their peak.35 There were political casualties, as many of the leading political figures such as Aislabie, the Chancellor, and Craggs, the Secretary of State, had been suspected of taking shares in the company and then using their parliamentary position to talk up the share price.

Yet of course the resumption would mean that, in future, interest payments could be convertible to gold. The committee recommended a resumption on the basis of the ‘ancient and permanent standard of value’. This would later be known as the ‘gold standard’. That an ounce of gold was worth £3 17s 10½d became another totem of British high finance.2 This in fact had been the value which Sir Isaac Newton, the great physicist, had established more than a century before in 1717, when he was Master of the Mint. Peel’s diligence as Chairman of the committee would shame many modern parliamentarians. The committee began taking evidence on 11 February 1819 and continued until 1 May. After sifting through all the matter with ‘the same attention, as he said, that he would give to the proof of a proposition in mathematics’, Peel, writing to an old Oxford tutor, was convinced that the ‘system of paper money had resulted in a depreciation of the currency, an increase in the price of bullion, and an unfavourable rate of exchange in the foreign markets’.


pages: 570 words: 151,609

Into the Black: The Extraordinary Untold Story of the First Flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia and the Astronauts Who Flew Her by Rowland White, Richard Truly

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, William Langewiesche

There were good reasons for this, the physics of which had been understood for hundreds of years. In July 1687, sixty copies of a freshly printed new book were dispatched from London to Cambridge by horse and cart. The volume’s title was Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and its author, Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientific minds of all time. A fellow of Trinity College, Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and Principia was his masterpiece, establishing laws of motion and gravity that have both underpinned classical physics and provided the foundation for all rocketry and spaceflight ever since.

Ellis, Warren, and Colleen Doran, with Dave Stewart. Orbiter. DC Comics, 2003. Evans, Ben. Space Shuttle Columbia. Springer-Praxis, 2005. Gainor, Chris. Arrows to the Moon. Apogee Books, 2001. Gatland, Kenneth. The Illustrated Book of Space Technology. Salamander, 1981. Gertner, Jon. The Idea Factory. Penguin Books, 2012. Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. Fourth Estate, 2003. Godwin, Robert, ed. Space Shuttle STS Flights 1–5: The NASA Mission Reports. Apogee Books, 2001. Gordon, Yefim, and Bill Gunston. Soviet X-Planes. Midland, 2000. Graham, Richard H. SR-71 Revealed. MBI, 1996. Gray, Mike. Angle of Attack. Norton, 1992. Grey, Jerry. Enterprise.


pages: 479 words: 144,453

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

In 1900 global life expectancy was no higher than forty because many people died young from malnutrition, infectious diseases and violence. Yet those who escaped famine, plague and war could live well into their seventies and eighties, which is the natural life span of Homo sapiens. Contrary to common notions, seventy-year-olds weren’t considered rare freaks of nature in previous centuries. Galileo Galilei died at seventy-seven, Isaac Newton at eighty-four, and Michelangelo lived to the ripe age of eighty-eight, without any help from antibiotics, vaccinations or organ transplants. Indeed, even chimpanzees in the jungle sometimes live into their sixties.29 In truth, so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year.

But just as the hunters and farmers had their myths, so do the people in the R&D department. Their most famous myth shamelessly plagiarises the legend of the Tree of Knowledge and the Garden of Eden, but transports the action to the garden at Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. According to this myth, Isaac Newton was sitting there under an apple tree when a ripe apple dropped on his head. Newton began wondering why the apple fell straight downwards, rather than sideways or upwards. His enquiry led him to discover gravity and the laws of Newtonian mechanics. Newton’s story turns the Tree of Knowledge myth on its head.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

—Winston Churchill We’ll come back to the knee of the curve, but let’s delve further into the exponential nature of time. In the nineteenth century, a set of unifying principles called the laws of thermodynamics6 was postulated. As the name implies, they deal with the dynamic nature of heat and were the first major refinement of the laws of classical mechanics perfected by Isaac Newton a century earlier. Whereas Newton had described a world of clockwork perfection in which particles and objects of all sizes followed highly disciplined, predictable patterns, the laws of thermodynamics describe a world of chaos. Indeed, that is what heat is. Heat is the chaotic—unpredictable—movement of the particles that make up the world.

A Practical Guide to Designing Expert Systems. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1984. Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason. San Francisco: W H. Freeman, 1976. Werner, Gerhard. “Cognition as Self-Organizing Process.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10,2:183. Westfall, Richard. Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. White, K. D. Greek and Roman Technology. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984. Whitehead, Alfred N. and Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica. 3 vols. Second ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925-1927. Wick, David. The Infamous Boundary: Seven Decades of Heresy in Quantum Physics.


pages: 490 words: 150,172

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance by Henry Petroski

business climate, Charles Babbage, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Khartoum Gordon, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen

Yet in spite of the material’s near-extinction, a large lump of unprocessed Cumberland graphite was on display in the Crystal Palace, and Hunt’s Hand-Book did not hesitate to make a natural philosophical connection between the dark plumbago and the sparkling object in a neighboring display: The diamond, as Sir Isaac Newton conjectured from its high refracting power, is a combustible body. The researches of Lavoisier, and others, have shown that this gem is nothing more than pure carbon, and under the influence of the voltaic battery diamonds have recently been converted into coke. The plumbago, which is in the adjoining bay, and the coke but a short distance from it, differ only in physical condition; in chemical constitution they are similar to the diamond.

., and K. Pearson. A History of the Theory of Elasticity and of the Strength of Materials from Galilei to Lord Kelvin. 1886 edition. New York, 1960. Townes, Jane. “Please, Some Respect for the Pencil,” Specialty Advertising Business, March 1983: 61–63. Turnbull, H. W., editor. The Correspondence of Isaac Newton. Vol. 1: 1661–1675. Cambridge, 1959. Turner, Gerard L’E. “Scientific Toys,” The British Journal for the History of Science, 20 (1987): 377–98. Turner, Roland, and Steven L. Goulden, editors. Great Engineers and Pioneers in Technology. Vol 1: From Antiquity through the Industrial Revolution. New York, 1981.


pages: 473 words: 154,182

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them by Donovan Hohn

An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, clean water, collective bargaining, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Exxon Valdez, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hindcast, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Isaac Newton, means of production, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, post-Panamax, profit motive, Skype, standardized shipping container, statistical model, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman

Aristotle did indeed flee to Chalcis, but the actual cause of his death was an undiagnosed gastrointestinal ailment, brought on, probably, by a funky oyster. In Aristotle’s suicidal confusion, it seems, Bolland and his seventeenth-century oceanographic colleagues saw their own. Just twelve years after Bolland repeated the apocryphal story of Aristotle’s suicide, Isaac Newton finally determined the lunar and solar “Cause of Tydes.” The currents, however, would prove to be an even more maddeningly intractable riddle. “The secrets of the currents in the seas,” Melville observes in Moby-Dick, which unlike most novels includes citations to actual scientific papers, “have never yet been divulged, even to the most erudite research.”

In 1960, aboard a one-hundred-foot ketch called the Aries, a British oceanographer named John Swallow sailed northeast out of Bermuda into the Sargasso Sea in search of a vast, deep, and altogether hypothetical northerly current that he was confident he would find. He was confident because a scientist at Woods Hole, Henry Stommel, the Isaac Newton of physical oceanographers, had deduced its existence. Most oceanographers sailed out, collected data, and then interpreted it. Stommel made his most important discoveries on land, with pencil and paper. In 1947, scribbling on a place mat at a roadside diner, he’d mathematically explained the physics of the Gulf Stream.


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

As David Wootton, a scientific historian, noted: “It is this assumption that there are new discoveries to be made which has transformed the world for it has made modern science and technology possible.”20 In the 17th century, philosophers like Francis Bacon introduced a systematic way to think about scientific research, while Isaac Newton changed the way people thought about the universe. In the 18th century, the ideas of the Enlightenment favoured liberty, tolerance and reason over faith and appeals to authority. What did all this have to do with steam engines or textile production? There are only a few direct links between scientific advances and the technological changes of the 18th century.

A rival bank, the South Sea Company, agreed to buy government debt in exchange for its shares. The company did have one profitable asset – the right to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. But the share price of the South Sea Company followed a similar trajectory to that of its French counterpart: up like a rocket, down like a stick. Even Sir Isaac Newton was caught up in the mania, leading to one of his most famous quotes: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.” The demise of the South Sea Bubble left the Bank of England unchallenged as Britain’s premier financial institution. And the bank played an important role in the rise of Britain as a global power in the 18th century.


What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

The one thing any course on probability drums into you is that it doesn’t matter how many times in a row you get a 6: this has no influence on what the dice is going to do on the next throw. So is there some way of knowing how my dice is going to land? Or is that knowledge always going to be out of reach? Not according to the revelations of a scientist across the waters in England. THE MATHEMATICS OF NATURE Isaac Newton is my all-time hero in my fight against the unknowable. The idea that I could possibly know everything about the universe has its origins in Newton’s revolutionary work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. First published in 1687, the book is dedicated to developing a new mathematical language that promised the tools to unlock how the universe behaves.

It is striking that Newton, the person who led us to believe in a clockwork deterministic universe, also felt that there was room in the equations for God’s intervention. He wrote of his belief that God would sometimes have to reset the universe when things looked like they were going off course. He got into a big fight with his German mathematical rival Gottfried Leibniz, who couldn’t see why God wouldn’t have set it up perfectly from the outset: Sir Isaac Newton and his followers have also a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. ON THE EDGE OF CHAOS Newton and his mathematics gave me a feeling that I could know the future, that I could shortcut the wait for it to become the present.


Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

More simply known as the Royal Society, the world’s oldest national scientific organization was established in 1660 to promote and disseminate “new science” by big thinkers of the day such as Sir Francis Bacon, the Enlightenment’s promulgator of “the prolongation of life.”1 Befitting its rich scientific history, the society has held annual scientific events ever since. Highlights have included lectures by Sir Isaac Newton on gravity, Charles Babbage on his mechanical computer, and Sir Joseph Banks, who had just arrived back from Australia with a bounty of more than a thousand preserved plants that were all new to science. Even today, in a post-Enlightenment world, most of the events at the society are fascinating if not world changing.

It is home to dozens of institutions of higher education and hundreds of thousands of university students. And it is home to what is arguably the most prestigious national scientific association in the world, the Royal Society. Founded in the 1600s during the Age of Enlightenment and formerly headed by Australia’s catalyst, the botanist Sir Joseph Banks, as well as such legendary minds as Sir Isaac Newton and Thomas Henry Huxley, the society’s cheeky motto is a pretty good one to live by: “Nullius in Verba,” it says underneath the society’s coat of arms. That’s Latin for “Take nobody’s word for it.” So far in this chapter I have presented a case—one agreed upon by many great scientists—that even at current and very conservative population growth projections, based on lives that are extended only slightly in the coming decades, our planet is already past its carrying capacity and we, as a species, are only exacerbating that problem with the ways in which we are increasingly choosing to live.


pages: 542 words: 145,022

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest by Andrew W. Lo, Stephen R. Foerster

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, compound rate of return, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, equity premium, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fake news, family office, fear index, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, prediction markets, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

.… Owning index funds, with their cost-efficiency, their tax-efficiency, and their assurance that you will earn your fair share of the markets’ returns, is, by definition, a winning strategy.… Stay the course!”120 6 Myron Scholes and the Black-Scholes / Merton Option Pricing Model FAMOUS MATHEMATICIANS and physicists often have arcane formulas permanently associated with their names as their legacy. Pythagoras has a2 + b2 = c2, Isaac Newton has F = ma, and Albert Einstein has E = mc2. However, it’s an exceptionally rare honor for economists, who are known more for being dismal than for their mathematical precision. Myron Scholes is that rare exception. Myron Scholes is the co-originator of the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula, a mathematical expression that produces the price of complex securities such as stock options, warrants, and other so-called derivative securities (securities whose payoffs depend on or derive from those of other securities).

One of the authors (Lo) has argued that a body of knowledge becomes a science only when a corresponding field of engineering emerges from it.53 As such, financial science had its beginnings with Harry Markowitz in 1952 but didn’t become a real science until Barr Rosenberg took Markowitz’s theoretical ideas and showed how to construct real live portfolios through them, when he introduced the BARRA model of risk factors to the investment industry in the 1970s. Merton was acknowledged as a scientist by his PhD dissertation supervisor and collaborator, Paul Samuelson, who called Merton “the Isaac Newton of finance.” Like his Nobel corecipient, Scholes, Merton has had one foot in the academic world and the other in the investment world, and each world has benefited. He once relayed a story about a trade in Hong Kong with Scholes. They were trading an option with a stock price that had fallen below a certain level, at which point the option was cancelled—a so-called down-and-out option.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

TO THE FRAMEWORK KNITTERS OF NOTTINGHAM, THE COUNTY THEREOF, AND THE TOWNS AND VILLAGES ADJACENT The troubled State to which the above Places are reduced, by the pressure of the Times and the operations of the Frame-Breakers, having at length excited the Attention of the Legislature; and as many Members thereof have expressed a desire to obtain every possible Information as to the probable Cause of these Disturbances, it has been thought prudent by many of the Workmen, that they, and their Fellow-Workmen at large, should contribute all their power toward furnishing such Information. Henson requested that each town, village, and neighborhood send two representatives to the Sign of the Sir Isaac Newton, a pub in Nottingham, the next Tuesday at noon sharp. The meeting would be on the public record, and the intelligence gathered there sent on to Lord Holland, a powerful Whig leader, and other officials, including Samuel Whitbread, a sympathetic Whig MP who had been encouraging the workers to seek reform in Parliament.

On April 19, Henson arrived in Leicester, where he began collecting samples of the industry’s output to show to politicians in London, to demonstrate the finery of their trade, and meeting with the organization of knitters there, soliciting input and support. He wrote back to the committee HQ at the Sir Isaac Newton pub in Nottingham with his progress. Gravener was obsessively marshaling every scrap of good clothing and bit of data about how it was produced that he could get his hands on. He was gathering thousands of signatures in support of the bill. His meticulous efforts were reflected in the letter he sent that day: When you send the Red Book, send the Minutes of the Evidence which Blackner1 has got; Endeavor to obtain every Species of Warp Nett, Raw and Got up; Cotton Stockings made of Single Cotton, Light Silk Hose, Stiff Silk Hose, Mr Alliotts pair of Pantaloons, from Mr Tutin; The Average Statement of Double Lap which you took.


pages: 1,396 words: 245,647

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

Yet this was a momentous piece of journalism, and it helped to propel Einstein from relative obscurity in Berlin to international celebrity; soon, his moustachioed face and frizzled mane of black hair were familiar to newspaper readers all over the world. The unsigned article reported the apparent verification of a theory by Einstein that ‘would completely revolutionize the accepted fundamental physics’ and thereby overturn the ideas of Isaac Newton that had held sway for over two centuries.26 The observations were made by two teams of British astronomers who had found that the deflection by the Sun of distant starlight during the recent solar eclipse was consistent with Einstein’s theory but not Newton’s. When he was an old man, Dirac remembered this as a time of special excitement: ‘Suddenly Einstein was on everyone’s lips […] [E] veryone was sick and tired of the war.

In the summer of 1969, Dirac prepared to leave his post and say his goodbyes to the few friends left in Cambridge, including Charlie Broad, the philosopher who gave him his first proper introduction to the theory of relativity. Broad, aged eighty-one, still lived in Trinity College, where he died two years later. On Tuesday 30 September, Dirac spent his final day in Cambridge as its Lucasian Professor, the most distinguished holder of the Chair since Sir Isaac Newton. Dirac’s retirement passed without ceremony, probably because the university authorities assumed that Dirac would feel uncomfortable if he was the cynosure of a leaving party. This was an error, though an understandable one: Dirac would have liked his contribution to the university to be marked officially as his sense of propriety was, contrary to the impression he gave, stronger than his aversion to ceremony.51 Manci was disgusted.

Weisskopf, V. (1990) The Joy of Insight, New York: Basic Books. Wells, H. G. (2005) The Time Machine, London: Penguin. Wells, J. C. (1982) Accents of English 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Werskey, G. (1978) The Visible College, London: Allen Lane. Westfall, R. S. (1993) The Life of Isaac Newton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, J. A. (1985) ‘Physics in Copenhagen in 1934 and 1935’, in A. P. French and P. G. Kennedy (eds), Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 221–6. – (1998) Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam, New York: W. W.


pages: 195 words: 58,012

The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India Was Mapped and Everest Was Named (Text Only) by John Keay

Isaac Newton

For example, the length of a degree of longitude as calculated from that short arc carried south from Madras in 1802 was soon revised when the Great Arc produced a more refined value. That in turn meant that the earliest triangles based on the Madras measurement had also to be revised. As the Arc got longer, other assumptions about the curvature of the earth were reassessed, and these in turn meant more recalculation. Lambton had at first accepted Sir Isaac Newton’s figure of 1/230 for the compression of the earth’s spheroid at the poles. However this ‘constant’ proved anything but. It was revised down to 1/304 in 1812 and by Lambton himself to 1/310 when in 1818 his Great Arc had embraced nearly ten degrees of latitude. Everest in turn would come up with his own constants; and every new constant meant recalculating all previous work.


pages: 207 words: 52,716

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

But they also arise from the culture in which that genius lives. The instrumentation, the notation system, and the prevalent musical forms are the dough from which composers bake their cakes. So too with ideas. All thinkers and writers draw on stories and discoveries that have been developed by countless men and women before them. To paraphrase Isaac Newton, each generation sees a little farther because it stands on the shoulders of its predecessors. In this way, all new work draws from the commons and then enriches it. To keep art and science flourishing, we have to make sure the cultural commons is cared for. S | 117 | 118 | A SOLUTION In addition, unlike most natural commons, the cultural commons is inexhaustible.


pages: 330 words: 59,335

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

They rarely appeared on the covers of business publications and did not write books of management advice. They were not cheerleaders or marketers or backslappers, and they did not exude charisma. They were very different from high-profile CEOs such as Steve Jobs or Sam Walton or Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines or Mark Zuckerberg. These geniuses are the Isaac Newtons of business, struck apple-like by enormously powerful ideas that they proceed to execute with maniacal focus and determination. Their situations and circumstances, however, are not remotely similar (nor are the lessons from their careers remotely transferable) to those of the vast majority of business executives.


The Interior Design Handbook by Frida Ramstedt

Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, microplastics / micro fibres

And once you’ve identified the colors you really like, based on your own preferences rather than the transient fashion of the day, you’ll be that much more sales-resistant and less likely to buy the wrong things. Which is a bonus in itself! A Note About Color It was the scientist Sir Isaac Newton who laid the foundation for our modern understanding of color: he shone a beam of white light through a prism in his laboratory, and it resolved into the colors of the rainbow on the other side. He then used another prism to refract the colors back to white. This is the principle behind the Newton color wheel, and his discovery helped us understand both the nuances of color and the connection between light and color.


pages: 198 words: 59,351

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Once two snails have copulated with one another, he maintained, they are forever bound to each other by this force, and any change brought about in one of them immediately brings about a corresponding change in the other: an action at a distance of the sort that the mechanical physics ascendant since the seventeenth century had sought to banish, but never fully succeeded in banishing. After all, what is Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity but action at a distance? It is precisely the evident non-mechanical implications of gravitational theory that caused Leibniz to reject Newton’s theory, to insist that no body may attract any other body from afar, since to move by attraction, rather than by the pulling or pushing of subvisible corpuscles, is to have the sort of internal soul-like power that modern physics was intent on denying to bodies.


pages: 240 words: 60,660

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Cepheid variable, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency risk, diversified portfolio, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, law of one price, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Myron Scholes, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, riskless arbitrage, savings glut, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, stochastic volatility, the scientific method, washing machines reduced drudgery, yield curve

Intuition is a merging of the understander with the understood. In the words of the Upanishads, Tat tvam asi, Thou art that. Perfection via Intuition “Pleasure is the transition of a man from a less to a greater perfection,” wrote Spinoza. No one achieved greater advances in our levels of perfection than Isaac Newton, born in 1642, only ten years later than Spinoza. John Maynard Keynes wrote a speech about Newton for the tercentenary of his birth, celebrated belatedly by the Royal Society in 1946, after World War II. By then Keynes had died, and his brother Geoffrey delivered the speech. It was based on Keynes’s reading of a box of Newton’s notes, many of them cryptic and mystical, concerning his attempts to understand not just the physical but the entire world.


pages: 261 words: 10,785

The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black-Scholes formula, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, credit crunch, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, full employment, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, pattern recognition, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, technological singularity, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

This rule of thumb has become known as Moore’s Law,* and it can be expressed as follows: As technology progresses, the computational capability of a computer will roughly double every two years. *[ Some versions of Moore’s Law use 18 months rather than 2 years as the doubling standard. I have chosen the more conservative number. ] Moore’s Law is, of course, not a “law” at all—certainly not in the sense that physical rules like the ones postulated by Isaac Newton are laws. It is, however, an accurate observation and projection, and nearly everyone in the technology field accepts it. Moore’s Law is an overall estimate. Different facets of technology, in fact, progress at different rates. Still, we can probably agree that it is our expanding ability to manipulate and communicate information that is the driving force behind the technical innovation we see all around us—and Moore’s Law does an especially good job of capturing the rate of progress in that arena.


pages: 173 words: 14,313

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates by John Logie

1960s counterculture, Berlin Wall, book scanning, cuban missile crisis, dual-use technology, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, Isaac Newton, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, pre–internet, publication bias, Richard Stallman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, search inside the book, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog

Luckombe is describing the then common practice of “literary piracy,” in which unscrupulous printers took advantage of the functional limits of copyright enforcement and produced unauthorized editions of popular books for sale at a considerable discount, relative to the authorized edition. A later example, drawn from Sir David Brewster’s 1855 biography, Memoirs of Newton, refers to Isaac Newton’s efforts to protect his invention of the reflecting telescope from “foreign piracy.” In each of these examples, the mechanism by which the “pirates” profit is the production and distribution of substitute goods, whether goods subject to copyright, like books, or goods subject to patent, like telescopes and other mechanical inventions.


pages: 203 words: 63,257

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

They have also confirmed the phenomenon many times over by measuring the change in the lifetime of subatomic particles traveling at different speeds. Ten years after he introduced the special theory, Einstein went on to present the general theory of relativity to describe gravity in a novel way. Two and a half centuries earlier, Isaac Newton had treated gravity as an attractive force between objects, and his approximations are still plenty good enough for most practical purposes, even for sending spacecraft to the Moon. With his general theory, however, Einstein proposed to look at gravity as geometry, a curvature in space-time caused by the presence of a mass.


pages: 202 words: 62,773

The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

David Sedaris, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan

Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell. Certainly the Puritans believed and said and did many unreasonable things. That kind of goes with the territory of being born before the Age of Reason. Ponder all the cockamamie notions we moderns have been spared simply by coming into this world after an apple conked Sir Isaac Newton in the head. The Puritans’ yearning for knowledge, especially their establishment of a college so early on, was self-correcting. In fact, it is Puritan father John Winthrop’s great-great-grandson, the Harvard scientist who taught John Adams, who would be nicknamed the father of seismology. (After an earthquake shook Boston in 1755 and prompted the usual religious flip-outs about the wrath of God, Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth.


pages: 224 words: 62,551

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, company town, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton

The owner of the appartement was the Marquise du Châtelet, whom Graffigny archly referred to as la belle dame. In fact, Émilie du Châtelet was no great beauty, but she possessed something rarer, a formidable intellect—she was an accomplished mathematician and physicist, whose translation and commentary on Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica remains the standard French text to this day. She was also a talented singer and musician, a collector of books, diamonds, and snuffboxes, and an inveterate (though not very successful) gambler. In addition, this remarkable woman, as Nancy Mitford indelicately put it, “always had something of the whore.”


pages: 185 words: 60,638

Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers by John Elder Robison

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, Isaac Newton, mirror neurons, neurotypical, place-making

That’s the same thing other inventors have realized since the beginning of time. A math professor called me out on that one day. He said, “How can you say you understand calculus concepts if you can’t even pass algebra?” Years ago, I was demeaned by comments like that, but today I understand the answer. Modern math teachers say Isaac Newton invented calculus in the seventeenth century. The implication of that statement is that advanced math did not exist before that day. That’s not true. Math is merely a set of tools to represent complex things that have always happened in the real world. If you can see into the patterns of nature, like the movements of the planets or the interplay of musical notes to make a melody … you are seeing the foundation that modern representational math was built upon.


Phil Thornton by The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)

Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, double helix, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, hindsight bias, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, loss aversion, mass immigration, means of production, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, trade route, transaction costs, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce

In 2007 he won the title of Print Journalist of the Year in the same awards. In 2013 his book, Brilliant Economics, was published by Pearson Education. He lives in London with his wife and three sons. vii Introduction ‘If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Sir Isaac Newton, British mathematician and physicist (1642–1727) All intellectual disciplines require great thinkers, writers, experimenters and cogitators who seem single-handedly to advance knowledge and understanding within their particular subject area. Of course the process of intellectual development is often a collaborative process.


pages: 210 words: 62,278

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

Once I learned to see it that way, I realized that slowing down to appreciate a moment is not failing to move fast—it’s actually necessary in order to be able to keep moving fast day after day after day. 3 Learn from reality You will only fail to learn if you do not learn from failing. —Stella Adler Those who do not want to imitate anything produce nothing. —Salvador Dalí If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. —Isaac Newton The greatest advantage you have in life is the speed at which you learn—so you have to learn fast. One of the best places to learn is from your customers. Learn everything you possibly can from the people you serve. Think of the restaurant owner who gets to know the regulars. The DJ who watches carefully for which tracks keep people dancing.


pages: 192 words: 63,813

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

Its protagonist travels in a dream to Levania, the moon (in Hebrew, the name connotes the whiteness of the full moon), where he notes correctly that one-­half of the moon’s population, ­because they inhabit the side of the moon that always ­faces away from the Earth, never has the chance to see our blue planet. In the ­century ­a fter Kepler’s time, Isaac Newton and other astronomers established that Earth’s natu­ral satellite has only 27 ­percent of Earth’s dia­meter, 1 / 50 of its volume, and 1 / 81 of its mass. · 50 THE END OF ASTRONAUTS WHY GO TO THE MOON? Astronomically speaking, the moon orbits in our own backyard; Mars and Venus lie a hundred times farther from us, on average.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

It may very well have happened anyway, but it was while he was under house arrest that he wrote what is perhaps his finest work, one of the truly great books in the scientific literature, titled Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences.1 The book is basically his legacy from the preceding forty years during which he grappled with how to systematically address the challenge of understanding the natural world around us in a logical, rational framework. As such, it laid the groundwork for the equally monumental contribution of Isaac Newton and pretty much for all of the science that followed. Indeed, in praising the book, Einstein was not exaggerating when he called Galileo “the Father of Modern Science.”2 It’s a great book. Despite its forbidding title and somewhat archaic language and style, it’s surprisingly readable and a lot of fun.

Such was the case in the history of shipbuilding and the origins of modeling theory and the role played by an extraordinary man with an extraordinary name: Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In 2002 the BBC conducted a nationwide poll to select the “100 Greatest Britons.” Perhaps predictably, Winston Churchill came in first with Princess Diana third (she had only been dead for five years at that time), followed by Charles Darwin, William Shakespeare, and Isaac Newton, a pretty impressive triumvirate. But who was second? None other than the remarkable Isambard Kingdom Brunel! On occasions when I mention Brunel’s name in lectures outside of the United Kingdom I usually ask the audience if they’ve ever heard of him. At best, there is a small smattering of hands, usually by people from Britain.


pages: 446 words: 578

The end of history and the last man by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, centre right, classic study, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, kremlinology, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, life extension, linear programming, long peace, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, nuclear winter, old-boy network, open economy, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Socratic dialogue, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, zero-sum game

The same cannot be said for activities like painting, poetry, music, or architecture: it is not clear that Rauschenberg is a better painter than Michelangelo or Schoenberg superior to Bach, simply because they lived in the twentieth century; Shakespeare and the Parthenon represent a certain kind of perfection and it makes no sense to speak of “advancing” beyond them. Natural science, on the other hand, builds upon itself: there are certain “facts” about nature that were hidden from the great Sir Isaac Newton, that are accessible to any undergraduate physics student today simply because he or she was born later. The scientific understanding of nature is neither cyclical nor random; mankind does not return periodically to the same state of ignorance, nor are the results of modern natural science subject to human caprice.

Thus Hobbes does not in the end believe that man is free in the sense of having a capacity for moral choice. He can be more or less rational in his behavior, but that rationality simply serves ends like self-preservation that are given by nature. And nature, in turn, can be fully explained by the laws of matter-in-motion, laws that had been recently explicated by Sir Isaac Newton. Hegel, by contrast, starts with a completely different understanding of man. Not only is man not determined by his physical or animal nature, but his very humanity consists in his ability to overcome or negate that animal nature. He is free not just in Hobbes’s formal sense of being physically unconstrained, but free in the metaphysical sense of being radically un-determined by nature.


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

Quoted in Damian Carrington, Suzanne Goldenberg, Juliette Jowit, Jonathan Watts, Alok Jha, James Randerson, David Smith, David Adam, and Tom Hennigan, “Global deal on climate change in 2010 ‘all but impossible,’” The Guardian (February 2, 2010). 17. http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy Chapter 2 1. Gutenberg was not the first to invent printing. Asian cultures had previously developed printing but it was not as sophisticated or flexible as Gutenberg’s wonder. 2. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 3.

On top of all that, broad participation in projects like Galaxy Zoo helps boost the public’s general understanding of science, a nice side effect at a time when some degree of scientific literacy is required just to understand, let alone solve, some of our biggest public policy issues. 3. The ideas of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, which defined the scientific method, set the tone for much of what would follow in the century. Bacon and Newton believed that true science called for axiomatic proof to be fused with physical observation in a coherent system of verifiable predictions. For scientific theories and predictions to be verifiable, science needed to be open. 4.


Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

“I can see no essential difference between the materialism which includes soul as a complicated type of material particle and a spiritualism which includes material particles as a primitive type of soul,” Wiener added in 1934.43 Leibniz believed, following Hobbes and in advance of Hilbert, that a consistent system of logic, language, and mathematics could be formalized by means of an alphabet of unambiguous symbols manipulated according to mechanical rules. In 1675 he wrote to Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society and his go-between with Isaac Newton, that “the time will come, and come soon, in which we shall have a knowledge of God and mind that is not less certain than that of figures and numbers, and in which the invention of machines will be no more difficult than the construction of problems in geometry.” Envisioning what we now term software, he saw that the correspondence between logic and mechanism worked both ways.

Powell, Office of the Chief of Ordnance, May 12, 1947, IAS. 43. Norbert Wiener, “Back to Leibniz!” Technology Review 34 (1932): 201; Norbert Wiener, “Quantum Mechanics, Haldane, and Leibniz,” Philosophy of Science 1, no. 4 (October 1934): 480. 44. G. W. Leibniz to Henry Oldenburg, December 18, 1675, in H. W. Turnbull, ed., The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 401; G. W. Leibniz, supplement to a letter to Christiaan Huygens, September 8, 1679, in Leroy E. Loemker, trans. and ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pp. 384–85. 45. G. W. Leibniz to Nicolas Remond, January 10, 1714, in Loemker, trans. and ed., Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2:1,063; G.


pages: 549 words: 160,930

The Book of Not Knowing: Exploring the True Nature of Self, Mind, and Consciousness by Peter Ralston

Albert Einstein, conceptual framework, different worldview, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like traversing a switchback trail, we will encounter the same views again and again, but always from a slightly higher vantage point. Knowing and Not-Knowing Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way. —William James 1:16 Certain names are synonymous with genius. Names like Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Galileo live on in our culture because of the remarkable discoveries these people made. Although their fields of expertise were different from one another, each of their impressive contributions began with one simple principle. People like Gautama Buddha, Solomon, and Aristotle are known as sages, people with extraordinary insight and wisdom.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Contemplation To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know. —George Spencer Brown, on Sir Isaac Newton Creating a Place to Stand 21:1 The ultimate purpose of our work is to experience the truth—the true nature of our own existence. This is done primarily through the use of contemplation, although if we have no real desire to know for ourselves whatever is true, then we won’t contemplate in earnest.


pages: 741 words: 164,057

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing by Kevin Davies

23andMe, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, bioinformatics, California gold rush, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hype cycle, imposter syndrome, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, Mikhail Gorbachev, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, phenotype, QWERTY keyboard, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rolodex, scientific mainstream, Scientific racism, seminal paper, Shenzhen was a fishing village, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, traumatic brain injury, warehouse automation

Cool’s scope of articles read: “Cool only publishes articles that it deems to be astonishingly cool beyond belief. Any dorky shit submitted will be returned immediately to the authors postage due; there is just too much cool shit submitted (mostly by Cool Dudes) to waste our precious thick glossy sexy stock on it.” II. Scientists do love to trot out Isaac Newton’s famous quote about “standing on the shoulders of giants” to acknowledge the scientific contributions of their colleagues and predecessors, although there is a school of thought that says Newton was actually trolling his diminutive rival, Robert Hooke. CHAPTER 6 FIELD OF DREAMS One could say that Feng Zhang’s immigrant story—from China to Iowa, Harvard to Stanford, back to Harvard, to MIT, 60 Minutes and scientific celebrity, fame, and a fortune in the making—is the quintessential American Dream.

CEO Sek Kathiresan reported a dramatic lowering of “bad” LDL cholesterol and triglycerides in animals targeted at the PCSK9 and ANGPTL3 genes, respectively.20 The results need to be confirmed and extended in humans, which is some years away. But base editing could help realize Kathiresan’s dream of a “one-and-done genome editing medicine for heart disease,” providing an alternative to chronic statins and reduce the 18 million cardiovascular deaths each year. * * * From Archimedes in the bath to Isaac Newton’s bruised head, there are many legendary aha moments in science history. Perhaps the most bizarre episode belongs to the late Kary Mullis, who recalled the invention of the polymerase chain reaction in a quite extraordinary Nobel lecture. It’s too good not to relive here: One Friday night I was driving, as was my custom, from Berkeley up to Mendocino where I had a cabin far away from everything off in the woods… As I drove through the mountains that night, the stalks of the California buckeyes heavily in blossom leaned over into the road.


Great Britain by David Else, Fionn Davenport

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, credit crunch, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mega-rich, negative equity, new economy, North Ronaldsay sheep, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, period drama, place-making, retail therapy, Skype, Sloane Ranger, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Hawking, the market place, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent

Apart from the royal graves, keep an eye out for the many famous commoners interred here, especially in Poet’s Corner where you’ll find the resting places of Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Tennyson, Dr Johnson and Kipling as well as memorials to the other greats (Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Bronte etc). Elsewhere you’ll find the graves of Handel and Sir Isaac Newton. The octagonal Chapter House ( 10.30am-4pm) dates from the 1250s and was where the monks would meet for daily prayer before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Used as a treasury and ‘Royal Wardrobe’, the cryptlike Pyx Chamber ( 10.30am-4pm) dates from about 1070. The neighbouring Abbey Museum ( 10.30am-4pm) has as its centrepiece death masks of generations of royalty.

The honour roll of famous Cambridge graduates reads like an international who’s who of high achievers: 81 Nobel Prize winners (more than any other institution in the world), 13 British prime ministers, nine archbishops of Canterbury, an immense number of scientists, and a healthy host of poets and authors. Crick and Watson discovered DNA here, Isaac Newton used Cambridge to work on his theory of gravity, Stephen Hawking is a professor of mathematics here, and Charles Darwin, William Wordsworth, Vladimir Nabokov, David Attenborough and John Cleese all studied here. The university celebrates its 800th birthday in 2009; look out for special events, lectures and concerts to mark its intriguing eight centuries.

It’s a wonderful introduction to one of Cambridge’s most venerable colleges, and a reminder of who really rules the roost. As you enter the Great Court, scholastic humour gives way to wonderment, for it is the largest of its kind in the world. To the right of the entrance is a small tree, planted in the 1950s and reputed to be a descendant of the apple tree made famous by Trinity alumnus Sir Isaac Newton. Other alumni include Tennyson, Francis Bacon, Lord Byron, HRH Prince Charles and at least nine prime ministers, British and international, and a jaw-dropping 31 Nobel Prize winners. The square is also the scene of the run made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – 350m in 43 seconds (the time it takes the clock to strike 12).


pages: 239 words: 69,496

The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return by Mihir Desai

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, assortative mating, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, carried interest, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, follow your passion, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jony Ive, Kenneth Rogoff, longitudinal study, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, Monty Hall problem, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, principal–agent problem, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, tontine, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

A theory is proposed to explain a mysterious social institution (the Paris Bourse). It is then used to resolve a mid-level mystery in physics (Brownian motion). Finally, it clears up an even deeper mystery in physics (quantum behavior). The implication is plain: Market weirdness explains quantum weirdness, not the other way around. Think of it this way: If Isaac Newton had worked at Goldman Sachs instead of sitting under an apple tree, he would have discovered the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.” Aside from an interesting reversal of conventional wisdom, the story of Bachelier’s discovery is also the story of the two most important risk management strategies—options and diversification.


The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

The obvious answer is "ethical standards rooted in Enlightenment values (liberty, justice, equality, and so on)," but the challenge to thinking about individuals and ethics ought to be obvious by now: when it comes to technological systems, the connections between decisions and outcomes are so attenuated as to render any notion of ethical accountability meaningless. A cognitive scientist working to incrementally improve integration of neurons and electronic circuits is no more accountable for the future impacts of human-machine hybrids-cyborgsthan Isaac Newton, formulating his laws of gravitation, was responsible for the use of those laws in calculating the trajectories of artillery shells and bombs. But the fact that much thinking about ethics is constrained by homage to simplistic Enlightenment values in much the same way as is thinking about technology or policy does not mean that there is no reasonable path forward.


pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

Time flows in one direction: from past to present, from young to old, from life to death.1 The irreversibility of time, much like the attraction of gravity, is a physical reality so conspicuous that it seems it must have an obvious explanation. But it does not. In fact, up until the twentieth century, the irreversible march of time was a puzzle that left some of the most brilliant minds of our species at a loss. Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein both produced successful theories of motion, which are technically time-reversible.2 They explain the motion of cannonballs, planets, and satellites without a clear distinction between where an object is and where it is going. This symmetry, which is true for simple systems, fails to explain why lions eat and digest gazelles instead of regurgitating whole live animals, and why crashed Bugattis do not self-assemble back into functioning vehicles.


pages: 220 words: 66,518

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, correlation does not imply causation, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Mars Rover, nocebo, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, sugar pill

But what great and marvelous advances in biomedical sciences can we attribute to the quantum revolution? Let’s list them in order of their importance: It is a very short list—there haven’t been any. Though I stress the need to apply the principles of quantum mechanics in bioscience, I’m not advocating that medicine throw out the valuable lessons they have learned using the principles of Isaac Newton. The newer laws of quantum mechanics do not negate the results of classical physics. The planets are still moving in paths that were predicted by Newton’s mathematics. The difference between the two physics is that quantum mechanics more specifically applies to molecular and atomic realms while Newtonian laws apply to higher levels of organization, such as organ systems, people, or populations of people.


pages: 257 words: 66,480

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

Those advances not only paved the way for measuring the composition and temperature of stars, but they also underpin today’s exploration of planetary systems in their midst. Decoding Light One critical breakthrough was the discovery by the German-born English astronomer William Herschel in 1800 of a new form of light, while experimenting with a prism and several thermometers. He spread sunlight into a rainbow of colors with the prism, as Isaac Newton had done two centuries earlier, and took the temperature of the different colors. To his surprise, the temperature was highest just beyond red, where he could not see any sunlight. He correctly surmised that a new form of radiation, which he called “calorifc rays” from the Latin word for heat, must be responsible.


pages: 271 words: 68,440

More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos by Dava Sobel

Astronomia nova, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

For the very reason, to be sure, that they are moved in other circles than the one eccentric to the Earth (that is, in concentrics and epicycles), they effect this present irregularity.” Gingerich points out that Kepler’s notes, though sparse, crop up at critical places, uncovering fundamental flaws in Copernicus’s theories. And although Kepler could be trusted to locate those points without help from anyone, nevertheless a trail was marked for him. If Isaac Newton owned a copy of On the Revolutions, it has not survived. In his student days, he undoubtedly consulted one of the three Trinity College first editions still held by that venerable library. After Newton established universal gravitation as the force that kept the planets in their orbits around the Sun, copies of Copernicus’s book came into the possession of many other giants in astronomy, such as comet namesake Edmond Halley, his successor as astronomer royal George Biddell Airy, computing pioneer Charles Babbage, and twentieth-century cosmologist Edwin Hubble, who was first to appreciate the infinite extent and continuing expansion of the universe.


pages: 238 words: 46

When Things Start to Think by Neil A. Gershenfeld

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Bretton Woods, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, disinformation, Dynabook, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information security, invention of movable type, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, means of production, new economy, Nick Leeson, packet switching, RFID, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, the medium is the message, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, world market for maybe five computers

The base of the machine was larger than it appeared; there was room for a small (but very able) chess player to squeeze in and operate the machine. While the Turk might have been a fake, the motivation behind it was genuine. A more credible attempt to build an intelligent machine was made by Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1828 to 1839. This is the seat that was held by Sir Isaac Newton, and is now occupied by Stephen Hawking. Just in case there was any doubt about his credentials, his full title was "Charles Babbage, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., F.R.A.S., F. Stat. S., Hon. M.R.I.A., M.C.P.S., Commander of the Italian Order of St. Maurice and St. Lazarus, Inst. Imp. (Acad. Moral.)


pages: 295 words: 66,824

A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market by John Allen Paulos

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elliott wave, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, four colour theorem, George Gilder, global village, greed is good, index fund, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, mental accounting, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, short selling, six sigma, Stephen Hawking, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, UUNET, Vanguard fund, Yogi Berra

On public television one sometimes sees a fantasia in which diverse historical figures are assembled for an imaginary conversation. Think, for example, of Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin discussing innovation. Sometimes a contemporary is added to the mix or simply paired with an illustrious precursor—maybe Karl Popper and David Hume, Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton, or Henry Kissinger and Machiavelli. Recently I tried to think with whom I might pair a present-day ace CEO, investor, or analyst. There are a number of books about the supposed relevance to contemporary business practices of Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient wise men, but the conversation I’d be most interested in would be one between a current wheeler-dealer and some accomplished hoaxer of the past, maybe Dennis Koslowski and P.


pages: 277 words: 72,603

Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures by Roma Agrawal

3D printing, air gap, Anthropocene, British Empire, clean water, Crossrail, David Attenborough, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elisha Otis, Guggenheim Bilbao, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Leo Hollis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method

It took nearly 4,000 years to beat the height of the pyramids – shaky spires notwithstanding. But in the past 150 years, our structures have grown from about 150m tall to over 1000m. Plotting the heights of the tallest buildings over time demonstrates how technical innovations over the past century have accelerated how high we can build. Isaac Newton famously said that ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ Standing at the top of the tallest tower in western Europe (310m), and aware of all the material and techniques that had gone into its making – the clanging steel and beeping cranes to name a couple – I was vividly reminded of how we got here, of the key people in our history who helped unlock the sky.


pages: 281 words: 72,885

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, active measures, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, liquidity trap, New Urbanism, stem cell, trade route

Through the centuries all glass makers must have noticed that glass could create mini-rainbows on the wall as sunlight hit it at particular angles, but no one could explain the cause, except to state the blindingly obvious, which is that the colors were somehow being generated within the glass. It wasn’t until 1666 that Isaac Newton realized that what was blindingly obvious was blindingly wrong and came up with the real explanation. Newton’s moment of genius was to notice that a glass prism not only turned “white” light into a mixture of colors, but could also reverse the process. From this, he deduced that all of the colors created by a piece of glass were already in the light in the first place.


pages: 262 words: 65,959

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

He constructs various gadgets, ranging from an alarm that beeps every three seconds just to let you know that everything is all right to a shotgun that applies makeup by shooting it directly onto the face. It is during this intense research and development phase that we glimpse Homer standing at a blackboard and scribbling down several mathematical equations. This should not be a surprise, because many amateur inventors have been keen mathematicians, and vice versa. Consider Sir Isaac Newton, who incidentally made a cameo appearance on The Simpsons in an episode titled “The Last Temptation of Homer” (1993). Newton is one of the fathers of modern mathematics, but he was also a part-time inventor. Some have credited him with installing the first rudimentary flapless cat flap—a hole in the base of his door to allow his cat to wander in and out at will.


pages: 233 words: 64,479

The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife by Marc Freedman

airport security, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Blue Ocean Strategy, David Brooks, follow your passion, illegal immigration, intentional community, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, McMansion, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, transcontinental railway, working poor, working-age population

He was eighty at the time, but without the slightest trace of infirmity; one colleague remarked that despite Laslett’s great interest in the question of aging, the historian himself never seemed to age. He was carrying an edition of A Fresh Map of Life, inscribed to me, “In Friendly Solidarity.” For the balance of the afternoon, I sat with him in Trinity’s dining hall under portraits of Isaac Newton, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other distinguished alumni of the college. Laslett proudly noted that Trinity could claim more Nobel laureates than all of France. What I came to realize that day and in later conversations is that just as Laslett saw the Third Age as a kind of culmination for society, the Third Age work was a personal culmination, drawing on all the strands of a remarkable career.


pages: 262 words: 66,800

Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future by Johan Norberg

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, availability heuristic, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, continuation of politics by other means, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Island, Hans Rosling, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, moveable type in China, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, open economy, place-making, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, special economic zone, Steven Pinker, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, very high income, working poor, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

Considering what humanity has been able to accomplish when only a fraction of us had access to a fraction of that knowledge, and could collaborate with only the people we met and knew of, it is easy to predict that a world without such limitations will unleash incredible creativity. Using a classic metaphor of science as a collaborative venture, Isaac Newton wrote, ‘If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ In his era, only a small élite of brilliant scientists lived in this world of connected knowledge, where they could make use of the accumulated knowledge of strangers. Now billions do. This time, we do not just stand on the shoulders of giants, we are all helping each other up.


AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War by Tom McNichol

computer age, electricity market, experimental subject, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Menlo Park, popular electronics, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thales of Miletus

“I started with the first book on the bottom shelf and went through the lot, one by one,” he recalled. “I didn’t read a few books. I read the library.” Edison inhaled thick popular reference books like The Penny Library Encyclopedia and burrowed through serious tomes like Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Isaac Newton’s Principia. He was utterly baffled by Newton’s work, finding the abstruse calculations incomprehensible. “I kept at mathematics till I got a distaste for it,” Edison would later say. Edison would credit his deafness with being instrumental in developing some of his greatest inventions. He spent long hours c03.qxp 7/15/06 30 8:46 PM Page 30 AC/DC devising an improved telephone transmitter because he couldn’t hear the sounds produced by the first Bell phones.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

A scan of “The Development of Abstract Art” is available at <http://www.arthistory-online.info/imagepages/ahom03w07/ahom03w07barrdiagram.htm>. A downloadable movie of a Lorenz strange attractor is available at <http://hypertextbook.com/chaos/movies/lorenz.mov>. 28 . Here I am caging the title of the third book of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Stephenson was of course caging Isaac Newton. Neal Stephenson, The System of the World (New York: William Morrow, 2004). 29 . In The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), neoliberal journalist Thomas L. Friedman looks at these same conditions and sees within them the seeds of what he calls Globalism 3.0. 30.


pages: 229 words: 71,872

Fred Dibnah's Age of Steam by David Hall, Fred Dibnah

Apollo 11, cable laying ship, clean water, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, North Sea oil, railway mania

Around this time Napoleon’s conquests in Europe had caused the price of animal feed to rocket, so why not, reasoned Trevithick, replace live horses with an ‘iron horse’ – one that mine owners could feed with their own coal? An early sketch showing Newton’s idea for a boiler mounted on a carriage. The very first scheme for applying steam to locomotion was probably that of the illustrious Sir Isaac Newton, who in 1680 proposed a machine which consisted of a spherical boiler mounted on a carriage. But it was not until the end of the eighteenth century, when the stationary steam engine had become so well developed, that the possibility of its successful application to locomotion began to be fully recognized, and it was at this time that many inventors tried to tackle the problem.


pages: 201 words: 67,553

Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart by James R. Doty, Md

Isaac Newton, Silicon Valley, social contagion

That might not sound like a lot, but it’s very powerful. It can change everything.” “I don’t know.” “You will. Keep coming back. Keep practicing everything you learn this summer, and someday you will.” I nodded yes, but I didn’t know if I would come back or not. This wasn’t like the magic tricks I wanted to learn. “Do you know who Isaac Newton is?” she asked. “Some kind of scientist?” “Yes, very good. He was a physicist and a mathematician. Maybe one of the greatest scientists of all time. There’s a story about him you might like. He didn’t have a great life. His father died three months before he was born. He was premature and without a father, so you could say he didn’t really get a fair start in life.


pages: 234 words: 63,844

Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein by James Patterson, John Connolly, Tim Malloy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, corporate raider, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Murray Gell-Mann, Ponzi scheme, Stephen Hawking, WikiLeaks

Al and Isabel met on a blind date and married in Malibu in or “around” 2007 (“I don’t keep the dates in my head,” Seckel explained). A few years later, they moved to the South of France, where Seckel continued to trade in rare books and papers. While living in France, he was sued by a Virgin Islands company that accused him and Isabel of fraudulently attempting to sell rare books and a seventeenth-century portrait of Isaac Newton. Seckel had also been trying to sell papers belonging to Isabel’s father. Isabel is Ghislaine Maxwell’s sister and the daughter of Robert Maxwell. It was an odd thing, Epstein’s association with this self-professed PhD who, on closer inspection, turned out to be a bit of a grifter. But the Mindshift conference that Epstein and Seckel hosted in the Virgin Islands did take place, in 2010.


pages: 199 words: 64,272

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

Good for the kids, bad for England. The British mathematician Edmond Halley knew of the work of Pascal and Fermat and figured the math for annuities should be solvable. By the time he was thirty-three years old, Halley had already traveled halfway around the world to map the stars, and helped his pal Isaac Newton publish The Principia, the book that laid out the theory of gravity. (Predicting the return of an as-yet-unnamed comet was still a few years off for Halley.) Around this time, he became editor of this new kind of thing, a scientific journal, and he had the same problem that every editor of every publication has had for all of history: he had to find stuff to fill up his pages.


pages: 194 words: 63,798

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Even if you don’t find the exact particles you’re looking for, I’m positive you’re going to discover something new, because I know there’s more to find. There is a small faction of physicists who theorize that dark matter isn’t matter at all, and that the answer to its riddle won’t be found in a particle accelerator. Instead, they reason the effects of dark matter can be explained by tweaking Isaac Newton’s definition of gravity. An Israeli physicist named Mordehai Milgrom conceived the idea in 1983, when he called for a theory of modified Newtonian dynamics, or MOND. MOND advocates believe that Newtonian gravity works only in high-acceleration environments, like Earth and your solar system. Low-acceleration environments like the outer edges of galaxies operate under different gravitational rules.


The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Ervin Knuth

Abraham Wald, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, Donald Knuth, Eratosthenes, G4S, Georg Cantor, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, NP-complete, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, sorting algorithm, Turing machine, Y2K

Panario, Lecture Notes in Comp. Sci. 1099 A996), 232-243. Factoring over the integers. It is somewhat more difficult to find the complete factorization of polynomials with integer coefficients when we are not working modulo p, but some reasonably efficient methods are available for this purpose. Isaac Newton gave a method for finding linear and quadratic factors of polynomials with integer coefficients in his Arithmetica Universalis A707). His method was extended by an astronomer named Friedrich von Schubert in 1793, 450 ARITHMETIC 4.6.2 who showed how to find all factors of degree n in a finite number of steps; see M.

Homer gave this rule early in the nineteenth century [Philosophical Transactions, Royal Society of London 109 A819), 308-335] in connection with a procedure for calculating polynomial roots. The fame of the latter method [see J. L. Coolidge, Mathematics of Great Amateurs (Oxford, 1949), Chapter 15] accounts for the fact that Horner's name has been attached to B); but actually Isaac Newton had made use of the same idea more than 150 years earlier. For example, in a well-known work entitled De Analysi per JEquationes InBnitas, originally written in 1669, Newton wrote y — Ax y: + b x y: - 12 x y: + 17 for the polynomial y4 — 4y3 + by2 — Yly + 17, while illustrating what later came to be known as Newton's method for rootfinding.

For example, in a well-known work entitled De Analysi per JEquationes InBnitas, originally written in 1669, Newton wrote y — Ax y: + b x y: - 12 x y: + 17 for the polynomial y4 — 4y3 + by2 — Yly + 17, while illustrating what later came to be known as Newton's method for rootfinding. This clearly shows the idea of B), since he often denoted grouping by using horizontal lines and colons instead of parentheses. Newton had been using the idea for several years in unpublished notes. [See The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton, edited by D. T. Whiteside, 1 A967), 490, 531; 2 A968), 222.] Independently, a method equivalent to Horner's had in fact been used in 13th-century China by Ch'in Chiu Shao [see Y. Mikami, The Development of Mathematics in China and Japan A913), 73-77]. 4.6.4 EVALUATION OF POLYNOMIALS 487 Several generalizations of Horner's rule have been suggested.


pages: 684 words: 188,584

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Uranium, thorium, and their ilk aren’t biological, yet they have half-lives, the amount of time it takes for a radioactive element to lose half of its radiant force, which is followed by a loss of a quarter, then an eighth, then a sixteenth, then a thirty-second, and on and on . . . mathematically immortal. That seemingly “dead” rocks can send out powerful rays without external stimulus is counterintuitive, reminiscent of quicksilver, the half-liquid, half-metal state of room-temperature mercury that so transfixed Isaac Newton, he died, poisoned by it. This fundamental condition is nothing less than magical—matter spontaneously converting itself into energy; atoms flying apart all of their own volition; a process disturbing to our common sense of the world. Radiation’s powers rise from a simple condition: fat atoms.

I’d like to thank for their remarkable professional courtesies and hard work both in person and in absentia the staffs of the American Museum of Science and Energy, Niels Bohr Library and Emilio Segrè Visual Archives of the American Center for Physics, Bradbury Science Museum, Bureau of Atomic Tourism, Churchill College Archives Centre, Library of Congress, Los Alamos Historical Society and Museum, Mandeville Department of Special Collections at the University of California at San Diego, Harvey Mudd College Oral History Project on the Atomic Age at Claremont, National Archives and Records Administration, National Atomic Museum, National Security Archive at George Washington University, Nuclear Weapons Archive, Society of Nuclear Medicine, Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago, US Department of Energy, Titan Missile Museum, Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, and Woodrow Wilson Center. Isaac Newton thanked giants who supported him with their shoulders, and though I’m no Newton, there are indeed giants, starting with the magisterial Richard Rhodes, the fundamental overviews of Amir Aczel, Jim Baggott, David Lindley, James Mahaffey, Marjorie Malley, John Mueller, Jay Orear, Jon Palfreman, N.


pages: 733 words: 179,391

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

These breakthroughs include game theory, general equilibrium theory, the economics of uncertainty, long-term economic growth theory, portfolio theory and the Capital Asset Pricing Model, option pricing theory, macroeconometric modeling, computable general equilibrium modeling, and rational expectations.21 Many of these contributions have been recognized by the Nobel Prize committee, and they’ve permanently changed the field of economics from an obscure branch of moral philosophy pursued by gentlemen-scholars, to a full-fledged scientific endeavor not entirely unlike the deductive process with which Isaac Newton explained the motion of the planets from three simple laws. The mathematization of economics is now largely complete, with dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, rational expectations, and sophisticated econometric techniques replacing the less rigorous arguments of the previous generation of economists.

ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS Despite the fact that physics and theory envy may have led economists to unrealistic mathematical extremes, there’s little doubt that we economists have drawn tremendous inspiration from the success of the physical and natural sciences, and that this inspiration has paid off handsomely. In a letter to Robert Hooke in 1676, Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” a particularly humble statement coming from one giant to another. Progress in academia rarely happens in a vacuum, but occurs sequentially as we build on ideas and tools from others, the wisdom of the crowds through time.


Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, the medium is the message

I remember last December, during the flight of Apollo 8, my five-year-old son had one, and only one, specific question: who was driving? Was it his friend Mr. Borman? One night when it was quiet in Mission Control I relayed this concern of his to the spacecraft, and Bill Anders promptly replied that no, not Borman, but Isaac Newton was driving. A truer or more concise description of flying between earth and moon is not possible. The sun is pulling us, the earth is pulling us, the moon is pulling us, just as Newton predicted they would. Our path bends from its initial direction and velocity after TLI in response to these three magnets.

Up until now the earth’s influence has been dominant, but by late tomorrow the moon will take over and our speed will begin to increase again. In the meantime, we have to correct our course slightly, as we have slowly been drifting off since TLI. For the three brief seconds of service module engine firing, Mike Collins will be driving instead of Sir Isaac Newton. Three seconds’ worth! I wonder at the precision of this journey, which people keep comparing with Columbus’s. I recall that as his crew grew more and more restless, with no land in sight, and as the pressure to turn back increased, Columbus is supposed to have doctored the daily log to show that the Niña really hadn’t traveled all that far, and therefore it was reasonable still to be out of sight of land.


Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics by Robert Skidelsky

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, constrained optimization, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kondratiev cycle, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, law of one price, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, long and variable lags, low interest rates, market clearing, market friction, Martin Wolf, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, nudge theory, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, placebo effect, post-war consensus, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, short selling, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, trade liberalization, value at risk, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-sum game

The harm came from changes in the standard, which ‘unreasonably and unjustly gives away and transfers men’s properties, disorders trade, puzzles accounts, and needs a new arithmetic to cast up reckonings, and keep accounts in; besides a thousand other inconveniences’5 – certainly valid concerns. Both sides in the debate accepted the fact that changing the quantity of money would have real effects. Isaac Newton, then Master of the Mint, accepted the case for devaluation, arguing that if the coinage was revalued, as Locke wanted it to be, the money supply would fall, resulting in trade depression: fixed costs required flexible money. Locke, too, understood that halving the money supply would lead either to the halving of output and employment or a halving of wages, prices and rents, though he did not say which.

The 1810 Bullion Report concluded that a ‘rise in the market price of gold above its mint price will take place if the local currency of this particular country, being no longer convertible into gold, should at any time be issued to excess’; the Bank, a private corporation, had failed to restrict its loans out of concern for its own profits.19 It was vain to think that the issue of a discretionary currency could be limited. The Report advocated an immediate resumption of convertibility of notes into gold at the pre-suspension price set by Isaac Newton a hundred years previously – ‘the only true, intelligible, and adequate standard of 47 H i s t ory of E c onom ic T houg h t value’, as Robert Peel called it.20 Bank lending would be automatically curtailed; most of the notes issued in the period of suspension would simply cease to be legal tender.


Firepower: How Weapons Shaped Warfare by Paul Lockhart

Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, disruptive innovation, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, interchangeable parts, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Blériot, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, retrograde motion, Scramble for Africa, technological determinism, three-masted sailing ship

There was no such thing as a weapons designer or a ballistics engineer; in fact, there was no such thing as a science of ballistics, because—outside of architecture, which was still more art than science—there was no such thing as engineering. There was not even an intellectual framework for comprehending the physics of a projectile in flight, because an understanding of motion and the forces that act upon it was just not there before Sir Isaac Newton. Craftsmen, not engineers or scientists, designed firearms, and so innovations were more the result of accidental discoveries or eccentric experimentation, not of planned research. Even as the dynastic states of post-Renaissance Europe were already in the throes of building large and complex bureaucracies, including vast military establishments, this did not translate to government involvement in weapons technology.

Later examination revealed that the guns themselves were just fine, the problems stemming entirely from operator error on the part of poorly trained gun crews. But the bad reputation stuck anyway. Besides the Madsen, the only other light machine gun that found a ready audience was the American-designed Lewis gun, invented by army officer Isaac Newton Lewis in 1911. The gas-operated Lewis gun, fed by means of a high-capacity (47- or 96-round) rotary magazine, was solid and reliable, and at twenty-eight pounds much more portable than the water-cooled guns of the time. It did not find a warm reception in the United States, but the British and the Belgians liked it well enough to place substantial orders just before the outbreak of the First World War.


The Art of Computer Programming: Fundamental Algorithms by Donald E. Knuth

Charles Babbage, discrete time, distributed generation, Donald Knuth, fear of failure, Fermat's Last Theorem, G4S, Gerard Salton, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, linear programming, linked data, Menlo Park, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, sorting algorithm, stochastic process, Turing machine

., we know the value of 10x with an accuracy of better than one part in 10 million (although we still don't even know whether the decimal expansion of 10x is 1.999... or 2.000...). When b < 1, we define bx = A/&)~X; and when b = 1, lx = 1. With these definitions, it can be proved that the laws of exponents E) hold for any real values of x and y. These ideas for defining bx were first formulated by John Wallis A655) and Isaac Newton A669). Now we come to an important question. Suppose that a positive real number y is given; can we find a real number x such that y = bxl The answer is "yes" (provided that 6^1), for we simply use Eq. G) in reverse to determine n and di,d,2,... when bx = y is given. The resulting number x is called the logarithm of y to the base b, and we write this asa; = logby.

A3) is valid for all r, if \x/y\ < 1. It should be noted that formula A3) gives 0° = 1. A4) We will use this convention consistently. The special case y = 1 in Eq. A3) is so important, we state it specially: k = A + x)r, integer r > 0 or \x\ < 1. A5) The discovery of the binomial theorem was announced by Isaac Newton in letters to Oldenburg on June 13, 1676 and October 24, 1676. [See D. Struik, Source Book in Mathematics (Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), 284-291.] But he apparently had no real proof of the formula; at that time the necessity for rigorous proof was not fully realized. The first attempted proof was given by L.

We have a\ = Si, 12 = ^l — ^52, O3 = g5x — 2<Sl52 + 3 53, 04 = 2^5! — j5152 + g52 + |5l53 — |54. (See exercise 9.) The recurrence analogous to C9) is nan = Sian-i — 52an_2 + • • •. 1.2.9 ANSWERS TO EXERCISES 497 Note: The equations in this recurrence are called Newton's identities, since they were first published in Isaac Newton's Arithmetica Universalis A707); see D. J. Struik's Source Booic in Matiiematics (Harvard University Press, 1969), 94-95. 11. Since J2m>i Smzm/m = lnG(z) = Efc>i(-l)fc~1(^ + /*222 + - • • )k/k, the desired coefficient is (-i)kl+k*+-+km-1m(k1 + k2 + ¦ ¦ ¦ + km - l)!/fci! fc2!... km\. [Multiply by (—I)™" to get the coefficient of a*1 a*2- ¦ . cfy?


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

The belief is that on most occasions, the full truth is inaccessible to the few, and hence deference to autocrats and confident planners is a big mistake. 216 / Infotopia Conclusion / Realizing Promises Is human knowledge a wiki? What is known is certainly a product of countless minds, constantly adding to existing information. Each of us depends on those who came before. Sir Isaac Newton famously captured the point, writing in 1676 to fellow scientist Robert Hooke, “What Descartes did was a good step. You have added much. . . . If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Biology, chemistry, physics, economics, psychology, linguistics, history, and many other fields are easily seen as large wikis, in which existing entries, reflecting the stock of knowledge, are “edited” all the time.


Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams

Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K

Cygnus Solutions, the company founded by Michael Tiemann and John Gilmore in 1990, was already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on quality and customizability. What if Red Hat took the same approach with GNU/Linux? "In the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says Young, echoing both Torvalds and Sir Isaac Newton before him. "In business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. The beauty of [the GPL] model is you put your code into the public domain.Young uses the term "public domain" incorrectly here. Public domain means not protected by copyright. GPL-protected programs are by definition protected by copyright.


pages: 238 words: 73,121

Does Capitalism Have a Future? by Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georgi Derluguian, Craig Calhoun, Stephen Hoye, Audible Studios

affirmative action, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, company town, creative destruction, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, distributed generation, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global village, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, loose coupling, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, too big to fail, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

It was this military and ideological stalemate rather than the Protestantism in itself that secured the survival of the first capitalist states like the Netherlands and England. Peter the Great launched his absolutist reformation of Russia only a couple generations after capitalism’s breakthrough in the West. The incredible Tsar Peter, who worked in disguise as apprentice carpenter at the Amsterdam shipyards and probably met Isaac Newton in London, was determined to learn from the best. Holland remained Peter’s first and most ardent love. To appreciate the power of this hegemonic example one might notice that the flag of Russia is a slightly modified Dutch flag, and the canals of Sankt Pietersburg (the original Dutch spelling) have no other reason than Peter’s ferocious belief that a modern capital must have canals like Amsterdam.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Although the Arab Spring uprising and the hacktivist group Anonymous may seem like exceptions in a world still rife with authoritarian power structures, they’re really just discrete, colorful manifestations of a well-established phenomenon. Paradigms, belief systems, prejudices—all exhibit the hallmarks of an emergent phenomenon. An individual can have a breakthrough, but an entire system of ideas, what we called an episteme, these emerge from the multitude, none of them conscious of the act. Gravity is an idea. Isaac Newton, with a hat tip to Galileo, was its author. But the scientific revolution was a gut renovation of mankind’s epistemological beliefs—how we acquire knowledge and justify our beliefs. In short, it was a new set of principles, the brainchild of no one and everyone. It’s no accident that this newfound fascination with emergent systems has coincided with our current historical moment.


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

That’s how we unleash a blossoming of curiosity, and all the benefits that come with it. • • • ROBERT HOOKE WAS A brilliant seventeenth-century English scientist who helped usher in the era of scientific inquiry—moving society away from religious explanations of how the world worked toward a scientific understanding. Hooke was a contemporary and fierce rival of Isaac Newton; some have compared Hooke’s range of interests and skills to Leonardo da Vinci. Hooke contributed discoveries, advances, and lasting insights to physics, architecture, astronomy, paleontology, and biology. He lived from 1635 to 1703, but although he’s been dead three hundred years, he contributed to the engineering of modern clocks, microscopes, and cars.


pages: 290 words: 75,973

The Cloudspotter's Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney

Albert Einstein, haute couture, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Seymour Hersh

You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for this red vision excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow…What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination? 5 Thoreau was echoing the sentiments of the poet, John Keats, who hated Isaac Newton for explaining the rainbow with dispassionate reference to wavelengths of light passing through water droplets. For Keats, there was no soul in the ‘cold philosophy’ of Newton’s explanations: Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?… Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine– Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made The tender-person’d Lamia melt into the shade.6 Altostratus sometimes exhibits supplementary features called ‘mamma’.


pages: 272 words: 76,089

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium by Carl Sagan

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, classic study, clean water, cosmic abundance, dark matter, demographic transition, Exxon Valdez, F. W. de Klerk, germ theory of disease, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, planetary scale, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, stem cell, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, zero-sum game

That's roughly the temperature on the surface of Jupiter's moons—much too cold for life. Jupiter and most of the other planets in our Solar System orbit the Sun in the same plane, as if they were confined to separate grooves on a phonograph record or a compact disc. Why should this be? Why shouldn't the orbital planes be tilted at all angles? Isaac Newton, the mathematical genius who first understood how gravity makes the planets move, was puzzled by the absence of much tilt in the orbital planes of the planets, and deduced that, at the beginning of the Solar System, God must have started the planets out all orbiting in the same plane. But the mathematician Pierre Simon, the Marquis de Laplace, and later the celebrated philosopher Immanuel Kant, discovered how it could have happened without recourse to divine intervention.


pages: 273 words: 72,024

Bitcoin for the Befuddled by Conrad Barski

Airbnb, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Isaac Newton, MITM: man-in-the-middle, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, node package manager, p-value, peer-to-peer, price discovery process, QR code, radical decentralization, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, software as a service, the payments system, Yogi Berra

You might have thought that a world built entirely on decentralized Bitcoin transactions would be a horrific dystopia. But after reading the awesome description of a day in the life of a typical bitcoiner in the year 2030, where everything operates via Bitcoin, we’re sure your worries have been conclusively put to rest. The Bitcoin End Game In 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia, arguably the single greatest piece of intellectual writing in the history of mankind. This book made Newton famous because for the first time in history, someone had discovered simple mathematical formulas that could precisely describe the motion of the planets and other objects under the influence of gravity.


pages: 266 words: 77,045

The Bend of the World: A Novel by Jacob Bacharach

Burning Man, disinformation, haute couture, helicopter parent, Isaac Newton, medical residency, messenger bag, phenotype, quantitative easing, too big to fail, trade route, young professional

Now, uh, well, there’s basically a big digression about how Shea and Wilson stole all of Pringle’s ideas about Weishaupt killing and replacing George Washington, but yeah, basically, he uses Washington, who he either is or is manipulating, and conceives the Forbes expedition, and burns down Fort Duquesne, and erects Fort Pitt, and lays the groundwork for the founding of Pittsburgh. Then etc. etc. ad infinitum, a bunch of boring shit. Then Andrew Carnegie arrives and him and Frick get involved; Frick, by the way, is linked back to the Priory of Sion via a tenuous connection to Isaac Newton; the Pinkertons at the Homestead Strike, that’s all basically a blood sacrifice sort of thing, it begins this century-long magical working, which eventually gets taken over by the CIA, of course, which is where Pringle’s family gets involved. It’s the goddamn Remembrances of Conspiracies Past.


pages: 291 words: 77,596

Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell

airport security, Albert Einstein, book scanning, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, information retrieval, invention of writing, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, language acquisition, lifelogging, Menlo Park, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, performance metric, RAND corporation, RFID, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Ted Nelson, telepresence, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, web application

Someone’s work can be immortalized, as in the paintings of the great masters, buildings by a brilliant architect, or some notable equation. Going deeper, the way they worked may be immortalized: their techniques, their approaches, their professional relationships, and the stories of them at work. For instance, we know a fair bit about the work of Isaac Newton, including the story of him in his early twenties, going to the countryside to avoid an outbreak of the plague and, like any typical young man with too much time on his hands, whiling away his time—inventing calculus and discovering the law of gravitation. Jim Gray’s Web site reveals a lot about him as a computer scientist.


pages: 230 words: 72,642

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, Mark Carwardine

David Attenborough, Isaac Newton, out of africa, South China Sea

What I could never get used to, however, was this situation: the vehicle in front of you is overtaking the vehicle in front of him, and your driver pulls out and overtakes the overtaking vehicle, just as three other vehicles are coming toward you performing exactly the same maneuver. Presumably Sir Isaac Newton has long ago been discredited as a bourgeois capitalist running-dog lackey. Tongling, in turn, made us long wistfully for the cheerful, familiar hominess of Nanjing. To quote the welcoming brochure for tourists that I found in my bleak hotel bedroom: “As a new rising industrial mining city, Tongling has already founded a rather [sic] scale of non-ferrous metallurgical, chemical, textile, building material, electronics, machinery, iron and steel and coal industries; especially the non-ferrous metallurgical building material and chemical industries, which, with a broad prospect of development, have already made or been on the way of making Tongling the major production centre.”


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

“For complicated historical reasons,” he writes, “they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.” There’s no question that Johnson was right: The old, unpersonalized web offered an environment of unparalleled richness and diversity. “Visit the ‘serendipity’ article in Wikipedia,” he writes, and “you are one click away from entries on LSD, Teflon, Parkinson’s disease, Sri Lanka, Isaac Newton, and about two hundred other topics of comparable diversity.” But the filter bubble has dramatically changed the informational physics that determines which ideas we come in contact with. And the new, personalized Web may no longer be as well suited for creative discovery as it once was. In the early days of the World Wide Web, when Yahoo was its king, the online terrain felt like an unmapped continent, and its users considered themselves discoverers and explorers.


pages: 275 words: 77,017

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society by David Wolman

addicted to oil, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, Diane Coyle, fiat currency, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, German hyperinflation, greed is good, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, offshore financial centre, P = NP, Peter Thiel, place-making, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, Steven Levy, the payments system, transaction costs, WikiLeaks

Sounds brazen, but in the annals of counterfeiting lore, Chen is a small fish compared with, say, the $7 million worth of fake notes a Los Angeles man produced in the early 2000s on an inkjet printer that he bought at Staples, or the millions of forged $100 notes printed by Art Williams in the 1990s, or the $16.5 million in fake bills printed by the German graphic artist Hans-Jürgen Kuhl between 2003 and 2005. Certainly Chen wasn’t as daring as counterfeiters who forged coin of the realm back when the crime was punishable by death.3 One such forger was William Chaloner, an enterprising seventeenth-century British charlatan and sex-toy salesman. After his capture and conviction by Sir Isaac Newton, then head of the Royal Mint, Chaloner was hanged, drawn, and quartered. Yet the story of Chen’s parcel is ominous because of its link to more end-of-days-style threats: nukes and terrorism.4 The counterfeits she tried to smuggle into the United States are part of a sprawling investigation that has spanned twenty years, led U.S. authorities to 130 countries, and resulted in more than 200 arrests.


pages: 290 words: 72,046

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

I even negotiated with the former deposed dictator of Egypt to spend a night in the nearly 5,000-year-old Cheops Pyramid in Giza, Egypt. I spent the night alone in the King’s Chamber of the pyramid and slept in the sarcophagus in total darkness. The very same sarcophagus that Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Herodotus, Sir Isaac Newton, and other giants of history had slept in. Media outlets dubbed me the “Thrillionaire.” My Worldwide Business Over the last two decades, my companies have impacted over one million people in more than fifty-seven countries. I deliver keynote speeches and facilitate entrepreneurial training courses around the world.


pages: 249 words: 77,342

The Behavioral Investor by Daniel Crosby

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, availability heuristic, backtesting, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, endowment effect, equity risk premium, fake news, feminist movement, Flash crash, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, housing crisis, IKEA effect, impact investing, impulse control, index fund, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, job automation, longitudinal study, loss aversion, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Murray Gell-Mann, Nate Silver, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, passive investing, pattern recognition, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, science of happiness, Shai Danziger, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, Thales of Miletus, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, tulip mania, Vanguard fund, When a measure becomes a target

Martin Heidegger, a well-respected philosopher, used his keen mind in support of the Nazi party, using spurious arguments to defend reprehensible behavior. William Crookes, who discovered the element thallium, was repeatedly swindled by spiritual mediums but could never be persuaded to give up his spiritualist beliefs. And Isaac Newton, a scientist without equal, lost his fortune in the South Sea Bubble through a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of markets and human behavior. Smarts, it would seem, are no guarantee of being a rational actor. Yes, the lessons you have just learned will be least available to your mind when they are most needed.


pages: 259 words: 76,915

Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith

dark pattern, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, ocean acidification, publish or perish, Rodney Brooks

It’s possible, but I think it’s more likely that Hume did encounter inner speech, but regarded it as one part of the wash of sensations, not as anything special. There are colors and shapes and emotions in there, and echoes of speech as well. Hume’s inattention to inner speech may also have been guided by his overall agenda in philosophy, by the shape of the theory he wanted to defend. Hume was inspired by Isaac Newton’s theories in physics, unleashed about fifty years before. Newton saw the world as made up of tiny objects ruled by laws of motion and a principle of attraction between them, also known as gravity. Hume aimed at an explanation of the same kind of the contents of the mind, and thought that he had discovered a “power of attraction” between sensory impressions and ideas, a complement to Newton’s attraction between physical objects.


pages: 266 words: 76,299

Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History by Stephen Jay Gould

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, correlation coefficient, Drosophila, European colonialism, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Monroe Doctrine, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Scientific racism, sexual politics, the scientific method, twin studies

It had rivals that failed under the weight of contrary evidence and changing attitudes about the nature of life. It has rivals that may succeed, at least in limiting its scope. If I am right, how can Bethell claim, “Darwin, I suggest, is in the process of being discarded, but perhaps in deference to the venerable old gentleman, resting comfortably in Westminster Abbey next to Sir Isaac Newton, it is being done as discreetly and gently as possible with a minimum of publicity.” I’m afraid I must say that Bethell has not been quite fair in his report of prevailing opinion. He cites the gadflies C. H. Waddington and H.J. Muller as though they epitomized a consensus. He never mentions the leading selectionists of our present generation—E.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Just as the earlier development of agriculture transformed human society, industry allowed previously unimaginable feats of both creation and destruction. This Second Disruption was powered as much by a transformation in energy as it was in production. Even as late as the 1600s – the century of Isaac Newton and Galileo – the primary sources of power remained much the same as in antiquity: water, wind, animals and humans. While there had been an energy revolution in medieval Europe, centred around the vertical windmill, this was unevenly distributed and far from exercising a regional, let alone global, impact.


pages: 253 words: 80,074

The Man Who Invented the Computer by Jane Smiley

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Bletchley Park, British Empire, c2.com, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, IBM and the Holocaust, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, machine translation, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Pierre-Simon Laplace, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Turing machine, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

In calculus, the operations change functions into functions. In the mid-1600s, two brilliant men independently invented the mathematics we now call calculus. Just as the question of who contributed most to the invention of the modern computer is the subject of argument, so is the question of who deserves the most credit for developing calculus. Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Leibniz in Germany both made groundbreaking contributions but were not aware of each other’s work. Newton developed calculus as a way to describe physics in mathematical terms. For example, if a mathematical expression describes the position of an object as a function of time, what is the mathematical expression that describes the speed of the object?


pages: 270 words: 79,068

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

He looked like he wanted to get up and leave the interview right then and there. I felt like offering him an aspirin or maybe some Abilify. His reaction surprised me, because he’d done such an excellent job up to that point. I later realized that for me to ask Mark Cranney to describe the proper way to train sales reps was like a layman asking Isaac Newton to explain the laws of physics. Where to begin? After what seemed like five minutes of silence, Mark reached into his bag and pulled out a giant training manual he had designed. He said he couldn’t possibly explain what I needed to know about training in the time we had left, but if I wanted to schedule a follow-up meeting, he would explain the nuances of training salespeople to be elite across a broad set of disciplines including process, products, and organizational selling.


Raw Data Is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

Henry Hammond, “A Brief Vindication of Three Passages in the Practical Catechisme,” in The Workes of the Reverend and Learned Henry Hammond (London: 1674), 248. 13. Francis Bacon, The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam,Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High-Chancellor of England, vol. 2 (London: 1733), 397. 14. Isaac Newton, The Method of Fluxions and Infinite Series (London: 1736), xx. 15. In this vast literature, see, for example, Nicholson Baker, The Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Vintage, 2002); Robert Darnton, The Case for Books (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009). 16. Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K.


pages: 225 words: 11,355

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, deal flow, disintermediation, diversification, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, global reserve currency, Greenspan put, Home mortgage interest deduction, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, long peace, low interest rates, margin call, market clearing, mass immigration, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, pension reform, pets.com, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, reserve currency, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the new new thing, the payments system, too big to fail, value at risk, very high income, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Y2K, yield curve

THE FIRST BUBBLE Everybody who has even a passing interest in economic history has a favorite folly. I confess that the South Sea Bubble of the 1720s is my own top pick, although the extraordinary adventures of the Scots financier John Law in France during the same period makes for even more exciting reading in Ferguson’s hands. In London, bubble mania even swept up Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps the smartest man who ever lived. (While most of us struggled with calculus in school, he largely invented it from scratch.) Like most of the dot.com stocks of the 1990s, the South Sea Company was a company that important people said would make a fortune without ever being quite able to explain how (the story kept changing, from the Latin American slave trade to government debt refinancing, and it never really did much or showed a profit).


pages: 276 words: 78,094

Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy

Airbnb, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, John Gruber, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, web application, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator

Sakurambo (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sakurambo) The electromagnetic radiation that humans can generally see is called the visible spectrum. These wavelengths range from about 390 to 750 nanometers in amplitude and cycle at 400 to 790 terahertz. Around the early 1700s, Isaac Newton discovered that white light refracted through a triangular prism disperses into the visible spectrum of color. By showing that portions of this spectrum traveled through an additional prism unchanged in color, and by recomposing this spectrum back into white light using a lens, he proved that this spectrum truly was the separation of white light, rather than colors somehow created by the prism.


pages: 265 words: 74,000

The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Berlin Wall, Black Swan, business process, call centre, correlation does not imply causation, Drosophila, full employment, illegal immigration, index card, information security, Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, McMansion, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, off-the-grid, PageRank, personalized medicine, recommendation engine, RFID, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, workplace surveillance

Kaplan Publishing, 2006 Brin, David. The Transparent Society. Basic Books, 1998 Courant, Richard, and Herbert Robbins (revised by Ian Stewart). What Is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1996 (originally published in 1941) Dantzig, Tobias. Number: The Language of Science. Fourth edition. The Free Press, 1967 Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. Vintage Books, 2003 Hamm, Steve. Bangalore Tiger. McGraw-Hill, 2007 Henshaw, John M. Does Measurement Measure Up? The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006 Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O'Reilly Media, 2005 O'Harrow, Robert Jr. No Place to Hide. Free Press, 2005 Schultz, Don E., Stanley I.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

For an excellent introduction to the information commons, and the complexities and possibilities for managing it, see Hess and Ostrom (2006), chapter 1. 150 as copyrights and patents have been extended: For a critique of intellectual property in the global context, see especially the work of Vandana Shiva on biopiracy (Shiva 1999). 150 the “on the shoulders of giants” effect: The phrase comes from Isaac Newton, who famously noted, “If I have seen far, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” For discussions of the “on the shoulders of giants” effect, see Scotchmer (1991), Caballero and Jaffe (1993), and Benkler (2006). This is one reason even market-oriented economists often support government funding of basic research and subsidies even for applied research. 151 a wide swath of the economy: The list of sectors where information sharing is becoming common is from Benkler (2006), p. 121. 151 In its online form, this has been dubbed peer production: Peer production is Benkler’s term.


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

Between 1817 and 1823, Comte had worked on a manuscript entitled Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for the Reorganization of Society. In it he argued that the ideal method for determining how best to run a society would come from studying it in the manner of the natural sciences. In the same way that Isaac Newton could formulate how physical forces might impact upon an object, so did Comte posit that social scientists should be able to discover the universal laws of “social physics” that would predict human behavior. 9 This idea appealed immensely to Guerry and Quetelet, who had a shared interest in subjects like criminology.


pages: 238 words: 77,730

Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything by Stephen Baker

23andMe, AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, behavioural economics, business process, call centre, clean water, commoditize, computer age, Demis Hassabis, Frank Gehry, information retrieval, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, job automation, machine translation, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, statistical model, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, thinkpad, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

In order to speed up the machine’s processing of its 75 gigabytes of data, the IBM team processed it all beforehand. This meant that instead of the machine figuring out on the fly the subjects and objects of sentences, this work was done in advance. Watson didn’t need to parse a sentence to conclude that the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and not vice versa. Looking at it from a culinary perspective, the researchers performed for Watson the job that pet food manufacturers like Purina carry out for animals: They converted a rich, varied, and complex diet into the informational equivalent of kibbles. “When we want to run a question,” Ferrucci said, “the evidence is already analyzed.


pages: 253 words: 79,214

The Money Machine: How the City Works by Philip Coggan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, call centre, capital controls, carried interest, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, endowment effect, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", joint-stock company, junk bonds, labour market flexibility, large denomination, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, tulip mania, Washington Consensus, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

For a while it had a whole network of self-regulatory bodies before it settled on the FSA. In the US, supervision has been hampered by the existence of a network of overlapping bodies. It is, in any case, inevitable that the private sector will be able to pay more than the regulators and will attract people who will find ways around the rules. People like to speculate; even Sir Isaac Newton lost money in the South Sea Bubble. Without speculation, Britain would be a far less vibrant society. Fewer new businesses would be started and new products invented. Busts are a price worth paying, the creative destruction that allows an economy to start anew. But the 2007–9 bust is a severe test of that thesis.


pages: 244 words: 73,966

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

active measures, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, dark matter, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum entanglement, retail therapy, scientific worldview, sugar pill, systems thinking, the scientific method

As the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, scientists began trying to explain every phenomenon in terms of interactions between concrete material particles through direct contact. Any explanation that did not conform to this template was considered ‘magical’ and, therefore, invalid. That is why the ideas of an English scientist called Isaac Newton were ignored and even ridiculed at first: Newton dared to propose that objects attracted one another at a distance through an ethereal force he called ‘gravity.’ Yet we know how that story developed. You see, magic is not really a taboo in science. It has never been. After all, the chain of reduction has to end somewhere.


pages: 261 words: 74,471

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

A second, that November, was fatal. On July 1, 1968, we renamed Rock Island in his honor and our company has been known as Koch Industries ever since. I still feel blessed to have worked with my father for those six years. Often when we see farther it’s not because of our own keen sight but, as Isaac Newton said, because we stand on the shoulders of giants. In his own unique way, Fred Koch was such a giant. Virtually all of us learn lessons from our parents, and I’m no different. My lessons weren’t specific to business, but they were fundamental values—integrity, humility, responsibility, work ethic, entrepreneurship, a thirst for knowledge, the desire to make a contribution, and concern for others—that profoundly influenced the way I do business and live my life to this day.


pages: 303 words: 74,206

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change by Ehsan Masood

Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, biodiversity loss, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, energy security, European colonialism, financial engineering, government statistician, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahbub ul Haq, mass immigration, means of production, Meghnad Desai, Mohammed Bouazizi, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, zoonotic diseases

You won’t have been taught this in school mathematics, but until the 1500s algebra was written down using words.2 Historians say that the trend for writers to use symbols for “plus” and “minus” began from around 1400. Symbols such as those used for “equals,” multiplication, and division found use between 1525 and 1687 with the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia. Interestingly, many of the symbols we now use in everyday arithmetic were conceived and adopted in this relatively short 150-year spurt.3 That isn’t the full story, however, as it doesn’t explain how symbols became mainstream in writing, teaching, and research in the social sciences and humanities.


pages: 255 words: 79,514

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar, Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, Donner party, Fellow of the Royal Society, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, mass immigration, Nash equilibrium, nuclear winter, out of africa, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, trolley problem, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile

One way of asking the question, then, is to separate out the capacity for culture (apes can develop variations in behaviour that are random, casual innovations of no particular ecological relevance – a bit like wearing baseball caps backwards) but only humans have the potential for culture that allows them to exploit novel innovations which build progressively on what people have done before – the thing that made possible Isaac Newton’s ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ view of how science, a cultural activity if ever there was one, evolves. [Page 194] Speak easy It is obvious that what we often view as culture in humans is deeply embedded in language. We use language to describe, to teach, to intone our rituals. Animals, as Descartes observed, do not.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

—THOMAS BROWNE 18 | CHEATING DEATH In the 21st-century world of Silicon Valley, not many people had heard of Benjamin Gompertz, and there was a good reason for it. Born in the 17th century, he was a little known, self-taught mathematician. Because he was a British Jew, he had been barred from a university education, so he took up work at the London Stock Exchange. In his spare time, though, he absorbed all the writings of Isaac Newton and mastered every kind of advanced mathematics. When a couple of his close relatives founded the Alliance Assurance Company in 1824, Gompertz became its head actuary. Insurance companies like to know when, as a group, people die, and the central duty of an actuary is to figure that out. And that was how the young math whiz came up with an equation known as Gompertz’s Law of Mortality.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

University Transport Studies Group Annual Conference, July 2021, Loughborough University. URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7520712/does-traffic-really-disappear-when-roads-are-closed. Chapter 12 Optimism bias I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. — Isaac Newton1 By early 1720 Isaac Newton had become suspicious of the stock market hype surrounding the South Sea Company but he made a modest investment nevertheless, and it paid off.2 Seeing the stock rise further he reappraised his views and went all in on what came to be known as the South Sea Bubble, returning to invest more many times.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Newton Graham in France,” New York Times, August 3, 1954. The entire text of the item read: “Frankfurt, Germany, Aug. 2 (Reuters)—Pvt. Newton Graham of Scarsdale, N.Y., committed suicide at La Rochelle, France, the United States Army announced today.” Newton—named after Sir Isaac Newton—was the second of Graham’s sons to be named Isaac Newton; the first had died of meningitis at age nine. Noting Newton’s increasing mental instability, which he labeled “highly neurotic, even probably schizophrenic,” Graham had written letters trying to get him discharged from the army, but failed. (Benjamin Graham, The Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street.

It was so understandable and so obvious and such a sure way of making money. Although it didn’t make you huge money necessarily, you knew you were going to make money.”5 What interested Warren about the Wattles model: the way one company could legitimately buy cheap stock in another. “You don’t have to think of everything, you know. It was Isaac Newton who said I’ve seen a little more of the world than others because I stand on the shoulders of giants. There’s nothing wrong with standing on other people’s shoulders.”6 Eventually Wattles had merged his empire into one company, Eltra Corporation, created through the merger of Mergenthaler Linotype and Electric Auto-Lite.

An unscrupulous operator could milk the subsidiaries for money while saddling the shareholders of the parent company with an unsustainable amount of debt. John S. Tompkins, “Pyramid Devices of 20’s Revived,” New York Times, November 16, 1958. 6. “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of giants.” Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, February 5, 1676. 7. “Fighting the Tape,” Forbes, April 1, 1973. “I trust this man [Wattles] to do intelligent things,” Ruane said. Shareholders had sued over the values in the merger, however, illustrating the conflicts created by the Wattles model. 8. Interview with Charlie Munger. 9.


pages: 786 words: 195,810

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by Steve Silberman

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bletchley Park, crowdsourcing, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, hydroponic farming, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Larry Wall, megacity, meta-analysis, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, placebo effect, scientific mainstream, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, sugar pill, the scientific method, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

The fact that two clinicians, working independently on both sides of the Atlantic, discovered it nearly simultaneously is still considered one of the great coincidences of twentieth-century medicine. The annals of science are replete with episodes of multiple discovery, when a long-hidden pattern in nature suddenly reveals itself to independent investigators at the same time. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed calculus in parallel in the last years of the seventeenth century and then fought a bitter war of words for priority that lasted until Leibniz’s death. If it weren’t for astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius, those ingeniously twisted paper loops would be known as “Listing strips,” after Johann Benedict Listing, who published a paper about them first.

One year later, the Viennese pediatrician Asperger reported a number of children as autistic psychopaths. We can take it for granted that neither was then aware of the other’s work. A few months later, Kanner mentioned Asperger’s name in print for the first and last time, in a magisterially disdainful review of a book called The Autistic Child by pediatrician Isaac Newton Kugelmass. For daring to credit Asperger (misspelled “Ansperger”) for independently confirming Kanner’s discovery, Kugelmass reaped a whirlwind from Baltimore. Calling the book a “laborious enterprise,” Kanner dispatched the potential competition in a single withering sentence cast in the third person: The name is Asperger, and the man, at that time, could have no knowledge of Kanner’s publication; instead, he independently described what he called “autistic psychopathy,” which, if at all related to infantile autism, is at best a 42nd cousin which merits, and has received, serious attention from investigators.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

In fact, it was really a continuation of Christian rationalism, with a subtle but important shift in emphasis, focusing now on precise mathematical definitions of the laws God had inscribed into the universe.45 Of all the brilliant thinkers of the seventeenth century, probably no one made a greater contribution to deciphering these laws than Isaac Newton. In his major work, he accomplished the final step in transforming God's laws into defined laws of nature. With his three mathematically derived “laws of motion,” he established the concept of “laws” as a foundation of scientific cognition. As mathematicians enthusiastically embraced Newton's findings, it seemed self-evident that the theoretical foundation of Christian rationalism—that God had created the universe according to a fixed set of natural laws—was indisputably true.46 After Newton, the idea of laws of nature would become firmly embedded into the structure of modern thought.

When Edward Lorenz announced his discovery of deterministic chaos to a conference of leading scientists in 1972, he sent shock waves reverberating through the halls of academia. When he received the distinguished Kyoto Prize two decades later, he was said to have “brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.” In spite of this, many mainstream scientists—not to mention the rest of the public—continue to understand reality according to the predominant reductionist stance. In 2013, readers of a respected British magazine, Prospect, named outspoken reductionist Richard Dawkins as the world's top thinker.


pages: 829 words: 186,976

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't by Nate Silver

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, availability heuristic, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, book value, Broken windows theory, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Freestyle chess, fudge factor, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, housing crisis, income per capita, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Laplace demon, locking in a profit, Loma Prieta earthquake, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oklahoma City bombing, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, power law, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, public intellectual, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, savings glut, security theater, short selling, SimCity, Skype, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

“This is against the Jesuits and Thomas Aquinas who said we actually have free will. This question is about whether the world is predictable or unpredictable.” The debate about predictability began to be carried out on different terms during the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Isaac Newton’s mechanics had seemed to suggest that the universe was highly orderly and predictable, abiding by relatively simple physical laws. The idea of scientific, technological, and economic progress—which by no means could be taken for granted in the centuries before then—began to emerge, along with the notion that mankind might learn to control its own fate.

Gradually, through this purely statistical form of inference, the probability he assigns to his prediction that the sun will rise again tomorrow approaches (although never exactly reaches) 100 percent. The argument made by Bayes and Price is not that the world is intrinsically probabilistic or uncertain. Bayes was a believer in divine perfection; he was also an advocate of Isaac Newton’s work, which had seemed to suggest that nature follows regular and predictable laws. It is, rather, a statement—expressed both mathematically and philosophically—about how we learn about the universe: that we learn about it through approximation, getting closer and closer to the truth as we gather more evidence.


pages: 252 words: 85,441

A Book for Her by Bridget Christie

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Boris Johnson, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, Costa Concordia, David Attenborough, feminist movement, financial independence, glass ceiling, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, obamacare, Rubik’s Cube, Russell Brand, sexual politics, TED Talk

He told me not to be blasphemous, and that there was no such thing as gravity. If there was it would have been mentioned in the Bible. I can’t believe I’m forty-three and I’m still not allowed to mention physics. When my friends’ parents stay with them they have to hide their collections of porn. When my dad comes to stay I have to hide my collection of books about Isaac Newton. I hid it up a tree in my garden. But I’d forgotten I’d put it there and one day, my dad was sat underneath it and the whole lot fell on him. And squashed his sausage roll. And it was an expensive London one too. And he was still trying to work out the mystery of it. I met Richard Dawkins, the Head of Atheism, at a benefit at the Bloomsbury Theatre once, and because he was wearing sandals I called him Jesus, for a joke.


pages: 287 words: 80,050

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

It seems most reasonable when the object of desire is something like territorial conquests, wealth, power, fame, glory, influence, sex, expensive art objects, fancy clothes, sports cars, and so on. But what if the object of desire is knowledge, understanding, artistic satisfaction, the eradication of a disease, or the elimination of injustice? Is the fact that these desires cannot be finally satisfied a reason for reining them in? Isaac Newton famously lamented that his quest for insight into the nature of things could be compared to the actions of a boy playing on the seashore “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Would it have been better for him to have kept his desire for understanding in check so as to avoid this abiding feeling of disappointment?


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Why have we had so much success in some scientific realms and so little in others, such as unveiling the mysteries of consciousness? Not all systems are alike, and we can’t understand the workings of all systems on the same level. Let’s start with the systems that we do understand. Many of science’s triumphs over the past few centuries are rooted in Isaac Newton’s principles. Newton’s world is a mechanical one, where cause and effect are clear and systems follow universal laws. With sufficient understanding of a system’s underlying components, we can predict precisely how the system will behave. Reductionism is the cornerstone of discovery in the Newtonian world, the basis for much of science’s breathtaking advance in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.


pages: 360 words: 85,321

The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling by Adam Kucharski

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, call centre, Chance favours the prepared mind, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, diversification, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Flash crash, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, locking in a profit, Louis Pasteur, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, p-value, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

A Short History of Mathematical Population Dynamics (2011): 35–39. 128May found that the larger the ecosystem: May, Robert M. “Will a Large, Complex Ecosystem Be Stable?” Nature 238 (1972): 413–414. doi:10.1038/238413a0. 129According to ecologist Andrew Dobson: Dobson, Andrew. “Multi-Host, Multi-Parasite Dynamics” (Infectious Disease Dynamics workshop, Isaac Newton Institute, Cambridge, UK,. August 19–23, 2013). 129Yet, according to Stefano Allesina and Si Tang: Allesina, Stefano, and Si Tang. “Stability Criteria for Complex Ecosystems.” Nature 483 (2012): 205–208. doi:10.1038/nature10832. 131Doyne Farmer has pointed out: Farmer, J. Doyne. “Market Force, Ecology and Evolution.”


pages: 293 words: 81,183

Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill

barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, experimental subject, follow your passion, food miles, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, job automation, job satisfaction, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nate Silver, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, William MacAskill, women in the workforce

Scientists who have clearly had a huge positive effect on the world include Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch, who invented synthetic fertilizer; Karl Landsteiner, who discovered blood groups, thus allowing blood transfusions to be possible; Grace Eldering and Pearl Kendrick, who developed the first whooping cough vaccine; and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier, who discovered HIV. In each of these cases, even after taking into account that these developments would have eventually happened anyway, the good each of these researchers did should be measured in the millions of lives saved. And clearly many other researchers, from Isaac Newton to Daniel Kahneman, have made a huge contribution to human progress even if it’s not easy to quantify their impact in terms of lives saved. Like innovative entrepreneurship, research is an area that is drastically undersupplied by the market because the benefits are open to everyone, and because much of the benefit of research occurs decades into the future.


When Free Markets Fail: Saving the Market When It Can't Save Itself (Wiley Corporate F&A) by Scott McCleskey

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, break the buck, call centre, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, place-making, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, time value of money, too big to fail, web of trust

The very thought of imposing mere transparency—to say nothing of actual restrictions— on this market was greeted ferociously not only from the industry but by other government agencies as well.1 The lineage of the notion that regulation reduces the freedom of the market can be traced back through the history of economic thought at least to the Scottish Enlightenment and the birth of modern capitalism, though the connection is actually a bit tenuous. IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS ADAM Capitalism existed long before Adam Smith, just as gravity existed long before Isaac Newton. There were even attempts to describe what we now regard as markets and market behavior before The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. But The Wealth of Nations gave the world an aha! moment when it described, in a mere thousand pages or so, the way that markets worked at that time. And so, we rightly attribute the birth of the theory of free markets to Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations.


pages: 250 words: 83,367

Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding

Alfred Russel Wallace, call centre, crack epidemic, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Multics, trade route, union organizing

In a May 12, 2008, New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell observes that world-shifting ideas, far from occurring to just one person at a time, crop up in something more akin to clusters. Alexander Graham Bell, Gladwell points out, is credited with inventing the telephone, though Elisha Gray filed a patent for the same invention on the same day. Calculus was discovered independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz; the theory of evolution was formulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at approximately the same time. For Gladwell, “the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable.” Lori Arnold had certainly had an enormous impact on Ottumwa in her day, as well as on a good deal of the greater Midwest.


pages: 302 words: 86,614

The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds by Maneet Ahuja, Myron Scholes, Mohamed El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, high-speed rail, impact investing, interest rate derivative, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, NetJets, oil shock, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Renaissance Technologies, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systematic bias, systematic trading, tail risk, two and twenty, zero-sum game

Includes index. ISBN 978-1-118-06552-5 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-16759-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-16758-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-16757-1 (ebk) 1. Hedge funds. 2. Investment advisors. I. Title. HG4530.A389 2012 332.64’524—dc23 2012010363 To God — The Ultimate Alpha Master Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, ‘I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.’ If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The blast furnace appeared in China in the first century CE and in Scandinavia in the twelfth – the possibility of its transference exists, but the Haya people of northwestern Tanzania have also been making steel for 2,000 years, long before the technology developed in Europe. In the seventeenth century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton and others independently formulated the rules of calculus. In the eighteenth, the realisation of oxygen emerged almost simultaneously in the work of Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley, Antoine Lavoisier, and others, while in the nineteenth, Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin both advanced the theory of evolution.


pages: 294 words: 87,429

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

Rational therapies, such as diets, baths and herbal medicines, came into practice: salad greens, barley water and milk, for example, were encouraged to replace red meat and wine; others endorsed a blend of aloes, black hellebore and colocynth.7 When the Enlightenment began, a string of discoveries in physics, chemistry and medicine–by Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, John Dalton, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta and Edward Jenner–pointed towards the possibility of physical explanations for mental phenomena. The French philosopher René Descartes thought that experiences make tiny pores in the brain like needles making a pattern of holes in a linen cloth.8 David Hartley, the eighteenth-century English physician, claimed that nerve vibrations create sensations and memory, and that violent vibrations are the cause of mental illness.9 These ideas were vague and incomplete, but they were free of mysticism and the supernatural.


pages: 345 words: 84,847

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Wilson wrote that “the great scientist who works for himself in a hidden laboratory does not exist.”15 Although many scientists might like to believe they work in ingenious solitude, they in fact operate in a vast web of interdependency. Even the problems they take to be important are influenced by the larger creative community. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest mind of his time, spent much of his life trying to master alchemy, as that was a prevalent preoccupation in his era. We’re exquisitely social creatures. We labor without pause to surprise each other. Imagine that each time your friend asked you what you did today, you answered precisely the same way.


pages: 302 words: 84,428

Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side by Howard Marks

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, business cycle, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, Isaac Newton, job automation, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stocks for the long run, superstar cities, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, uptick rule, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

No more buyers means the end of the bull market, and vice versa. The last capitulator makes the top or bottom and sets the scene for a cyclical swing in the opposite direction. He is the “fool in the end.” The following account from history shows that even the most brilliant among us can fall prey to capitulation: Sir Isaac Newton, who was the Master of the Mint at the time of the “South Sea Bubble,” joined many other wealthy Englishmen in investing in the stock [of the South Sea Company]. It rose from £128 in January of 1720 to £1,050 in June. Early in this rise, however, Newton realized the speculative nature of the boom and sold his £7,000 worth of stock.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Lawrence’s belief in material success as a manifestation of inner clarity, conviction, or drive was shared by just about everyone in the Bay Area tech scene. Silicon Valley prefers to tell its story in terms of individualistic entrepreneurial achievement against the odds, marked by dramatic moments of insight, in the mythical tradition of Isaac Newton and the Buddha—not as I see it: as a twisted multigenerational shovel-selling enterprise that goes all the way back to the Gold Rush. Code is pure, but politics is messy. Although a klutz with computers, Rome understood the nature of the tech industry more clearly because he did not shy from the gritty work of sorting out who gets what, when, and how.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

My friend Elon Musk is a great example. He dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program in applied physics because he thought he could learn more on his own! He started SpaceX and Tesla by learning literal rocket science and carmaking. So how do you accelerate your learning curve so that you can learn more faster? The key is to stand, as Isaac Newton wrote, “on the shoulders of giants.” This means talking with other smart people, often, so that you can learn from their successes and failures. It’s usually easier and less painful to learn from another’s mistakes than from your own. When I need to learn about a new subject, I’ll definitely devour some books on the topic, but I almost always supplement this reading by seeking out dialogue with leading experts in the field.


pages: 332 words: 81,289

Smarter Investing by Tim Hale

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, Future Shock, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, Northern Rock, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, the rule of 72, time value of money, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

With class ‘A’ drugs encouraging bad behaviour on the upside, and the part of the brain that responds to mortal danger processing losses on the downside, it is not hard to see the emotional perils that lie in wait for us all as investors. Perhaps surprisingly, success in investing is not about deep investment knowledge or intelligence. After all, Sir Isaac Newton managed to lose all his money on the stock market when the South Sea Bubble collapsed, despite his ability to calculate the motion of heavenly bodies. It is about the ability to understand human nature, as suggested by Henry Ford, and to control the harmful decisions that it often drives. Warren Buffett too, concurs.


pages: 348 words: 82,499

DIY Investor: How to Take Control of Your Investments & Plan for a Financially Secure Future by Andy Bell

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, estate planning, eurozone crisis, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, low interest rates, money market fund, Northern Rock, passive investing, place-making, quantitative easing, selection bias, short selling, South Sea Bubble, technology bubble, transaction costs, Vanguard fund

Blinded by greed, investors rich and poor ploughed their savings into what they believed was a one-way bet, without regard to the fact that the territories the company held the rights to exploit were all controlled by Spain, with whom Britain was at war. When promised dividends didn’t materialise, investors started running for the door and the shares were decimated, falling back down to £100 again by the end of the year. And it wasn’t just stupid people who lost money – the very clever Sir Isaac Newton is said to have lost today’s equivalent of £2.4m in the company. The 19th and 20th centuries have also had their fair share of market collapses, with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 perhaps the most famous of them all, kicking off the Great Depression of the 1930s. Within living memory for anyone over the age of 50 is the crash of 1973 and 1974, which was caused by the devaluation of the US dollar and a spike in the price of oil.


Dinosaurs Rediscovered by Michael J. Benton

All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Bayesian statistics, biofilm, bioinformatics, classic study, David Attenborough, Ernest Rutherford, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, ocean acidification

It’s all about interpreting the skeleton, finding a plausible posture for the limbs, and choosing the appropriate modern examples. We may treat the older images with humour – how could they ever have believed that? – but palaeontologists of the future will likely mock our best efforts. Nevertheless, we might still hope that our hypotheses improve through time: ‘we stand on the shoulders’ of previous researchers, as Isaac Newton said. When dinosaurs were first reconstructed, palaeontologists thought they were looking at outsized lizards or crocodiles. About 1830, Gideon Mantell even reconstructed his Iguanodon as an enormous lizard, over 61 metres (200 feet) long, walking on all fours and with its body close to the ground.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The oldest habits of sharing will be central to how we innovate together using new technologies. As innovation becomes more central to create less resource-intensive, environmentally damaging forms of economic activity, so will this ethic of sharing. As we will see, time and again, communities that share and develop ideas usually start around someone who donates their knowledge. In 1672 Isaac Newton sent a long letter to Henry Oldenburg at London’s Royal Society, outlining his theory of light and colour. Oldenburg printed the letter immediately in the society’s Philosophical Transactions which he had created to provide for the fast and orderly dissemination of scientific discoveries. Newton’s gift in making his ideas available for publication created a scientific community through which knowledge flowed for centuries to come.


pages: 261 words: 86,905

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

The idea is that it doesn’t matter what the underlying realities are, just as long as there’s a Greater Fool down the line. This is a reckless strategy, for the obvious reason that at some point the price is going to stop going up; but it is very difficult thing to resist the momentum of a rising market, especially when everyone around you is coining it. Isaac Newton, who has a claim to be the most intelligent person ever to have lived, and who knew a lot about the operation of money thanks to his day job as master of the King’s Mint, himself fell victim to the Greater Fool theory. When the South Sea bubble came along, Newton could see it was based on nothing and was certain to collapse; it was certain to collapse; it was certain to . . . oh, the hell with it, since everyone else was making to much money, he piled in too.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As we have researched the paradigm, we have uncovered over sixty organizations with scores over our ExO threshold, each achieving at least a 10x performance improvement over others in its space. The following are our top 10 (in alphabetical order): Airbnb, GitHub, Google, Netflix, Quirky, Tesla, Uber, Waze, Valve, Xiaomi. It may seem odd to look back four centuries to capture the essence of the most modern of company organizations. Nevertheless, Isaac Newton’s second law precisely summarizes the overall concept of an Exponential Organization. The law, F = MA, states that force causes acceleration in inverse proportion to mass. A small mass allows dramatic acceleration and quick changes in direction—precisely what we’re seeing with many ExOs today. With very little internal inertia (that is, number of employees, assets or organizational structures), they demonstrate extraordinary flexibility, which is a critical quality in today’s volatile world.


pages: 317 words: 84,400

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner

23andMe, Ada Lovelace, airport security, Al Roth, algorithmic trading, Apollo 13, backtesting, Bear Stearns, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, delta neutral, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, dumpster diving, financial engineering, Flash crash, G4S, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, High speed trading, Howard Rheingold, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge economy, late fees, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, medical residency, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Sergey Aleynikov, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

More than a hundred books have been published touting the power of the golden mean and its presence within marketplaces as diverse as commodities, stocks, and foreign exchange. And that’s just in the last twenty years. There’s little evidence that any of this is true, but Wall Street is nothing if not a paradox where cockamamie theories and rigid logic happily coexist in equal abundance. THE GODFATHER OF THE MODERN ALGORITHM Gottfried Leibniz, like Isaac Newton, his contemporary, was a polymath. His knowledge and curiosity spanned the European continent and most of its interesting subjects. On philosophy, Leibniz said, there are two simple absolutes: God and nothingness.13 From these two, all other things come. How fitting, then, that Leibniz conceived of a calculating language defined by two and only two figures: 0 and 1.


pages: 791 words: 85,159

Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid

Alvin Toffler, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cross-subsidies, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, Frank Gehry, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, George Gilder, George Santayana, global village, Goodhart's law, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Y2K

The early postal service deserves some of the credit, too. 28 For not only documents, but letters circulating and recirculating, copied and recopied, among individuals throughout Europe helped to create what have been called "invisible colleges," with members spread across continents and beyond.29 One of the most influential local groups, forming a subsection in this larger network, was the British "Royal Society." The Society included some eminent figures, among them Isaac Newton (who produced Newton's laws of physics), Robert Boyle (who produced Boyle's law of gases), Robert Hooke (who produced Hooke's law of springs), and Christopher Wren (who produced St. Paul's Cathedral). Circulating documents played a critical role in binding together the members of this group. They also helped to link the group to others in continental Europe.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

“The task left to me was to marry them together.”45 The fruit of that marriage was the World Wide Web, the information management system so integral to the Internet that many people think that the Web actually is the Internet. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton once said. And Berners-Lee not only built upon the achievements of the Internet’s founding fathers, but he designed the Web to ride on top of the Internet to create what the Sussex University economist Mariana Mazzucato calls a “foundational technology.”46 His program leveraged the Internet’s preexisting packet-switching technology, its TCP/IP protocols, and, above all, its completely decentralized structure and commitment to treating all data equally.


pages: 339 words: 83,725

Fodor's Madrid and Side Trips by Fodor's

Atahualpa, call centre, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, low cost airline, Pepto Bismol, traffic fines, young professional

Also be aware that at the beginning, middle, and end of July and August, the country suffers its worst traffic jams (delays of six to eight hours are common) as millions of Spaniards embark on, or return from, their annual vacations. Roadside Emergencies The rental agencies Hertz and Avis have 24-hour breakdown service. If you belong to AAA, you can get emergency assistance from the Spanish counterpart, RACE. Emergency Service RACE (Isaac Newton 4, | Parque Tecnológico de Madrid | 28760 | 902/404545 for info, 902/300505 for assistance | www.race.es). Rules of the Road Spaniards drive on the right and pass on the left, so stay in the right-hand lane when not passing. Children under 12 may not ride in the front seat, and seat belts are compulsory for both front- and backseat riders.


pages: 561 words: 87,892

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

The success of the developed world partly rests, then, on freedom of expression and the rule of law (particularly with regard to the establishment of legally enforceable property rights, a point well understood by Adam Smith: the incentive to develop a new product is much reduced if there’s no patent system, for example).14 Meanwhile, contraception has limited population growth in the developed world and, hence, has allowed ever-increasing income to be shared out among the lucky few. Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom in the 1980s and 1990s was achieved in part because women were able to go out to work rather than staying at home to endure far too many births: contraception can also play a big role in creating economic opportunity. As Sir Isaac Newton might have said, we benefit economically from standing on the shoulders of centuries of creative, inventive and innovative giants. Each giant made his or her own contribution to the advancement of productivity. Productivity – measured either as output per hour or output per head – is the elixir of economic growth, the magical process that seemingly bypasses the problem of scarce resources.


pages: 254 words: 81,009

Busy by Tony Crabbe

airport security, Bluma Zeigarnik, British Empire, business process, classic study, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, death from overwork, fear of failure, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gamification, haute cuisine, informal economy, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, loss aversion, low cost airline, machine readable, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, scientific management, Shai Danziger, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, the long tail, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple

I will start by addressing inertia, because I think that’s the biggest issue for most of us. Inertia Inertia “is a power of resisting by which everybody, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.” The above quote comes from Sir Isaac Newton’s seminal work, Principia Mathematica, which became the cornerstone of classical physics. His first law of motion, in that work, was inertia. It’s rightfully first, because without the ability to overcome inertia, nothing will move or change. Inertia applies to objects, but it also applies to getting started on anything, and it can cripple our effectiveness.


The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

Kepler's Second Law establishes that the planet moves fastest when it is closest to the Sun (the point known as perihelion) and slowest when it is farthest (aphelion), in such a way that the line joining the planet to the Sun sweeps equal areas in equal time intervals (Figure 62). The question of what causes Kepler's laws to hold true was the outstanding unsolved problem of science for almost seventy years after Kepler published the laws. It took the genius of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) to deduce that the force holding the planets in their orbits is gravity. Newton explained Kepler's laws by solving together the laws that describe the motion of bodies with the law of universal gravitation. He showed that elliptical orbits with varying speeds (as described by Kepler's laws) represent one possible solution to these equations.


pages: 304 words: 84,396

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success by Matthew Syed

barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, combinatorial explosion, deliberate practice, desegregation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Isaac Newton, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, placebo effect, seminal paper, sugar pill, zero-sum game

Parry O’Brien broke the world shot put record seventeen times by rotating his body through 180 degrees rather than rocking back and forth before releasing the shot. The question is: Where do these paradigm shifts come from? How do these creative leaps, which transform performance by circumventing seemingly immovable constraints, emerge? It is easy to suppose, following the apocryphal story of Isaac Newton, who was said to have invented the theory of gravity after being hit on the head by an apple, that they are like bolts from the blue: random, capricious, and entirely inexplicable. And when you think about it, there is something deeply mysterious about eureka moments. But careful study has shown that creative innovation follows a very precise pattern: like excellence itself, it emerges from the rigors of purposeful practice.


pages: 266 words: 85,265

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal by Erik Vance

classic study, fixed income, Frances Oldham Kelsey, hive mind, impulse control, Isaac Newton, meta-analysis, nocebo, personalized medicine, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, side project, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Yogi Berra

Finding the right imagery to induce hypnosis is tough, and finding the right kind of story to make the suggestion really stick is even tougher. And even if a hypnotist gets the voice, pacing, and storytelling, he has to adapt well on the fly and follow his gut as to what is resonating with the patient. This makes it almost impossible to standardize an experiment. Imagine Sir Isaac Newton measuring the speed of a falling object, but Earth’s gravity keeps changing. That’s what it’s like studying hypnosis. Nevertheless, Patterson and his research partner Mark Jensen have made considerable strides by examining the neural underpinnings of a hypnotic trance. Jensen offers to show me one of the tools he uses in his work, called electroencephalography, or EEG, which measures electricity in the brain.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

“It’s the most famous and wealthiest college in Cambridge,” Price tells me, not without a hint of pride about Trinity, where he is a fellow. Over the last five hundred years Trinity has been one the world’s most exclusive and powerful clubs—educating generation after generation of elites, including the inventor of the theory of gravity, Sir Isaac Newton; the father of empiricism, Francis Bacon; thirty-one Nobel Prize–winning scientists; British monarchs and prime ministers; and even the current Singapore prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, who was awarded a mathematics and computer science degree from Trinity in 1974. Price, a gangly, down-to-earth Australian whose only ornamentation is an expensive-looking timepiece wrapped around his wrist, is a most gracious host.


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

It was in Britain that theologian and philosopher Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century preached a philosophy of empirical knowledge of nature, and where his namesake and perhaps distant relation Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century put forward the modern idea of human progress through science and technology, with science based on the experimental method. This empirical approach underpinned the new physics that arrived with Galileo and Isaac Newton in the next century. As poet Alexander Pope wrote of Newton, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton explained the cosmos with his new physics and made possible many of the scientific breakthroughs that were to come. Newton did his work at the University of Cambridge, an institution that continues to be a pioneer in the basic sciences today.


pages: 280 words: 82,393

Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes by Ian Leslie

Atul Gawande, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, call centre, data science, different worldview, double helix, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, low cost airline, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Socratic dialogue, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture , zero-sum game

Scientists try to knock down each other’s arguments, at the same time as they learn from each other. Science makes the most of reason’s social nature. Much as we celebrate great individual scientists, it is scientists as a group who make progress. Confirmation bias runs amok when an individual is isolated from people who disagree with them, no matter how brilliant their mind. Isaac Newton spent the last decades of his life immersed in a futile quest to turn base metals into gold. If that work didn’t lead anywhere, it was at least partly because he did it alone, without collaborators or reviewers. When he published his groundbreaking work in physics, by contrast, Newton was drawing on the published work of others (‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, as he put it), and doing so in the knowledge that mathematicians and astronomers across Europe would pounce on any weak arguments.


pages: 247 words: 86,844

Perfect Sound Whatever by James. Acaster

4chan, Airbnb, butterfly effect, Donald Trump, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Rubik’s Cube, side project

And who introduced him to that album? You guessed it. Me, baby! Am I suggesting that hipping James to this record was the key catalyst in his realisation that 2016 was the Greatest Year For Music Of All Time? Yes, I am. Why not, eh? If James is allowed to publish his own wild hypothesis, why can’t I? Isaac Newton will get his chance in just a few pages; first let’s hear from the apple. Maybe it’s part of getting older, maybe it’s just life getting under my feet, but it seems like fewer and fewer albums grab me by the throat and kiss me on the lips these days. Of course, when I was a kid it seemed that every week a handful of such albums would arrive in my local record shop.


pages: 303 words: 84,023

Heads I Win, Tails I Win by Spencer Jakab

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fear index, fixed income, geopolitical risk, government statistician, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, price anchoring, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, transaction costs, two and twenty, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

One is that you’ve got to be in it to win it. Unless you’re unbelievably lucky, prolonged periods on the sidelines will cost you. The other is that financial markets can make a fool out of the smartest person you know. In fact, they made a fool out of the smartest person almost anyone has known. No less a genius than Isaac Newton took a bath in a speculative mania. He even sold for a nice gain but jumped back in near the peak. It was called the South Sea Bubble, and at one point it was worth about five times all the money in Europe. And you thought Pets.com was loony! “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people,” said Newton at the time.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

CASINO HACKS 35He modified over thirty machines: Las Vegas Sun (21 Feb 1997), “Slot cheat, former casino regulator, reputed mob figure added to Black Book,” https://lasvegassun.com/news/1997/feb/21/slot-cheat-former-casino-regulator-reputed-mob-fig. 36wearable computer with toe switches: Paul Halpern (23 May 2017), “Isaac Newton vs. Las Vegas: How physicists used science to beat the odds at roulette,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/23/how-physicists-used-science-to-beat-the-odds-at-roulette. 36Nevada banned the use of devices: Don Melanson (18 Sep 2013), “Gaming the system: Edward Thorp and the wearable computer that beat Vegas,” Engadget, https://www.engadget.com/2013-09-18-edward-thorp-father-of-wearable-computing.html. 36Casinos have responded: Grant Uline (1 Oct 2016), “Card counting and the casino’s reaction,” Gaming Law Review and Economics, https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/glre.2016.2088. 37Laws were passed banning: David W.


pages: 1,079 words: 321,718

Surfaces and Essences by Douglas Hofstadter, Emmanuel Sander

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gerolamo Cardano, Golden Gate Park, haute couture, haute cuisine, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, l'esprit de l'escalier, Louis Pasteur, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, place-making, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, theory of mind, time dilation, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Because of these major differences, it was a very bold act of Vitruvius to apply the same word to two phenomena of which one was very well known and the other was hardly known at all (much like Galileo’s daring extension of the word “Moon” to infinitesimal dots that moved, when he observed them through his telescope). It took many centuries more, however, before the theory of sound waves was further advanced, thanks to the work of such insightful scientists as Galileo, Marin Mersenne, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Leonhard Euler. Not surprisingly, there were some significant discrepancies between sound waves in air and waves on water. Among the most important is the fact that, unlike water waves, sound waves are longitudinal, meaning that they involve motions of air molecules along the direction of propagation of the noise.

As mathematicians gradually got used to the fact that these mysterious expressions acted in many ways just as ordinary numbers do, that they were not going to lead people into paradoxical waters, and moreover that they enriched our collective understanding of the world of mathematics, the objecting voices slowly faded away and the mathematical community opened up to them, although not unanimously. Here, for example, is how Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, co-inventor with Isaac Newton of the infinitesimal calculus, described, in 1702, the numbers that René Descartes had dubbed “imaginary”: “an elegant and marvelous trick found in the miracle of Analysis: a monster of the ideal world, almost an amphibian located somewhere between Being and non-Being.” And even Leonhard Euler, the Swiss genius who deserves enormous credit for putting the theory of complex numbers on a solid footing, declared, on the subject of the square roots of negative numbers, that they are “not nothing, nor less than nothing, which makes them imaginary, indeed impossible.”

In essence, the problem was to figure out how changes in gravity’s intensity are propagated across space, and at what speed — finite or infinite? — such “news” travels from one point to another. This boils down to asking “What is the formula for the gravitational attraction between two moving objects?” This was a question that had already been of serious concern to Isaac Newton, the first person to offer a quantitative theory of gravitation, but in all the years since him, no one had yet solved the problem. Einstein, in an attempt to answer this riddle, turned to the analogy between Newton’s formula for static gravitational attraction and Coulomb’s formula for static electrical attraction (the two formulas we mentioned above), and threw in an extra term that seemed exceedingly natural, and which came from his theory of (special) relativity.


pages: 725 words: 221,514

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, banks create money, behavioural economics, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, carried interest, cashless society, central bank independence, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, David Graeber, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, double entry bookkeeping, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Gilder, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, means of production, microcredit, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, oil shock, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit motive, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, seigniorage, sexual politics, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, urban decay, working poor, zero-sum game

Above all, the book was an attempt to establish the newfound discipline of economics as a science. This meant that not only did economics have its own peculiar domain of study—what we now call “the economy,” though the idea that there even was something called an “economy” was very new in Smith’s day—but that this economy operated according to laws of much the same sort as Sir Isaac Newton had so recently identified as governing the physical world. Newton had represented God as a cosmic watchmaker who had created the physical machinery of the universe in such a way that it would operate for the ultimate benefit of humans, and then let it run on its own. Smith was trying to make a similar, Newtonian argument.2 God—or Divine Providence, as he put it—had arranged matters in such a way that our pursuit of self-interest would nonetheless, given an unfettered market, be guided “as if by an invisible hand” to promote the general welfare.

Many who supported this position took explicitly Chartalist positions, insisting that silver has no intrinsic value anyway, and that money is simply a measure established by the state.81 The man who won the argument, however, was John Locke, the Liberal philosopher, at that time acting as advisor to Sir Isaac Newton, then Warden of the Mint. Locke insisted that one can no more make a small piece of silver worth more by relabeling it a “shilling” than one can make a short man taller by declaring there are now fifteen inches in a foot. Gold and silver had a value recognized by everyone on earth; the government stamp simply attested to the weight and purity of a coin, and—as he added in words veritably shivering with indignation—for governments to tamper with this for their own advantage was just as criminal as the coin-clippers themselves: The use and end of the public stamp is only to be a guard and voucher of the quality of silver which men contract for; and the injury done to the public faith, in this point, is that which in clipping and false coining heightens the robbery into treason.82 Therefore, he argued, the only recourse was to recall the currency and restrike it at exactly the same value that it had before.


Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The Abbey Museum ( 10.30am-4pm) exhibits the death masks of generations of royalty, wax effigies representing Charles II and William III (who is on a stool to make him as tall as his wife Mary), as well as armour and stained glass. To reach the 900-year-old College Garden ( 10am-6pm Tue-Thu Apr-Sep, to 4pm Tue-Thu Oct-Mar), enter Dean’s Yard and the Little Cloisters off Great College St. On the western side of the cloister is Scientists’ Corner, where you will find Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb; a nearby section of the northern aisle of the nave is known as Musicians’ Aisle. The two towers above the west door are the ones through which you exit. These were designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor and completed in 1745. Just above the door, perched in 15th-century niches, are the latest sacred additions to the abbey: 10 stone statues of international 20th-century martyrs.

Return to beginning of chapter CAMBRIDGE 01223 Even though Oxford students wouldn’t like to admit it, Cambridge beats Oxford as the quintessential English university town. Whereas Oxford has a solid record in educating political grandees, Cambridge’s reputation lies more in the technological sphere. Past names to have worked and studied here range from Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin to the discoverers of DNA, James Watson and Francis Crick, and renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. In some senses it’s the mother of English scientific ideas. And even though you may think all those medieval and neo-Gothic buildings look serious, Cambridge was where English humour was nurtured, producing John Cleese, Michael Palin and others of the Monty Python team.


pages: 795 words: 215,529

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a willingness, even eagerness, to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys. This strength could have been a crippling weakness had it not been redeemed, time and again, by a powerful intelligence. “Dick could get away with a lot because he was so goddamn smart,” a theorist said. “He really could climb Mont Blanc barefoot.” Isaac Newton spoke of having stood on the shoulders of giants. Feynman tried to stand on his own, through various acts of contortion, or so it seemed to the mathematician Mark Kac, who was watching Feynman at Cornell: There are two kinds of geniuses, the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better.

Now Einstein’s image drew on a colorful and absentminded appearance—wild hair, ill-fitting clothes, the legendary socklessness. The mythologizing of Einstein occasionally extended to others. When Paul A. M. Dirac, the British quantum theorist, visited the University of Wisconsin in 1929, the Wisconsin State Journal published a mocking piece about “a fellow they have up at the U. this spring … who is pushing Sir Isaac Newton, Einstein and all the others off the front page.” An American scientist, the reporter said, would be busy and active, “but Dirac is different. He seems to have all the time there is in the world and his heaviest work is looking out the window.” Dirac’s end of the dialogue was suitably monosyllabic.


Frommer's London 2009 by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Edmond Halley, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, Maui Hawaii, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Sloane Ranger, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal, young professional

Bus: 52. 3 The Pursuit of Science: Cambridge £ 89km (55 miles) N of London, 129km (80 miles) NE of Oxford The university town of Cambridge is a collage of images: the Bridge of Sighs; spires and turrets; willows; dusty secondhand bookshops; the lilt of Elizabethan madrigals; lanes where Darwin, Newton, and Cromwell walked; the grassy Backs of the colleges, sweeping down to the banks of the Cam; punters; and the tattered robes of hurried upperclassmen flying in the wind. Along with Oxford, Cambridge is one of Britain’s ancient seats of knowledge. In many ways their stories are similar. However, beyond its campus, Cambridge has a thriving, high-tech industry. And while Oxford concentrates on the arts, Cambridge has embraced the sciences. Both Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking are graduates, joined by luminaries in every field. There is much to explore in Cambridge, so give yourself time to wander. ESSENTIALS GETTING THERE Trains depart frequently from London’s Liverpool Street and King’s Cross stations, arriving an hour later. For inquiries, call & 0845/748-4950.

It was founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, who consolidated a number of smaller colleges that had existed on the site. The courtyard is the most spacious in Cambridge. Sir Christopher Wren designed the library. Insider’s Tip: It’s fun to contemplate what went on here before you arrived. Pause at Neville’s Court where Isaac Newton first calculated the speed of sound. Take in the delicate fountain of the Great Court where Lord Byron used to bathe naked with his pet bear. Why a bear? The university forbade students from having dogs, but there was no proviso for bears. Years later, Vladimir Nabokov walked through that same courtyard dreaming of the young lady he would later immortalize as Lolita.


pages: 288 words: 92,175

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

They had long dreamed of shooting a spacecraft so high that it would reach a perfect balance between the tug of Earth’s gravitational pull and its own inertia. With the forces equalized, the satellite could orbit Earth. Just as the moon carves a gravitational path around our planet, their satellite would need no external power to encircle the globe. The idea of a satellite ceaselessly orbiting Earth had been around since Isaac Newton’s time. The power to achieve it, however, was new. In 1947 William Pickering shared this idea in a paper in which he recommended that “extensive cosmic ray studies be deferred until a satellite rocket can be produced.” Even then he had the project, both its scope and its ultimate scientific goal, clear in his mind.


pages: 328 words: 91,474

Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar by Kelly Oxford

Ford Model T, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Saturday Night Live

After bringing me my Coke, she escorted us into the cockpit. “Do you want to know what these buttons do?” said the younger pilot. He looked like Woody Harrelson. Natural Born Killers Woody. “No,” I said. I suddenly realized I was leaning against the wall like I was James Dean or something. I’m the Isaac Newton of embarrassing myself with body language. “Do you want to sit in my seat?” Woody asked. His copilot, a Tom Selleck look-alike, shot Woody a WTF look. “I DO!!!” shrieked Aimee, and she jumped onto his lap. Can you imagine the fucking animal sounds that would have come from the passengers if they knew a white girl with dreadlocks was behind the buttons and levers that were keeping them from becoming a pile of shitty pants and flaming metal?


pages: 315 words: 92,151

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

This provided a bridge between computing and the real world, combining virtual reality with a physical environment, using force fields to simulate real objects and giving the “player” a unique experience that could take them to the African veldt or a nineteenth-century saloon—or, as the character Data famously did, put them in a poker game with Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking—played by the actual scientist and Star Trek fan. Like much science fiction, Star Trek had, ever since the original series, taken shields and tractor beams for granted. We’ll come back to the difficulties with creating a holodeck a little later, but let’s make a start with the basics that would be needed to make it work.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The guilds had the political authority to make binding rules and to judge, fine, and punish violations of their rules.25 The rise of the West was made possible by the death of feudalism and the weakening of its all-encompassing regulation of economic life. But the West really came into its own during the Enlightenment. After witnessing the Scientific Revolution, epitomized by Isaac Newton’s epic achievements, Enlightenment thinkers came to see reason, not revelation, as the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. The individual was no longer viewed as helpless in the face of an unknowable reality ruled by incomprehensible supernatural forces. He was a rational creature, competent to understand the world, set his own goals, make his own choices, and support his own life.


pages: 319 words: 89,477

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel Iii, John Seely Brown

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, game design, George Gilder, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Benioff, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Network effects, old-boy network, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, software as a service, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, TSMC, Yochai Benkler

• To how many of these people would you feel comfortable reaching out and mobilizing in a new initiative related to your shared passions and interests? • For these fifty people, how effectively are you using social media to increase your mutual awareness of each other’s activities? Chapter 3 Attracting What We Need Only when the apple fell from the tree did Sir Isaac Newton begin pondering the nature of gravity. Only by setting sail for India did Christopher Columbus find America. Only by going to a conference to hear presentations on the future of the Internet did Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page meet Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi, who later gave them an important key for monetizing search results.


pages: 286 words: 90,530

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Real science has a just entitlement to the tingle in the spine which, at a lower level, attracts the fans of ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Doctor Who’ and which, at the lowest level of all, has been lucratively high-jacked by astrologists, clairvoyants and television psychics.9 In short, though science might unweave the rainbow, in the sense of helping us to understand why we see the colours of the spectrum in it, we can, in the words of James Thompson’s poem to Sir Isaac Newton say that the setting suns and shifting clouds declare ‘How just, how beauteous the refractive law’. So Richard, who quotes the great Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar: This ‘shuddering before the beautiful’, this incredible fact that a discovery motivated by a search after the beautiful in mathematics should find its exact replica in nature, persuades me to say that beauty is that to which the human mind responds at its deepest and most profound.10 A theologian will want to see this phenomenon as grounded in a reality that lies beyond the visible universe.


pages: 356 words: 95,647

Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Brownian motion, correlation does not imply causation, Dmitri Mendeleev, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gary Taubes, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, John von Neumann, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Macrae, Project Plowshare, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, the scientific method, Yom Kippur War

The laws of physics seemed to say one thing, while the observations of biologists seemed to tell another. Physicists would have to follow a tortuous path before they could resolve the contradiction—a path that led, first, to understanding the mystery of matter. By the end of the nineteenth century, physicists and chemists had unraveled many of the mysteries of the universe. Isaac Newton had divined the physical laws that govern how objects move and how gravity works. James Clerk Maxwell had figured out the subtle interrelationships between electric and magnetic forces. Thermodynamicists had codified the laws of energy and heat. At the same time, though, scientists did not know much about matter; they had little idea what sort of stuff made up stars and planets and people.


pages: 383 words: 92,837

Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Columbine, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, facts on the ground, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, out of africa, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, subprime mortgage crisis, Thales of Miletus, trolley problem

SUM is also available as an eBook: 978-0-307-37802-6 Visit David Eagleman’s website: www.eagleman.com Or follow him on: twitter.com/@davideagleman Notes Works listed in full in the Bibliography are referred to only by short title here. Chapter 1. There’s Someone In My Head, But It’s Not Me 1 Music: “Tremendous Magic,” Time December 4, 1950. 2 Something I’ve always found inspiring: the year Galileo died—1642—Isaac Newton was born into the world and completed Galileo’s job by describing the equations underlying the planetary orbits around the sun. 3 Aquinas, Summa theologiae. 4 Specifically, Leibniz envisioned a machine that would use marbles (representing binary numbers) that would be guided by what we now recognize as cousins to punch cards.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

In our modern world, such a revolutionary device would be written about and photographed ad nauseam. Colleges around the world would try to outdo each other making improvements to the device. Entrepreneurs would be raising money to build Antikythera mechanisms cheaper, smaller, and faster. That’s how technology advances: by making incremental improvements on work done by others, a process Isaac Newton described as seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants. In 1687, Newton, on whose shoulders we still stand, published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which describes the laws of motion and gravitation. In just a few formulas, Newton showed that even the planets themselves obey straightforward, mechanistic laws.


pages: 340 words: 94,464

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World by Andrew Leigh

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, Atul Gawande, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Indoor air pollution, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microcredit, Netflix Prize, nudge unit, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, placebo effect, price mechanism, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, statistical model, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, TED Talk, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty

In Shakespeare’s day, these weren’t fringe notions – they were what the best-informed people of that era understood to be true. Among the powerful beliefs of the age was alchemy – the notion that base metals such as lead could be turned into precious metals such as gold. For millennia, alchemy had occupied a significant portion of all scientific research efforts. Even Isaac Newton spent more time on alchemy than on physics, prompting Keynes to suggest that Newton was ‘not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.’ What saw off alchemy was not a culture of experimentation. Quite the contrary: alchemists had been doing experiments for centuries. The critical shift was the movement from secretive, badly designed experiments to experiments that were rigorous and publicly reported.


pages: 315 words: 89,861

The Simulation Hypothesis by Rizwan Virk

3D printing, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, butterfly effect, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, DeepMind, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, game design, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Minecraft, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological singularity, TED Talk, time dilation, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Zeno's paradox

The Old Physics Before we jump into the crux of this chapter’s point about quantum indeterminacy and how it relates to the simulation hypothesis, some background information will be needed. Let’s take a quick look at what’s often called the old (“classical”) physics models, which were built on the works of Sir Isaac Newton, and the new (“relativistic and quantum”) physics, which began with Albert Einstein but was really fleshed out by a number of eminent physicists in the early 20th century, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, and others. In the classical view of physics, the universe operates independently of people like us (or observers) and does so in a purely mechanistic way.


pages: 304 words: 91,566

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption by Ben Mezrich

airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cryptocurrency, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, game design, information security, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, new economy, offshore financial centre, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, QR code, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, transaction costs, Virgin Galactic, zero-sum game

“To me,” Voorhees said, “the mystery surrounding Satoshi is a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it is not built around Satoshi, it’s not built around anyone. To understand Bitcoin, you only need to understand Bitcoin.” Charlie coughed from behind an epic ring of pot smoke, then grinned. “Gravity doesn’t work because you believe in Isaac Newton.” * * * Ten minutes later, the group had moved out of the Bakery and back into the front office of the small startup, so Charlie could finish his guided tour. He was showing them some of his software, running on a pair of desktop computers. “Our company, BitInstant, is part of the Bitcoin economy’s gravity.


pages: 322 words: 92,769

The Alps: A Human History From Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond by Stephen O'Shea

car-free, clockwork universe, Edward Snowden, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Large Hadron Collider, plutocrats, Snapchat, trade route

The Enlightment, then stretching human horizons, had begun touching such young men, or at least those who took their education seriously. Already in the 1680s, an English cleric named Thomas Burnet had posited that the Alps had been formed after the seven days of Creation, thereby explaining the mysterious absence of mountains in Genesis. Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth caused an unholy stir among the learned classes. Isaac Newton, whose Principia on physics (published in the same decade as Burnet’s work) would lead Deists to believe in a clockwork universe, fashioned by God then left alone to keep ticking, felt moved to write a lengthy letter to Burnet and suggest that each “day” of Creation could, in fact, encompass a much, much longer period of time than is customarily understood by that word.


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

Although in 1899 Charles Duell, the US commissioner of the Office of Patents, may have remarked that ‘Everything that can be invented has been invented’, it is clear that knowledge continues to advance. If each generation is born as smart as the previous one and inherits their stock of knowledge, then by exploring and combining different aspects of that knowledge and creating new insights, the world progresses technologically. As Isaac Newton brilliantly summarized, we stand on the shoulders of giants. New technologies, however, mean an end to past jobs and usually the creation of new tasks and roles. At this point in time people are very aware of the jobs that are about to be lost, but of course they are not yet aware of the jobs that will be created.


pages: 290 words: 94,968

Writing on the Wall: Social Media - the First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage

An Inconvenient Truth, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Evgeny Morozov, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, New Journalism, packet switching, place-making, Republic of Letters, sexual politics, social intelligence, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, yellow journalism

COFFEE HOUSES AND COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION Hooke and several of his scientific colleagues, including Christopher Wren and Robert Boyle, had acquired a taste for coffee in Oxford during the 1650s, when they had all been members of a club of science enthusiasts formed by John Wilkins, a senior academic at the university. They continued their tradition of coffeehouse discussion in London, where theirs was one of several groups that came together in 1660 to form the Royal Society, Britain’s pioneering scientific institution. The society’s members, who also included Pepys, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley, would often decamp to a coffeehouse after its meetings to continue their discussions. On May 7, 1674, for example, Hooke recorded in his diary that he demonstrated an improved form of astronomical quadrant at a meeting of the Royal Society, and then repeated his demonstration afterward at Garraway’s coffeehouse, where he discussed it with John Flamsteed, an astronomer who was appointed by Charles II as the first Astronomer Royal the following year.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Lastly, it means children have figured out an efficient way to fill this gap in their knowledge—by asking someone who might know. Why is the sky blue?5 It may be the ultimate child’s question, one that every parent is asked at some point. If you find it hard to answer, you are in good company: Great minds from Aristotle to Isaac Newton grappled with this query over a span of several centuries, notes Nicholas Christakis, writing for edge.org. Christakis credits Newton and his light-refraction experiments with first showing that “white light could be decomposed into its constituent colors.” But this only raised another question: What might refract more blue light towards our eyes?


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

The mass of each planet is fixed, so the only variable of relevance for determining the forces acting on them is the distance between them. We want to analyze this system so that we can determine where the planets will be at any given time in the future, given their current position and velocity. Back in 1687, Isaac Newton made a running start on this problem by solving it for two planets. Then he hit a wall. (It happens, even to the man who discovered the laws of gravity in 1666.) And so did every mathematician after him for the next couple of centuries. The three-body problem was a central topic in mathematical physics from the mid-1700s until the early 1900s, when it was determined that the three-body problem could not be solved in terms of algebraic formulas and other standard mathematical functions.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

In 2008, Hector Zenil, who coleads the Algorithmic Dynamics Lab at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, studied 3,400 people between the ages of four and ninety-one on their ability to behave randomly. The idea is that random thinking—seeing beyond the obvious—is connected to creative thinking. When an apple falls from a tree, the creative person doesn’t simply think that apple must have been ripe; like Isaac Newton, she sees the apple fall and pictures the invisible force of gravity. How did Hector Zenil and researchers test for random thinking? They developed five short “random item generation” tasks performed on a computer, including twelve simulated coin flips, ten simulated rolls of a die, and arranging boxes on a grid.


pages: 474 words: 87,687

Stealth by Peter Westwick

Berlin Wall, centre right, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, fixed-gear, friendly fire, Haight Ashbury, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, knowledge economy, machine translation, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, Teledyne, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white flight

Founded during the war, the institute boasted a stellar staff, including such luminary physicists as Vladimir Fock, who had made major contributions to quantum mechanics and general relativity.19 Much of the institute’s work was secret, which to the young Ufimtsev suggested that his father had not been guilty of whatever had condemned him to the gulag. Otherwise Pyotr never would have been trusted with a security clearance. Ufimtsev took up the problem of diffraction, a topic of long interest to students of nature (including Isaac Newton, for one) that concerns how waves—whether water, sound, or light—behave around the edges of an object. People often think of physics in the twentieth century as exclusively concerned with the exotic new topics of quantum theory and nuclear physics, but older fields such as electromagnetism and optics continued as active research areas, with renewed relevance thanks to technologies such as radar.


The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History by Roland Ennos

British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, Easter island, experimental subject, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, place-making, rewilding, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons, yellow journalism

Britain’s coal supply had been secured, at least for the next half century, enabling industrialization to continue. The heady early days of the Royal Society could not last. The inevitable process of specialization robbed it of some of its impetus, and Hooke was progressively marginalized by the aristocratic establishment. Under Isaac Newton’s presidency the society became obsessed with the ideal of the “philosopher scientist” and progressively devalued the prestige of applied science, cutting British science off for a century or more from its important role in society. Fortunately, by then applied science had taken off elsewhere in Europe, particularly in France, where the famous Encyclopédie, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alambert, stimulated a myriad of encyclopedias of technology that spread knowledge across the world.


pages: 292 words: 94,660

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

This notion helped to create a mechanical explanation for the behavior of light, and physicists continued to depend on and refine it. While Descartes considered the aether to have a static property, Robert Hooke theorized that it vibrated, Christiaan Huygens theorized that it consisted of spinning particles, and then Isaac Newton wiped them both out with his suggestion, delivered in the same memorandum to the Royal Society in which he explained gravity, that “all space is occupied by an elastic medium, or aether, which is capable of propagating vibrations in the same way that air propagates the vibrations of sound, but with far greater velocity.”4 In Newton’s view, small, rapidly moving corpuscles made up the aether.


4. A Trail Through Time by Jodi Taylor

friendly fire, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton

‘No one saw him do it so we still don’t know. It’s very possible he took himself down in the heavy goods lift.’ We both smiled at the memory. ‘Do you remember when John Calvin called you the devil’s strumpet and tried to have you run out of town?’ ‘No,’ I said, regretfully, ‘that didn’t happen to me, but Isaac Newton did once try to have me indicted for stealing his mirror. And it was my bloody mirror in the first place. Do you remember Professor Rapson assembling a Roman tortoise and they all fell into the lake?’ He laughed. ‘We didn’t have that, but I do remember his efforts to invent his own embalming fluid – he never said why and no one dared ask – and he had about twenty sheep’s heads hanging from the trees like wind chimes.


pages: 848 words: 240,351

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, death of newspapers, Isaac Newton, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, pneumatic tube, Suez canal 1869, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, three-masted sailing ship, transcontinental railway

His curiosity about all aspects of seamanship, navigation, ocean currents, rules for passengers, or the personal life history of the captain and each member of the crew seemed inexhaustible. He wanted to know the name of every sail, every stay, brace, bowline, halyard, every rope and how each one worked and he made diagrams to be sure he understood. He talked to the captain (“a very just, straightforward, and sober man”) about astronomy, meteorology, philosophy, history, about Isaac Newton and the American coinage system. He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.”

Roebling and Rink Committee investigation and New York World (newspaper) attacks New York Bridge Company Brooklyn Bridge inauguration and on cable positioning on Committee of Investigation Kingsley interviewed by Rink Committee investigation and New York’s Novelty Iron Works Newell, Stub Newport Daily News (newspaper) Newport Guide, Newton, Sir Isaac Newton, Gen. John Niagara Bridge (International Suspension Bridge) Ellet and footbridge of plans for Niagara Falls Gazette (newspaper) Nicholas II (Czar of Russia) Nitrogen, effects of sudden release of, in bloodstream Nolan, Samuel Barnes B. North American Review (magazine) Northern Pacific Railroad O’Brien, Jimmy Occupational hazards, see Accidents; Bends; Casualties Odium, Robert E.


pages: 879 words: 233,093

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, classic study, collaborative economy, death of newspapers, delayed gratification, distributed generation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, feminist movement, Ford Model T, global village, Great Leap Forward, hedonic treadmill, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, Recombinant DNA, scientific management, scientific worldview, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, supply-chain management, surplus humans, systems thinking, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, working poor, World Values Survey

Such a science should contain the primary rudiments of human reason, and its province ought to extend to the eliciting of true results in every subject.6 Descartes looked into God’s creation and saw a rational and calculable domain. “To speak freely, I am convinced that it [mathematics] is a more powerful instrument of knowledge than any other that has been bequeathed to us by human agency, as being the source of all things.”7 It was left to Isaac Newton, a deeply religious man and the last of the great medieval alchemists, to discover the mathematical methods Descartes dreamed of for describing the mechanical motions that govern God’s creation. His three laws of matter and motion were meant to explain the workings of the divine blueprint. God was praised for being the grand architect of a rationally and mathematically orchestrated mechanical universe.

Quite simply, the ability of individuals to imagine diverse others as if they were oneself does not exist in such societies but does exist in the more complex urban environments from which the Romantics came and of which they were so critical. Shortcomings aside, the Romantic movement offered a sophisticated countercosmology to the mathematical and mechanical universe of René Descartes and Isaac Newton. While Descartes found cosmic unity in mathematical laws and Newton in the laws governing gravitation, the Romantics saw it in the divine interconnectedness of all living beings. Their views anticipated the scientific vision of twentieth-century ecology. Alfred Tennyson wrote:FLOWER in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.59 The Romantics, like the Enlightenment rationalists, believed in progress, but for them it had nothing to do with accumulation of wealth but, rather, the accumulation of natural wisdom.


pages: 362 words: 97,862

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

But how do these rhodopsins manage to sense all that? It’s not only that the waveband is so wide, but it goes far beyond what their primary sensory component, the retinal, can sense by itself. This question goes to the heart of the problem of how we see colors—an old puzzler, but besides quondam perplexities, there are new ones. Isaac Newton opened the subject 300 years ago when he found that white sunlight splits up into a rainbow as it gets refracted. But why we see it in all its glorious polychrome, we have only begun to understand in recent years through refined probings of rhodopsin’s inner structure. A trenchant and singularly fruitful hypothesis was offered as early as 1802 by Thomas Young.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

That’s why large geographical centers of trade—Athens and Rome, for example—have produced so much innovation. Today communities of experts, like Silicon Valley and the Internet, are critical to the evolution of technology. Success bubbles up from a community of hardworking innovators all pursuing the next advancement, learning from the insights of others, and competing with one another. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz invented calculus at the same time. Samuel Morse patented the telegraph hours before someone else applied for the same patent. And Hendrik Lorentz published the equation E=mc2 before Albert Einstein. Each shared a common base of knowledge. The evolution of that knowledge and their familiarity with it was critical to their success.


pages: 299 words: 98,943

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

Until well into the Renaissance in Europe, there was no distinction between chemistry and alchemy or scientist and wizard. What we now see as the rigors of the scientific method, the antithesis of all superstition, emerged only slowly from the alchemical quest for immortality. Many of the great figures at the dawn of the scientific age, such as Robert Boyle and even Sir Isaac Newton, were steeped in alchemical teachings—Newton himself saw his contributions to alchemy as more important than his discoveries in physics. As the successes of the new evidence-based methods rapidly grew, faith in ancient wisdom and the occult eventually declined. If nature’s secrets were to be unlocked, it was through testing new theories against methodically acquired experimental data—not through deciphering old hieroglyphs.


pages: 370 words: 94,968

The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Blue Ocean Strategy, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, l'esprit de l'escalier, language acquisition, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Menlo Park, operational security, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, SimCity, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, starchitect, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Thales of Miletus, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

And I’m like, Damn—that’s, one, quite far from reality, and, two, it’s stretching, like, x number of dollars’ worth of computing at it and barely even making it. So.” Devon laughs. “It feels … It definitely feels good at the end of the day that I can open my eyes and look at something that’s, like, many orders of magnitude more complex.” And to be able to know where to look for it— And how to recognize it. Acknowledgments It was Isaac Newton who famously said (though it was actually a common expression at the time), “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I want to say, more neurologically, that if I’ve been able to conduct a good signal to my axon terminal, I owe it to the people at my dendrites.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1849 about the speed of this change. As more people “dared to know,” controversial ideas became irresistible. Evolution, ideas about electricity or politics, all drew a curious audience. John Locke and Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin were as notable for the crowd of debating citizens they attracted as they were for their ideas. The arguments were intended to elicit truth, to give individuals that same shocking sense that Luther had felt on discovering a powerful idea. But, just as important, these debates were recorded—they were printed in journals and books or repeated in letters.


pages: 370 words: 102,823

Rethinking Capitalism: Economics and Policy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth by Michael Jacobs, Mariana Mazzucato

Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, collaborative economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Detroit bankruptcy, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, facts on the ground, fiat currency, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, private sector deleveraging, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, systems thinking, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, vertical integration, very high income

Indeed, knowledge builds on knowledge: one of the sources of endogenous growth is that constant or increasing returns to ideas can overcome diminishing returns to physical capital.17 It is very hard to unlearn what has been learned and intellectual capital accumulates, so technical progress tends to push productivity ever upwards. As Isaac Newton famously acknowledged, he saw further only by ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. In a virtuous spiral, knowledge begets increased output and liberates resources for further investment. At the same time, as we have dramatically witnessed over recent decades, knowledge and information come to make up a larger and larger portion of GDP.


pages: 361 words: 97,787

The Curse of Cash by Kenneth S Rogoff

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial intermediation, financial repression, forward guidance, frictionless, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, government statistician, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, moveable type in China, New Economic Geography, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, payday loans, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, RFID, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, unconventional monetary instruments, underbanked, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

His discussion is eerily similar in many ways to issues that treasuries discuss today in their constant search for more counterfeit-proof paper currencies, a quest that has resulted in ever more colorful and complicated-looking paper (or now in many countries, polymer plastic) currencies. If anyone doubts the importance of technology in coinage, one only has to note that England turned to Sir Isaac Newton in 1696 to serve as warden of the Royal Mint, and later master of the Mint in1699. Newton helped Britain recoin its currency after debasement and counterfeiting during the Nine Years’ War; he also invented the milled edge, aimed at discouraging counterfeiting and clipping, a version of which still appears on many of today’s coins.11 As we shall see later with paper currency in chapter 6, however, nothing seems to defeat the counterfeiters forever.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

Would that not generate more innovation than if those same scientists worked separately in small, relatively impoverished start-ups of their own? Not necessarily. Ownership makes a difference. Breakthroughs demand obsession. Success in solving a hard problem comes through thinking about it in the shower, while driving to work, during coffee breaks, over dinner, in front of the television. Isaac Newton, asked how he had arrived at his insights, answered, “By keeping the problem constantly before my mind.” If Newton, possibly the greatest scientific genius of all time, had to keep problems constantly before his mind in order to solve them, then mere mortals need to be at least as focused. A large organization, necessarily bureaucratic, is at a disadvantage in trying to cultivate such fixation in its employees.


The rough guide to walks in London and southeast England by Helena Smith, Judith Bamber

Alfred Russel Wallace, Isaac Newton, land tenure, the market place, trade route, urban sprawl

Next up is Clare College, founded in 1325 and thus the city’s second oldest college. Beyond Clare College lies Trinity College, the city’s largest, which was founded by Henry VIII in 1546. Trinity has more famous alumni than any other college – from poets and writers such as Byron and Dryden, to the spies Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, and scientists and philosophers such as Isaac Newton and Bertrand Russell. Most of the colleges are open to visitors at limited times and for a small entrance fee (around £2). Beyond the gates to Clare College, turn right along pedestrianized Garret Hostel Lane, over the Cam and onto Trinity Lane. Here, bear left then right and, at Trinity Street, right again to head down King’s Parade, the narrow medieval street that runs past the front of these colleges.


pages: 325 words: 99,983

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

From 1717 to 1731 the South Sea Company sold no fewer than 64,000 slaves in North America, and the list of its investors reads like a roll-call of British society under George I: the Speaker of the House, more than half the lords and commons, the lord chancellor, and the entire royal family. From the artistic community, John Gay, Alexander Pope and John Vanbrugh were all investors. Their involvement speaks of a deep national association with slavery that touched all classes. When the crash came in 1720 Sir Isaac Newton lost £20,000 and was said to have been unreconciled, to the end of his life, to the fateful words ‘South Sea’. Even the shabby, contrarian figure of the journalist Daniel Defoe was caught up in the fever of slave capitalism. In his time, Defoe had been imprisoned for debt and pilloried for his satire, but for the launch of the South Sea Company he composed a pamphlet puffing its potential, and declaring that he could not recall ‘an undertaking of such consequence’.


pages: 342 words: 99,390

The greatest trade ever: the behind-the-scenes story of how John Paulson defied Wall Street and made financial history by Gregory Zuckerman

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Ponzi scheme, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Robert Shiller, rolodex, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Wozniak, technology bubble, zero-sum game

History is littered with legendary investors who gave in to temptation and rode financial waves to their ruin, or attempted gutsy maneuvers to profit from what they viewed as inevitable crashes, only to suffer humiliating losses that sometimes haunted them for years. In the early eighteenth century, Sir Isaac Newton, the man who discovered gravity as a fundamental force in nature and became the highest officer of Britain’'s Royal Mint, decried the growing passion for shares of the South Sea Company, a British company that gained a monopoly on trade in South America. Newton sold his own stock holdings of the company, worth £PS7,000, for a 100 percent profit, sure the shares would fall with a thud.


One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

air freight, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Boeing 747, book value, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, fixed income, index fund, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, large denomination, money market fund, prediction markets, random walk, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Teledyne, vertical integration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Johnson II, also known as Mister Johnson, who founded the company. Ned Johnson’s Fidelity Trend and Gerry Tsai’s Fidelity Capital outperformed the competition by a big margin and were the envy of the industry over the period from 1958 to 1965. With these sorts of people training and supporting me, I felt as if I understood what Isaac Newton was talking about when he said: “If I have seen further...it is by standing upon the shoulders of Giants.” Long before Ned’s great successes, his father, Mister Johnson, had changed America’s mind about investing in stocks. Mister Johnson believed that you invest in stocks not to preserve capital, but to make money.


pages: 334 words: 98,950

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Shocking though these examples may be, the consequences of the lowering of originality bar is not the biggest problem with the recent unbalancing of the intellectual property rights system. The most serious problem is that the IPR system has begun to be an obstacle, rather than a spur, to technological innovation. The tyranny of interlocking patents Sir Isaac Newton once famously said, ‘if I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.42 He was referring to the fact that ideas develop in a cumulative manner. In the early controversy around patents, some people used this as an argument against them – when new ideas emerge from a ferment of intellectual endeavour, how can we say that the person who put the ‘finishing touches’ to an invention should take all the glory – and the profit?


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

For their frenetic intellectual activity and egalitarian atmosphere, these establishments were called “Penny Universities,” because for the price of a cup of coffee, patrons could hear the latest news, participate in debate, or witness, say, Adam Smith writing his “Wealth of Nations.” If a Londoner was in the mood for science, he could wander over to a place like the Grecian Coffee House, where Isaac Newton, the astronomer Edmond Halley, and the physician Hans Sloane once dissected a dolphin that had wandered into the Thames river. Edification came free with every purchase. Historians disagree about why the Brits switched so abruptly to tea, terminating the London coffee-house phenomenon, but one possible cause is this: the coffee tasted repulsive. * Since the government taxed coffee by the gallon, proprietors had to make it in advance — first roasting the beans in frying pans over a fire, which left them half scorched and half raw — and then reheat the brew later.


pages: 324 words: 101,552

The Pineapple: King of Fruits by Francesca Beauman

British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Corn Laws, Fellow of the Royal Society, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, language of flowers, Maui Hawaii, refrigerator car, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route

Dutch intellect had reigned supreme throughout much of the seventeenth century, with the brilliant analytical minds of men like Joseph Scaliger, Hugo Grotius and Daniel Heinsius; but the end of the century saw the resurgence of England in its ability to yield scholars of the calibre of John Locke and Isaac Newton, both of whose most famous works, Essay Concerning Human Understanding and the Principia, were published in the year that William and Mary ensconced themselves on the throne. Now that England had been similarly released into religious liberty, it seemed to many that it was also her turn to take over the reins of cultural advance and the garden was one area in which this was seen to manifest itself.


pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

The Copernican revolution which Wilkins had been prosecuting in prose had by then been won by other means. By the end of the 17th century, the manner in which the Moon represented a new way of seeing the cosmos had changed from being a question of what it might be to live there, or how it looked, to a matter of the force that governed its movement. ISAAC NEWTON’S “PRINCIPIA” OF 1687 TIED THE MOON TO THE Earth not by similarity but by gravity. Kepler had discovered that the planets moved in ellipses round the Sun; in the decades which followed it was confirmed that moons did the same around the planets fortunate enough to have them. He also found that orbiting objects moved faster when closer to the object they were orbiting than they did when farther away in a mathematically well-defined way.


pages: 385 words: 98,015

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

Matrix mechanics: An approach to quantum mechanics in which observables are represented by matrices. Momentum: A quantity defined for moving particles, which is exchanged in collisions so as to conserve the total. In Newtonian physics it is equal to the product of the mass and velocity. Newtonian physics: A framework for describing and explaining motion, invented by Isaac Newton and presented in his 1687 book Principia Mathematica, which is based on three laws of motion. Nonlocality: Any phenomenon which does not satisfy the principle of locality, and so involves influences transmitted between systems separated in space. Operationalism: An approach to instrumentalism in which one specifies for a physical system a set of operations which include how it is to be prepared and how it is to be measured.


pages: 417 words: 103,458

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

While still working as young patent clerk in 1905, he outlined the foundations for quantum mechanics, special relativity, and the equation for mass?energy equivalence (E=MC2) – the concept for which he is most famous.47 A decade later he would announce his theory of general relativity – tearing through Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity. But his ambitions did not stop there. For the remainder of his life, he planned to build an even grander, all-encompassing understanding of the universe that melded the forces of electromagnetism and gravity into a single, unified theory. ‘I want to know how God created this world.


pages: 347 words: 99,317

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, liberal world order, liberation theology, low skilled workers, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, mega-rich, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, principal–agent problem, Ronald Reagan, South Sea Bubble, structural adjustment programs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Shocking though these examples may be, the consequences of the lowering of originality bar is not the biggest problem with the recent unbalancing of the intellectual property rights system. The most serious problem is that the IPR system has begun to be an obstacle, rather than a spur, to technological innovation. The tyranny of interlocking patents Sir Isaac Newton once famously said, ‘if I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’.42 He was referring to the fact that ideas develop in a cumulative manner. In the early controversy around patents, some people used this as an argument against them – when new ideas emerge from a ferment of intellectual endeavour, how can we say that the person who put the ‘finishing touches’ to an invention should take all the glory – and the profit?


pages: 326 words: 97,089

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

Kepler’s third law allowed him to estimate the proportional distances of the planets: he determined, for instance, that Mars was one and a half times the distance from the Sun that our Earth was, and that Jupiter was more than five times as far, though the actual distance from the Earth to the Sun remained unknown. The importance of Kepler’s findings cannot be overstated. Near the end of the 1600s, Isaac Newton would use Kepler’s laws to derive the universal laws of gravity. Today, knowledge of Kepler’s laws is what allows mission planners to chart the courses for interplanetary spacecraft, and is how planet hunters determine whether an exoplanet resides in its star’s habitable zone based on the world’s orbital period alone.


pages: 364 words: 103,162

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

‘England may justly lay claim to be the Head of a Philosophical League, above all countries in Europe’, wrote Bishop Sprat in his 1667 History of the Royal Society, ‘Nature will reveal more of its secrets to the English than to others, because it has already furnish’d them with a Genius so well Proportion’d, for the receiving and refining of its mysteries.’14 Others have been far more ready to recognize the English genius than the English have been themselves. Voltaire, in many senses the apotheosis of the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’, fell in love with the English intellectual tradition, using his Letters from England to compare Isaac Newton with René Descartes. He observed that the Cartesian belief in pure thought was ‘ingenious, at the best only plausible to ignoramuses’ and simply shouldn’t be spoken of in the same breath as the genius of Newton. ‘The first is a sketch, the second a masterpiece.’ The distinction continues: until very recently Newton’s Alma Mater, Trinity College, Cambridge, had produced more Nobel Prize winners (twenty-nine) than the whole of France.


pages: 471 words: 97,152

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof, Robert J. Shiller

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, financial innovation, full employment, Future Shock, George Akerlof, George Santayana, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are all Keynesians now, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Who has not taken a hike and come across a long-abandoned railway line— someone’s past dream of a path to riches and wealth? Who has not heard of the Great Tulip Bubble of the seventeenth-century Netherlands— a country famous, we might add, for its stalwart Rembrandt burghers and often caricatured as the home of the world’s most cautious people. Who does not know that even Isaac Newton—the father of modern physics and of the calculus—lost a fortune in the South Sea bubble of the eighteenth century? All of which takes us back to Trondheim. Akerlof had stored the observation prompted by his relative’s million-dollar home in the wrong place in his brain. He should have seen that home prices in Trondheim were not merely indicative of curiously high real estate prices in Scandinavia; they were part of a worldwide real estate bubble.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

But what hidden costs do we pay? ACCIDENTAL CONCOCTIONS Ever since the days of alchemy, the field of chemistry has suffered from a tragic flaw: its isolation from the field of biology. Humans were deploying technology long before they understood what causes disease, or how living things interrelate. Sir Isaac Newton may have discovered gravity, but he didn’t seem to have a clue that the heavy metals he experimented with could kill him. In a 1692 letter to colleague John Locke, he blamed his insomnia, depression, poor digestion, amnesia, and paranoia on “sleeping too often by my fire.” We found out otherwise three hundred years later, when scientists analyzed a lock of his hair, passed along as a family heirloom.


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Of course, like any clever bureaucracy, the neocortex often deals with the problems it is assigned by redefining them. On that note, let’s review the information processing in the old brain. The Sensory Pathway Pictures, propagated by motion along the fibers of the optic nerves in the brain, are the cause of vision. —Isaac Newton Each of us lives within the universe—the prison—of his own brain. Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibers, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world around us: heat, light, force, and chemical composition. That is all we ever know of it directly; all else is logical inference.


pages: 377 words: 97,144

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World by James D. Miller

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, barriers to entry, brain emulation, cloud computing, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Netflix Prize, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Norman Macrae, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, placebo effect, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, supervolcano, tech billionaire, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Turing test, twin studies, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture

The stronger the correlation between bathroom and dining room quality, the better the dining room you will get if you succeed in getting a home with fantastic bathrooms. SELECTING AGAINST CERTAIN TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE Embryo selection against autism would likely reduce the number of geniuses. High-functioning autistics often excel at pattern recognition, a skill vital to success in science and mathematics. Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Socrates have all been linked to Asperger syndrome, a disorder (or at least a difference) on the autism spectrum.206 Parents with strong math backgrounds are far more likely to have autistic children, perhaps an indication that having lots of “math genes” makes one susceptible to autism.207 Magnetic resonance imaging has shown that on average, autistic two-year-olds have larger brains than their non-autistic peers do.208 A Korean study found the percentage of autistics who had a superior IQ was greater than that found in the general population.209 Some autistics have an ability called “hyperlexia,” characterized by having average or above-average IQs and word-reading ability well above what would be expected given their ages.


pages: 282 words: 89,436

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation

Then summon up your grasp of mind, Your fancy scientific, Till sights and sounds with thought combined Become of truth prolific. —James Clerk Maxwell, from “To the Chief Musician upon Nabla: A Tyndallic Ode” U ntil the age of relativity and quantum mechanics, the two greatest unifiers of physics were Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Newton’s laws of mechanics demonstrated how the changing motions of objects were governed by their interactions with other objects. His law of gravitation codified one such interaction; the force causing celestial bodies, such as the planets, to follow particular paths, such as elliptical orbits.


pages: 391 words: 99,963

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

Unfortunately, scientific discoveries are not always good news. And there is a nagging fear among scientists that we’ll prove ourselves to be not so different from the woolly mammoth, the symbol of a climate that no longer exists. Chapter 3 The Science of Prediction If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. —Sir Isaac Newton Prediction is an odd thing. Depending on your personality, predictions are a source of either comfort or anxiety. In one broad stroke, they have the power to reassure or destabilize. Predictions often give us an illusion of control in situations that are inherently out of our control. Nothing exemplifies this better than our relationship to weather forecasts.


pages: 366 words: 100,602

Sextant: A Young Man's Daring Sea Voyage and the Men Who ... by David Barrie

centre right, colonial exploitation, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, GPS: selective availability, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, lone genius, Maui Hawaii, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, polynesian navigation, South China Sea, three-masted sailing ship, trade route

The sextant is also versatile. Unlike the astrolabe or quadrant it can be used for measuring angles in any plane—for example, between two heavenly bodies, or between two objects on the surface of the earth. The sextant was the offspring of an earlier invention, the so-called reflecting quadrant. Sir Isaac Newton can take credit for designing the first device of this kind, plans for which were shown to the Royal Society in 1699.12 Another Fellow of the Royal Society, John Hadley (1682–1744), came up with two designs, similar to Newton’s though apparently not derived from them, which he presented to that institution in May 1731.13 One of these was widely adopted following successful sea trials conducted the following year by the Oxford professor of astronomy John Bradley, who was later to become Astronomer Royal.14 By one of those strange coincidences that seem common in the history of science, an American—Thomas Godfrey—independently came up with a similar design almost simultaneously.15 Confusingly, the reflecting quadrant is actually an octant—its arc is one-eighth of a circle (45 degrees) rather than one-quarter.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Whether it be the circulation of the planets or of the blood (or, as we will see, of money), the underlying reality was always the same, namely the mathematical laws that governed bodies in motion. Geometry revealed the basic rules of physical existence. This is not to say that the study of mathematics and geometry had no religious dimensions. Scientific pioneers, including Sir Isaac Newton and Bacon, believed that the study of nature’s physical mechanics was a way of getting closer to God. For many Protestant sects and for Calvinists in particular, the study of mathematics represented the type of ascetic “good work” that could gain God’s approval.4 According to this philosophy, God produced the world as a machine for human beings to use, and it is our moral duty to understand how it functions.


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

“FARC blamed for Colombia club blast,” BBC News, February 9, 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2741105.stm. Page 207 Seth Godin, Unleashing the Ideavirus (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Do You Zoom, 2001), pp. 23–24. Stephen Hawking quote from “Life in the Universe,” 1994 (lecture given by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, the transcript of which can be viewed here: http://www.hawking.org.uk/ pdf/life.pdf). Page 211 Dizzee Rascal, interview by author, July 2002 (this interview originally appeared in the August 2002 edition of RWD magazine). Page 211 Chris Campion, “Inside Grime,” Observer Music Monthly, May 23, 2004. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1219493,00.html.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

It soon departs from all known conceptions of automatic inference or computations. Take scientific discovery, or innovation. ­Human beings invent languages, concepts, and laws to explain the world. This is creative abduction. Creative abductions “leap” to novel conceptual frameworks themselves. Sir Isaac Newton comes to mind. Not only did he extend mathe­matics to describe instantaneous rates of change on curves (or acceleration), he gave words in En­g lish new meanings, to explain physics. Gravity used to mean depth and seriousness—as in gravitas—­a nd the force of attraction we now call gravity was understood as tendency or purpose.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

’Tis a token of grace: they blush for shame. After a run of nearly four hundred years, the purity of English sterling slid to 75 percent, then 50 percent, then 33 percent, then 25 percent. Coins issued in 1551 retained just 17 percent of the silver that coins a decade earlier contained.16 No less a luminary than Sir Isaac Newton, as Warden of the Mint, led the effort to restore the health of British coins. Advanced nations do not melt down or “clip” coins these days to make more money, because they don’t need to. Printing money at a stunning pace is easier and causes more harm. Debasement of fiat currencies is always a temptation.


pages: 329 words: 101,233

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds by Sally Adee

air gap, airport security, anesthesia awareness, animal electricity, biofilm, colonial rule, computer age, COVID-19, CRISPR, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, hype cycle, impulse control, informal economy, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stealth mode startup, stem cell, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury

But while these early microscopes were powerful enough to rule out tubes, they were still too weak to probe nerve structure more precisely. This left a crucial question unanswerable: how could anything be transported through a body without the help of tubes? New theories rushed in to fill the vacuum. Lack of evidence opened the debate to all comers, from the sublimely credentialed to the sublimely questionable. Isaac Newton suggested that the brain’s messages traveled along the nerves by vibration, the way you might pluck a guitar string. At the other end of the spectrum was the conjecture of a spa physician in Bath (these were doctors who took up residence at spas, then at the height of their popularity in England, to prescribe exact drinking and bathing regimes—for a robust fee, of course): David Kinneir claimed in a 1738 tract that, as the animal spirits were carried in the blood, taking the waters at the spa would help to unblock the vessels that carried them.6 It’s worth noting that before the nineteenth century, science was a lot less fussy about its academic boundaries.


pages: 334 words: 103,106

Inheritance by Leo Hollis

British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, coronavirus, Fellow of the Royal Society, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, land bank, Leo Hollis, lockdown, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, place-making, side hustle, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban planning

But just as stocks rocket up, they can plummet with similar velocity. The selloff began in July as confidence started to wobble. By September, the price was back at £175. It was not just investors who lost out, but also bankers and goldsmiths who could no longer recover their loans. Even a genius such as Sir Isaac Newton was burned, forced to write off £20,000, claiming that: ‘I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men.’11 By December, there were calls for a government inquiry, which inevitably uncovered widespread fraud. In the end, the enterprise was folded into the East India Company, and recorded as the first financial ‘bubble’.


pages: 816 words: 242,405

A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Gene Kranz, gravity well, index card, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics

But in that memory lay coded instructions for a flight to the moon, permanently written on bundles of magnetized wire encased in plastic, so that not even a total power failure would erase them. Although the computer was incapable of adding two numbers, when it came to getting to the moon and back it was as good as putting Isaac Newton himself to work on the problem. It could calculate the command module’s position and path through space with the same equations of motion used by Newton to study the orbits of celestial bodies. And it was so essential to flying the command module that the astronauts thought of it as a fourth crew member.

From Marilyn Lovell there were cuff links and a man-in-the-moon tie tack, and from Valerie Anders, a gold “8" tie tack, replete with moonstone. For Bill Anders, the trip home was a long, quiet, and boring fall. At one point, Mike Collins mentioned that his son Michael had asked who was driving up there. Anders replied, “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now." This should have been a welcome chance to catch up on all the sleep he'd missed on the way out, but Anders, at least, wasn't having much luck there. Somehow it worked out that when he was trying to sleep Borman and Lovell were awake, and they got into small talk.


pages: 920 words: 237,085

Rick Steves Florence & Tuscany 2017 by Rick Steves

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, carbon footprint, Dava Sobel, Google Hangouts, index card, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wikimedia commons, young professional

A metal rod sticking out of the top of the jar gave off a small charge when touched, enough to create a spark, shock a party guest, or tenderize a turkey (as Ben Franklin attempted one Thanksgiving). But such static generators could never produce enough electricity for practical use. • In the corner near where you entered, look for a... Model for Demonstrating Newton’s Mechanics: Isaac Newton (1642-1727) explained all of the universe’s motion (“mechanics”)—from spinning planets to rolling rocks—in a few simple mathematical formulas. The museum’s collision balls (the big wooden frame with hanging balls—labeled Elastic and Inelastic Collisions Apparatus), a popular desktop toy in the 1970s, demonstrate Newton’s three famous laws. 1.

In doing so, he shattered the conventional wisdom, established by Aristotle, that heavier objects accelerate faster. We don’t know whether Galileo actually dropped those orbs from this Tower, but we do know he tested this theory of gravity by rolling balls of different weights down ramps, which would have been easier to time (see here). These experiments led to Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of gravity. Moreover, by forging theories through rigorous testing rather than through reasoning alone (as Aristotle had), Galileo helped reenvision science itself. Around 1272, the next architect continued, trying to correct the problem by angling the next three stories backward, in the opposite direction of the lean.


pages: 782 words: 245,875

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, animal electricity, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, book value, British Empire, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, industrial research laboratory, invention of radio, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, margin call, Menlo Park, price stability, railway mania, Right to Buy, the scientific method, trade route, transcontinental railway, working poor

Early theories of heat fell into two distinct categories. Some considered it a distinct type of matter, while others regarded it simply as a condition that could be produced in certain bodies. In the seventeenth century Robert Hooke declared that “heat is a property of a body arising from the motion or agitation of its parts.” Isaac Newton agreed. “Do not all fixed Bodies,” he asked, “when heated beyond a certain Degree, emit light and shine; and is not this Emission performed by the vibrating Motion of their Parts?” One prominent follower of Newton, Wilhelm Jacob ’sGravesande [sic], tried to meld these opposing views by describing heat as a form of motion containing a particular kind of matter similar to that of light.

News of the “Leyden jar,” the first device capable of storing static electricity, spread rapidly and enabled still more imaginative research into the mysterious force.18 In the United States those interested in electricity, most notably Benjamin Franklin, knew little about what was happening in Europe. Franklin, however, did have a thorough knowledge of Isaac Newton’s Opticks. From it he learned not only important concepts, such as the notion of an elastic fluid, but also the rigor of performing and reporting experiments carefully. After hearing a lecture on the subject by Archibald Spencer, a visiting Scotsman, Franklin bought the man’s equipment and plunged eagerly into experimenting.


pages: 354 words: 105,322

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, cellular automata, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, G4S, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global reserve currency, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, jitney, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, operational security, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, plutocrats, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, reserve currency, RFID, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tech billionaire, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transfer pricing, value at risk, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, Westphalian system

The theoretical foundation for free trade is found in the theory of comparative advantage articulated by David Ricardo in The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). It is no dishonor to Ricardo that his theory fails in conditions of globalization. His ideas were brilliant for their time, and advanced the then-young science of economics toward its classical phase. The same can be said of Sir Isaac Newton, whose ideas on celestial mechanics were surpassed by Albert Einstein’s relativity. Newton is counted among our greatest geniuses; Einstein thought so himself. Yet one cannot probe distant galaxies with Newtonian mechanics, nor can one run a twenty-first-century economy on Ricardian principles.


Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In fact, a recent study reports that 92 percent of the world’s top 500 companies are using derivatives.8 The Edinburgh professor Donald MacKenzie has described options pricing theory as “mathematics . . . performed in flesh and blood.”9 As you read on, keep in mind that the powerful body of knowledge motivating this whole story was conceived in the space of only twentyone years, from 1952 to 1973. That is a remarkable fact.* The resulting theoretical structure had no prior existence and only a few scattered roots in the past. Few triumphs in the history of ideas can compare with this achievement. Think of the centuries from Euclid to Isaac Newton to Albert Einstein or the 160 years in the development of modern economic theory from Adam Smith in 1776 to David Ricardo, Alfred Marshall, and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, and finally to John Maynard Keynes in 1936. When I started work on this project early in 1989, all of my heroes were still alive, which was my prime motivation for telling the story at that moment.


pages: 363 words: 109,374

50 Psychology Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, global village, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, Necker cube, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

If you have always firmly held to an Ayn Rand-like belief in personal responsibility, free will, and the primacy of the individual, Skinner may cause a revolution in your thinking. Did he actually believe that the idea of the individual should be abolished? No, simply that of the “inner person” who is said to heroically manipulate their environment to their ends. We don’t change humans by being scientific about them, Skinner remarked, any more than Isaac Newton’s analysis of a rainbow lessened its beauty. While Skinner remains unfashionable, he had a major influence across a range of areas. In time the popular view of him as the cold man of the lab may well change to reflect the reality of someone who knew that there was too much at stake to gamble with ideologies and romantic ideas of humanity.


pages: 397 words: 102,910

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet by Justin Peters

4chan, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Alan Greenspan, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bayesian statistics, Brewster Kahle, buy low sell high, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, Free Software Foundation, global village, Hacker Ethic, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, machine readable, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Open Library, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, social web, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

These four norms are universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.57 Although the word has many political associations, Merton’s term communism simply meant that the products of scientific research belong to the community, and that scientists are rewarded for their discoveries not by money, but by “recognition and esteem.” Isaac Newton was the first to describe his second law of motion, for instance, but that fact does not entitle his descendants to royalties whenever an object comes to rest and stays at rest. Scientific discoveries “constitute a common heritage in which the equity of the individual producer is severely limited,” wrote Merton.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Often, several people create essentially the same device or discover the same scientific law at about the same time, but for various reasons, including sheer luck, history sometimes remembers only one of them. In 1858, the German mathematician August Möbius independently discovered the Möbius strip simultaneously with another German mathematician, Johann Benedict Listing. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently developed calculus at roughly the same time. British naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both developed the theory of evolution by natural selection independently and simultaneously. Similarly, Hungarian mathematician János Bolyai and Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky seem to have developed hyperbolic geometry independently and at the same time.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Shannon was not the first great scientific mind to suppose that his talents extended to the stock market. Carl Friedrich Gauss, often rated the greatest mathematician of all time, played the market. On a salary of 1,000 thalers a year, Euler left an estate of 170,587 thalers in cash and securities. Nothing is known of Gauss’s investment methods. On the other hand, Isaac Newton lost some 20,000 pounds investing in the South Sea Trading Company. Newton’s loss would be something like $3.6 million in today’s terms. Said Newton: “I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Shannon told one of his Ph.D. students, Henry Ernst, that the way to make money in the market was through arbitrage.


pages: 385 words: 103,561

Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boeing 747, British Empire, creative destruction, data acquisition, data science, Dava Sobel, different worldview, digital map, Easter island, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, Eyjafjallajökull, Flash crash, friendly fire, GPS: selective availability, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Ian Bogost, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, lone genius, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, place-making, polynesian navigation, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, skunkworks, smart grid, systems thinking, the map is not the territory, vertical integration

The surveyors had used their measurements to determine the size of one degree of latitude, but the northern arc and the southern arc yielded different figures. The earth, it turned out, was not round. Picard thought the planet was shaped like an upturned egg, with a polar axis longer than its equatorial axis. The Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens, building off work done by Isaac Newton, disagreed. He thought the equatorial axis was longer, making the planet look more like a squat grapefruit. After years of debate between the two camps (egg and grapefruit), Huygens’s theory was proved correct. The geometrically correct term for the earth’s grapefruit shape is “oblate spheroid.”


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

A commenter on Horning’s article writes, “To me, the radical move that Guitar Hero makes is to turn music into an objectively measurable activity that is more amenable to our Protestant work ethic. It brings the corporation’s focus on quantitative performance indicators to the domain of music, displacing the usual mode of subjective enjoyment.” Who’s in control? EVERYTHING THAT DIGITIZES MUST CONVERGE October 19, 2008 “A CENTRIPETAL FORCE,” WROTE Isaac Newton, “is that by which bodies are drawn or impelled, or any way tend, towards a point as to a center.” That’s a pretty good description of what’s been going on with the web. When I started blogging, back in 2005, I would visit Technorati, the then-popular blog search engine, several times a day, both to monitor mentions of my own blog and to track discussions on subjects I was interested in writing about.


pages: 411 words: 108,119

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World by Erwann Michel-Kerjan, Paul Slovic

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, bank run, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, endowment effect, experimental economics, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, George Akerlof, hindsight bias, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kenneth Arrow, Loma Prieta earthquake, London Interbank Offered Rate, market bubble, market clearing, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Oklahoma City bombing, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, social discount rate, source of truth, statistical model, stochastic process, subprime mortgage crisis, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto

It defines superstition as “a belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance.” (Emphasis added.) If magic is supernatural, these definitions are distinguished mainly by the somewhat superfluous adjective irrationally. Of course, what is in accordance with the laws of nature can be somewhat ephemeral. Isaac Newton believed in the transmutation of elements; alchemy was not yet against the laws of nature. Eventually the laws of nature made the transformation of one element into another not possible. Then, in the twentieth century, it proved possible to convert Uranium 238 into Plutonium 239 by irradiation.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

But just before the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, he received a belated, postmortem vindication. By then, it was abundantly clear that rockets could indeed work in space, and the Times issued a correction to its editorial, a half-century after it was published. “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere,” it read. “The Times regrets the error.” FROM A PURELY chronological standpoint, it made sense that Bezos named his first rocket after the father of rocketry. But they were also kindred spirits.


pages: 571 words: 106,255

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

More nations began to switch to a monetary standard of paper fully backed by, and instantly redeemable into, precious metals held in vaults. Some nations would choose gold, and others would choose silver, in a fateful decision that was to have enormous consequences. Britain was the first to adopt a modern gold standard in 1717, under the direction of physicist Isaac Newton, who was the warden of the Royal Mint, and the gold standard would play a great role in it advancing its trade across its empire worldwide. Britain would remain under a gold standard until 1914, although it would suspend it during the Napoleonic wars from 1797 to 1821. The economic supremacy of Britain was intricately linked to its being on a superior monetary standard, and other European countries began to follow it.


The Deep Learning Revolution (The MIT Press) by Terrence J. Sejnowski

AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Conway's Game of Life, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, Henri Poincaré, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Netflix Prize, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PageRank, pattern recognition, pneumatic tube, prediction markets, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Socratic dialogue, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Although the origin of algorithms is ancient, digital computers have more recently elevated them to the forefront of science and engineering. 196 Chapter 13 Complex Systems There was a flowering of new approaches to complexity in the 1980s. The goal was to develop new ways to understand systems like those found in living things, systems more complex than those of physics and chemistry. Unlike the simplicity of how rockets move, which follows Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, there was no simple way to describe how a tree grows. Computer algorithms were used by a colorful group of pioneers to explore these age-old questions about living things. Stuart Kauffman was trained as a physician and became intrigued with gene networks in which proteins called “transcription factors” target genes and influence whether or not they are activated.6 His models were selforganizing and based on networks of binary units that were similar in some respects to neural networks but on much slower timescales.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

He hired an assistant to catalogue the duration of every variant of every procedure. Determined to be as “scientific” as possible in his optimizing, he followed the reductionist impulses of classical mechanics, breaking every job down to its most granular elements, analyzing factory labor with similar intellectual tools to those used by Isaac Newton to deconstruct and make sense of the forces of the physical world. In the case of workers at Midvale, this was a series of discrete motions, which he measured, compared, and then reconstructed, calculating the fastest possible way to execute each step. The small gains made by optimizing each tiny element came together to make a substantial difference in efficiency.


pages: 361 words: 105,938

The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

British Empire, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, mortgage debt, spinning jenny, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman

I think it a high privilege to fill this Chair, on an occasion when we are not met coldly to deliberate on the balance of conflicting claims in which, after all, we may go wrong, and give the prize to one man by injustice to another; but to perform a sacred duty where there is no room for doubt or error, and to record an act of public gratitude, in which the judgment and the feelings are united. William Smith, now sixty-two years old, slightly lame from rheumatism, a little deaf, but otherwise as fit and wiry as a field geologist has a right to be, sat beaming throughout. He made a short speech of thanks, noting that Sir Isaac Newton had been born on the Oolite, and remarking on how the science of geology might have changed “had he looked down at the ground instead of up at the apple”—a remark that produced a clatter of (presumably polite) laughter that enabled Smith to resume his place and “hide my honoured head among the seated.”


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Dissatisfaction with the Royal Observatory’s performance had come to a head in 1707, with its experts still apparently clueless after more than three decades of research. One foggy night Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, wrongly believing that his fleet was further west of the English mainland, wrecked four ships on the Isles of Scilly. Sir Clowdisley’s miscalculation led to more deaths than the sinking of the Titanic. The British parliament turned to Sir Isaac Newton and the comet expert Edmond Halley for advice, and in 1714 passed the Act of Longitude, promising a prize of £20,000 for a solution to the problem. Compared with the typical wage of the day, this was over £30 million pounds in today’s terms. The prize transformed the way that the problem of longitude was attacked.


pages: 350 words: 103,270

The Devil's Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street . . . And Are Ready to Do It Again by Nicholas Dunbar

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, bonus culture, book value, break the buck, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delayed gratification, diversification, Edmond Halley, facts on the ground, fear index, financial innovation, fixed income, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, proprietary trading, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

It was an era of aristocratic gamblers, lottery players, and insurance entrepreneurs who were prepared to pay for information that gave them an edge in the various bets they were making. Scurrying to satisfy this demand were mathematicians versed in the newly invented mathematics of probability, which seemed to tame uncertainty. Abraham de Moivre, a penniless Huguenot expelled from Louis XIV’s France, had befriended Sir Isaac Newton and was recognized by the Royal Society for his skills in mathematics, but none of that paid the bills. So de Moivre put his services up for sale in London’s Covent Garden, where a corner of Slaughter’s coffeehouse served as his makeshift office. There, he was sought out by gamblers such as Francis Robartes, the Earl of Radnor, a denizen of the card and dice tables in London’s high-end gambling clubs.


pages: 372 words: 107,587

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Economic philosophers, for their part, could point to price as arbiter of supply and demand, acting everywhere to allocate resources far more effectively than any human manager or bureaucrat could ever possibly do. Surely this was a principle as universal and impersonal as the force of gravitation! Isaac Newton had shown there was more to the motions of the stars and planets than could be found in the book of Genesis; similarly, Adam Smith was revealing more potential in the principles and practice of trade than had ever been realized through the ancient, formal relations between princes and peasants, or among members of the medieval crafts guilds.


pages: 355 words: 63

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Today’s innovators are acutely aware that future innovations will eventually render obsolete today’s inventions. That lowers the return to today’s invention and so tends to discourage innovation,an unfortunate circumstance because tomorrow’s inventions are going to build on today’s invention. A s Isaac Newton said, “If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants.”14 Today’s innovators don’t take into account that their innovation will permanently increase the productivity of the economy; they get the returns to their innovation only until the next ”new, new thing” comes along.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

Lipson and Schmidt chose the double pendulum because it’s a good example of a system that is simple to set up but quickly exhibits chaotic behaviour – and would therefore be a good test of the robot brain’s skills. The results were startling. In fact, the Starfish brain went a long way to deriving the laws of motion, previously sweated over for decades by the likes of Isaac Newton. And it did it in three hours. It followed the same process as when it sat in the Starfish, guessing at models (mathematical equations) that might explain what it had seen so far, then creating new experiments (new starting positions for the pendulum) that targeted the areas of most disagreement between equations it had guessed at so far.


pages: 385 words: 111,807

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, antiwork, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, discovery of the americas, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land reform, liberation theology, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, post-industrial society, precariat, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, structural adjustment programs, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey

This did not mean that the central bank had to have in reserve an amount of gold equal to the value of the currency that it had issued; however, the convertibility of paper money into gold made it necessary for it to hold a very large gold reserve – for example, the US Federal Reserve Board kept gold equivalent to 40 per cent of the value of currency it issued. The result was that the central bank had little discretion in deciding how much paper money it could issue. The Gold Standard was first adopted by Britain in 1717 – by Isaac Newton,* the then head of the Royal Mint – and adopted by the other European countries in the 1870s. This system played a very important role in the evolution of capitalism in the next two generations, but that is a subject for later: see Chapter 3. Use of banknotes is one thing, but saving with and borrowing from banks – namely, banking – is another.


A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

There are no lone geniuses, never evil geniuses, and very rarely any heretical geniuses. Almost all science is done by very normal people working in teams or in cahoots with others in similar or dissimilar fields, and they build knowledge on the shoulders of historical and contemporary giants, as Isaac Newton once suggested, parroting the words of the eleventh-century philosopher Bernard of Chartres, who was referencing the Greek myth of the temporarily blinded hunter Orion, who saw further by sitting a dwarf on his shoulders. The science in this book is perhaps more collaborative than most, as it involves the introduction of a new discipline, genomics, into older ones, namely history, archaeology, palaeoanthropology, medicine and psychology.


pages: 408 words: 108,985

Rewriting the Rules of the European Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, deindustrialization, discovery of DNA, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, mini-job, moral hazard, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paris climate accords, patent troll, pension reform, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Well-designed intellectual property rights regimes attempt to minimize these static harms and maximize the dynamic benefits. Poorly designed intellectual property regimes may even impede innovation, for instance, by making access to knowledge, which is the most important input to any research, more difficult to come by. “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Isaac Newton famously wrote. Many of today’s intellectual property laws make these metaphorical “shoulders” off-limits, by forbidding not only profit from another’s innovation but also any research based on it (at least not without providing compensation). Think of all the research that has been based on the discovery of DNA.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

But, as Yuval Noah Harari has argued, this was not through the extension of a normal human life but rather because of a large reduction in the numbers of people suffering a premature death from malnutrition, infectious diseases and violence. In the distant past, if you escaped these depredations, it was not at all unusual for people to live to a ripe old age. As Harari (2016) points out, Galileo Galilei died at 77, Isaac Newton at 84, and Michelangelo at 88. He says: “In truth, so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year.” 26 Bregman, R. (2017) Utopia for Realists, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 27 Wilde (1888), The Remarkable Rocket, Reprint 2017, London: Sovereign Publishing. 28 See Stiglitz (2010), op. cit.


pages: 334 words: 102,899

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph

Airbnb, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, digital rights, high net worth, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, Mason jar, pets.com, recommendation engine, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, Travis Kalanick

More importantly, the idea for Netflix didn’t appear in a moment of divine inspiration—it didn’t come to us in a flash, perfect and useful and obviously right. Epiphanies are rare. And when they appear in origin stories, they’re often oversimplified or just plain false. We like these tales because they align with a romantic idea about inspiration and genius. We want our Isaac Newtons to be sitting under the apple tree when the apple falls. We want Archimedes in his bathtub. But the truth is usually more complicated than that. The truth is that for every good idea, there are a thousand bad ones. And sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. Customized sporting goods.


pages: 297 words: 108,353

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn, John D. Turner

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, debt deflation, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fake news, financial deregulation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Akerlof, government statistician, Greenspan put, high-speed rail, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Right to Buy, Robert Shiller, Shenzhen special economic zone , short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, the built environment, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, urban planning

Having demonstrated the near universality of madness, he then had chapters on the South Sea 10 THE BUBBLE TRIANGLE Bubble, the Mississippi Bubble, and the Dutch Tulipmania, all of which argued that bubbles occur because of the psychological failings of investors. Mackay was not the first to associate bubbles with madness and irrationality. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant and influential scientists in all of history, lost a fortune by investing in the South Sea Bubble. When questioned about his losses, he is reputed to have said ‘that he could not calculate the madness of the people’.29 This madness-of-crowds hypothesis has been refined and expanded by the likes of Kindleberger, John Kenneth Galbraith and, most recently, Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller.30 Shiller and other economists argue that bubbles can largely be explained by behavioural economics, with cognitive failings and psychological biases on the part of investors causing prices to rise beyond their objective value.31 A subset of investors, for example, may suffer from an overconfidence bias, whereby they overestimate the future performance of a company stock, or they may have a representativeness bias, whereby they incorrectly extrapolate from a series of good news announcements and overreact.32 Other investors may simply follow or emulate this subset of investors simply because of herd behaviour and naivety on their part.33 The view that bubbles are largely a product of irrationality has been contradicted by economists who, like Nobel Laureate Eugene Fama, believe investors to be rational and markets to be efficient.34 Much recent research on the subject has thus focused on establishing whether a particular bubble was ‘rational’ or not.35 This is unfortunate, because the rational/irrational framework is almost useless for understanding bubbles.


pages: 419 words: 109,241

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

Economists are wary of labeling any empirical regularity a “rule” or a “law,” but task encroachment has proven as law-like as any historical phenomenon can be. Barring catastrophe—nuclear war, perhaps, or widespread environmental collapse—it seems certain to continue. Figure 5.2: Mentions of “AI” or “Machine Learning” in Earnings Calls74 Isaac Newton famously wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” The same observation applies equally well to the capabilities of machines. Today’s technologies build upon those that came before, drawing their strength from the accumulated wisdom of all the past discoveries and breakthroughs.


pages: 414 words: 109,622

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

“He created a kind of canopy where the Brain team could operate, and we didn’t have to worry about anything else,” Hinton says. “If you needed something, you asked Jeff and he got it.” What was odd about Dean, Hinton thought, was that unlike most people so intelligent and so powerful, he wasn’t driven by ego. He was always willing to collaborate. Hinton compared him to Isaac Newton, except that Newton was an asshole: “Most smart people—someone like Newton, for example—hold grudges. Jeff Dean doesn’t seem to have that element to his personality.” The irony was that the lab’s approach was all wrong. It was using the wrong kind of computing power—and the wrong kind of neural network.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Soon she will delight in mastering the even more complex task of putting clothes on, and she will seek dominion over what she wears. “I dressed all by myself,” a four-year-old announces with great pride. “Even the buttons!” It’s not a given that we leave wonder behind as we outgrow childhood. In fact, wonder is an essential component of creativity. The story of Sir Isaac Newton getting bopped on the head with an apple and coming up with the theory of gravity seems to be apocryphal, but it’s a good metaphor for the necessity of wonder in scientific discovery. Up to that point, we were all tooling along in life taking for granted the fact that objects fall. Discovering new ways of understanding the world involves a first step of recognizing the extraordinary in what others see as ordinary, or don’t see at all.


pages: 1,042 words: 273,092

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

Between 1600 and 1750, the rate of successful fire of handguns multiplied by a factor of ten. Technological advances – including the inventions of ramrods, paper cartridges and bayonets – made guns cheaper, better, quicker and more deadly.68 Similarly, although the names of scientists like Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler have become famous to generations of schoolchildren, it can be all too easy to forget that some of their most important work was on the trajectory of projectiles and understanding the causes of deviation to enable artillery to be more accurate.69 These distinguished scientists helped make weapons more powerful and ever more reliable; military and technological advances went hand in hand with the Age of Enlightenment.

Perdue, ‘Empire and Nation in Comparative Perspective: Frontier Administration in Eighteenth-Century China’, Journal of Early Modern History 5.4 (2001), 282; C. Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975), p. 15. 68P. Hoffman, ‘Prices, the Military Revolution, and Western Europe’s Comparative Advantage in Violence’, Economic History Review, 64.1 (2011), 49–51. 69See, for example, A. Hall, Isaac Newton: Adventurer in Thought (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 152, 164–6, 212–16; L. Debnath, The Legacy of Leonhard Euler: A Tricentennial Tribute (London, 2010), pp. 353–8; P-L. Rose, ‘Galileo’s Theory of Ballistics’, The British Journal for the History of Science 4.2 (1968), 156–9, and in general S. Drake, Galileo at work: His Scientific Biography (Chicago, 1978). 70T.


pages: 1,152 words: 266,246

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Doomsday Clock, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global village, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, market bubble, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pink-collar, place-making, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Sinatra Doctrine, South China Sea, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, upwardly mobile, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

Northerners began turning the Renaissance on its head, rejecting antiquity instead of seeking answers in it, and in the 1690s, as social development nudged within a hair’s breadth of its peak under the Roman Empire, learned gentlemen in Paris formally debated whether the Moderns were now surpassing the Ancients. By then the answer was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica had appeared in 1687, using the new tool of calculus that Newton himself developed to express his mechanical model of the heavens mathematically.* It was as incomprehensible (even to educated readers) as Einstein’s general theory of relativity would be when he published it in 1905, but all the same, everyone agreed (as they would about relativity) that it marked a new age.

., p. 292. 462 “Along the whole coast”: cited from Lane 1998, p. 18. 464 “If death came”: The saying has been attributed to several sources, but Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle said something very similar in a letter dated May 11, 1573, cited in Kamen 1999, p. 252. 464 “naked people”: letter to Juan de Oñate (1605), cited from Kamen 2003, p. 253. 464 “Even if you are poor”: settler’s letter home to Spain, cited from Kamen 2003, p. 131. 468 “one-handed clocks”: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the First, chapter 3. 468 “The honour and reverence” etc.: Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), preface. 469 “it is not less natural”: René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), chapter 203. 470 “Nature, and Nature’s laws”: Alexander Pope, “Epitaph: intended for Sir Isaac Newton” (1730). A wit would later add two more lines: It did not last; the Devil howling “Ho! Let Einstein be!” restored the status quo. (J. C. Squire, “In Continuation of Pope on Newton” [1926]) 470 “Philosophy is written”: Galileo Galilei (1605), translated in Drake 1957, pp. 237–38. 471 “Man hath by nature,” “The great and chief,” and “by nature all”: John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), chapter 7, section 87; chapter 9, section 124; and chapter 8, section 95. 472 “Dare to know!”


pages: 434 words: 117,327

Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America by Cass R. Sunstein

active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, anti-communist, anti-globalists, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cognitive load, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Isaac Newton, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, microaggression, Nate Silver, Network effects, New Journalism, night-watchman state, nudge theory, obamacare, Paris climate accords, post-truth, Potemkin village, random walk, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey

In effect, science was claiming for itself areas of human knowledge—like the size of the universe and the nature of the elements—that had for hundreds of years been the province of religion and poetry. The traditional arbiters of truth found their status increasingly challenged by a new breed of experts who brought with them methods—and a level of self-assurance in their answers—that the old guard naturally found deeply threatening. No less a figure than Isaac Newton was castigated by John Keats, himself a giant figure in the culture of the time, who claimed that Newton’s historic discovery of the color spectrum of white light had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow” (Holmes 2010). These days it is hard to imagine a poet directly criticizing the work of the world’s preeminent physicist—if anything, physicists have coopted the language of poets to describe their work.


pages: 347 words: 112,727

Rust: The Longest War by Jonathan Waldman

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Anton Chekhov, computer age, David Brooks, digital map, Exxon Valdez, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Golden Gate Park, index card, Isaac Newton, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, pez dispenser, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

Robert Boyle, the tall, wealthy English “father of chemistry,” took up an investigation of rust during the seventeenth-century reign of King Charles II. He began by insulting Pliny: “I have not found among the Aristotelians,” he wrote, “so much as an offer at an intelligible account.” Born a year after the death of Francis Bacon, Boyle talked metaphysics with Sir Isaac Newton, hung out with the founders of the scientific group known as the Royal Society, and was in Florence, Italy, when Galileo died. He taught himself Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic so that he could read original sources. He conducted medical experiments on himself, and tasted his own urine. By the end of his life, he’d written more than two and a half million words.


pages: 405 words: 117,219

In Our Own Image: Savior or Destroyer? The History and Future of Artificial Intelligence by George Zarkadakis

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Asperger Syndrome, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business process, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, continuous integration, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Edward Snowden, epigenetics, Flash crash, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, intentional community, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, machine translation, millennium bug, mirror neurons, Moravec's paradox, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, post-industrial society, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

Measurement assigned numbers to regularities, a transformation that offered new perspectives and insights. The early scientists could now manipulate the numbers in order to draw new conclusions about the relation between natural causes and effects. This mathematical transformation of observations led them to the discovery of the first physical laws that culminated with Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity. It was an incredible journey for the European mind, set in motion by Aristotelian empiricism and arriving at something completely unexpected: at the curious, and disturbing, confirmation of Plato and the Pythagoreans! Scientific discoveries showed that numbers and mathematics ruled the universe.


pages: 396 words: 112,748

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

“So on the one hand, people are horrified, on the other they’re mesmerized.” She does chaos in curved space-time. Einstein would be proud. AS FOR ME, I never returned to chaos, but readers might spot seeds of all my later books in this one. I knew hardly anything about Richard Feynman, but he has a cameo here (see here). Isaac Newton has more than a cameo: he seems to be the antihero of chaos, or the god to be overthrown. I discovered only later, reading his notebooks and letters, how wrong I’d been about him. And for twenty years I’ve been pursuing a thread that began with something Rob Shaw told me, about chaos and information theory, as invented by Claude Shannon.


pages: 396 words: 112,354

Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon by Jeffrey Kluger

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Gene Kranz, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, space junk, white flight

The cocksure idea that Apollo 8’s ride home was little more than an easy free fall got an unintentional boost from Bill Anders when the spacecraft had traveled about 45,000 miles from the moon and crossed over the invisible line at which lunar gravity gave way to the Earth’s more powerful gravity. When Collins mentioned on the capcom loop that his young son had asked him which of the astronauts was driving the spacecraft, Anders responded, “I think Isaac Newton is doing most of the driving right now.” Physics alone would not bring the crew home, of course, but even Mission Control began sounding a little overconfident. Not long after Anders’s comment, Mattingly gave Borman a read of the mood on Earth and related, as well, a conversation he had just had with Windler.


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

Like his mastzelle, Ehrlich’s magic bullet appeared only in proximity to coal tar–based dyes. The argument at the core of Ehrlich’s Nobel Lecture, entitled “Partial Cell Functions,” was that the future of microbiology depended less on observational biology, and more on fundamental chemistry. Chemistry is one of the younger sciences. If you could pluck Isaac Newton out of the seventeenth century and drop him into a twenty-first-century high school, he could teach at least the first few chapters of a contemporary physics course; the laws of mechanics, for example, are still the ones Newton postulated. For that matter, a second-century mathematician could do the same for a full year of geometry or trigonometry.


pages: 464 words: 116,945

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

But its overemphasis and its treatment as if it operates autonomously and independently of the other contradictions of capital have, I believe, been damaging to a full-blooded revolutionary search for an alternative to capital and, hence, to capitalism. Contradiction 6 Capital as Process or Thing? In years gone by physicists endlessly debated whether light should best be conceptualised in terms of particles or waves. In the seventeenth century Isaac Newton developed a corpuscular theory of light at the same time as Christiaan Huygens advocated his wave theory. Opinion thereafter fluctuated between one or other determination until Niels Bohr, the daddy of quantum mechanics, resolved the so-called ‘wave–particle duality’ by appeal to a principle of complementarity.


pages: 420 words: 119,928

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past) by Cixin Liu

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cosmic microwave background, Deng Xiaoping, game design, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, information security, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Norbert Wiener, Panamax, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Von Neumann architecture

The other gave chase for a few steps and spat in the direction of the loser. “Shameless!” He bent down to pick up his wig. As he straightened up, he saw Wang. Pointing in the direction of the escapee, he said, “He dared to claim that he invented calculus!” He put on his wig, put a hand over his heart, and bowed courteously to Wang. “Isaac Newton, at your service.” “Then the one who ran away must be Leibniz?” Wang asked. “Indeed, an unscrupulous man. I don’t really care about this little claim to fame. Inventing the three laws of mechanics has already made me the greatest, God excepted. From planetary motion to cell division, everything follows the three great laws.


pages: 410 words: 114,005

Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn From Their Mistakes--But Some Do by Matthew Syed

Abraham Wald, Airbus A320, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, crew resource management, deliberate practice, double helix, epigenetics, fail fast, fear of failure, flying shuttle, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Dyson, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, luminiferous ether, mandatory minimum, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, publication bias, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, US Airways Flight 1549, Wall-E, Yom Kippur War

Steven Johnson runs through an entire list of breakthroughs that were conceived by different people, working independently, at almost precisely the same time.10 Sunspots, for example, were discovered by four scientists in four different countries in 1611. The mathematical calculus was developed by both Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz in the 1670s. The forerunner to the first electric battery was invented by Ewald Georg von Kleist in 1745 and Andreas Cuneus of Leyden in 1746. Four people independently proposed the law of the conservation of energy in the 1840s. The theory of evolution through natural selection was proposed independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace (an extraordinary, unsung polymath) in the mid-nineteenth century.11 S.


pages: 489 words: 111,305

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

It’s very valuable to study the social, institutional and cultural assumptions within which scientific work is done, but the best work of that sort isn’t by postmodernists (at least as far as I can understand their work). For instance, fascinating work has been done in the last thirty or forty years on what Isaac Newton, the great hero of science, actually thought he was doing. His theory of gravity was very disturbing to him and to everyone else at the time. Because gravity works at a distance, Newton agreed with other leading scientists of his day that it was an “occult force,” and spent most of the rest of his life trying to come to terms with that unacceptable conclusion.


pages: 429 words: 114,726

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Where computers were clearly human-made and particular, algorithms were conceptual and therefore universal. “The notion of a mechanical process and of an algorithm,” Peter Wegner would declare, “are as fundamental and general as the concepts that underlie the empirical and mathematical sciences.”67 By suggesting that the algorithm was as fundamental to the technical activity of computing as Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion were to physics, Knuth and his fellow computer scientists could claim full fellowship with the larger community of scientists. In addition to its claims to fundamental metaphysical significance, the algorithm provided aspiring computer scientists with a practical agenda for advancing their discipline.


pages: 360 words: 110,929

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

augmented reality, British Empire, business process, false flag, gravity well, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kuiper Belt, loose coupling, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, theory of mind

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content. Copyright © 2008 by Charles Stross. eISBN : 978-1-436-22512-0 1. Androids—Fiction. I. Title. PR6119.T79S28 2008 823’.92—dc22 2008008228 http://us.penguingroup.com “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” —Sir Isaac Newton This book is dedicated to the memory of two of the giants of science fiction: ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN ( July 7, 1907-May 8, 1988) and ISAAC ASIMOV ( January 2, 1920-April 6, 1992) The Three Laws of Robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.


pages: 384 words: 112,971

What’s Your Type? by Merve Emre

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, behavioural economics, card file, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, emotional labour, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gabriella Coleman, God and Mammon, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, p-value, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planned obsolescence, Ralph Waldo Emerson, scientific management, Socratic dialogue, Stanford prison experiment, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, women in the workforce

From the lowliest clerk to the president of the company, each position had an ideal personality profile. “To be considered a potential executive, you will probably do best when you emphasize economic motivation the most; aesthetic and religious, the least,” Whyte wrote. “If you were trying out for the research department, you might wish to say that you think Sir [Isaac] Newton helped mankind more than Shakespeare and thereby increase your ratings for theoretical leanings. Were you trying out for a public relations job, however, you might wish to vote for Shakespeare, for a somewhat higher aesthetic score would not be amiss in this case.” Whyte’s irony was, at every turn, opposed to Isabel’s earnestness.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Lady Byron was worried the condition might be hereditary and thus steered her daughter away from anything that might bring on such troubles. The tutoring paid off. In 1833, when Ada was seventeen, her life took a turn for the computational. It was then that she met Charles Babbage, who held the same chair at Cambridge University that had been once occupied by Isaac Newton and would later belong to Stephen Hawking. After learning of her love of math, Babbage invited Ada and her mother to see his “difference engine,” his steam-powered calculating machine. Stunned by what she saw, Ada was determined to understand it. She got a copy of the machine’s blueprints from Babbage.


The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

A Theatre Royal was opened in Drury Lane and a Duke of York’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with instructions that in future women and not boys should play female roles. At the same time, a Royal Society was founded for scientists and philosophers, its first tract by the diarist John Evelyn being ‘A Discourse on Forest-Trees and the Propagation of Timber’. Its leading lights were Oxford’s liberal empiricist John Locke, the physicist Isaac Newton, the chemist Robert Boyle and the scientist and architect Robert Hooke. The king built them a laboratory in Whitehall. Another founder member was the young Christopher Wren. Wren had received the sort of polymath upbringing that so often holds the key to great achievement. He studied classics, mathematics and science at Oxford, and was a professor of astronomy at twenty-nine, reading the Royal Society papers on cosmology, mechanics, optics, surveying, medicine and meteorology.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

In a world of design firms, advertising agencies, and retail consultants, he did it all by himself: clipping the art from old books, writing the copy for the Fearless Flyer at his easel, coming up with sly witticisms with Alice around the kitchen table. It was a master class in understatement. “I wanted to create a silent conspiracy among all the over-educated, underpaid people in town, so as they moved down the aisles they would read secret messages on the products, get a chuckle,” he writes in an unpublished autobiography. Hence, the Sir Isaac Newtons, the Heisenberg’s Uncertain Blend of coffee made up of the different roasts that had fallen off the conveyor belt and mixed together in unknown quantities, or the Trader Darwin’s and Next to Godliness brands, for the chain’s vitamins and cleaning products, respectively. He wanted to flatter his customers’ vocabulary and tickle their minds, not tell them what to buy or convince them his products were the best.


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Not coincidentally, this was the first time an economy hit escape velocity.6 In the words of economic historian Joel Mokyr, this was a ‘culture of growth’.7 A new proto-scientific culture spanned Europe: a Republic of Letters, an ‘invisible college’ and transnational market for ideas, where leading thinkers created a buzzing epistolary network devoted to discovery, exploration, thought and experiment. Led by path-breaking cultural entrepreneurs – people like the statesman and natural philosopher Francis Bacon, who encouraged a new empirical, improving attitude – the point of this ‘college’ was to proffer something original and unknown. Its leading figures, like Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, John Locke and Voltaire, created an economy of prestige which acted as an incentive for new entrants to try their hand. The culture of ideas, once closed, was now open. Curiosity wasn't weird or sinful. The natural world was subject to reason, manipulation; the domain of humanity, not its master.


Europe: A History by Norman Davies

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, centre right, charter city, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of DNA, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equal pay for equal work, Eratosthenes, Etonian, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial independence, finite state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, gentleman farmer, global village, Gregor Mendel, Honoré de Balzac, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, land reform, liberation theology, long peace, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, Peace of Westphalia, Plato's cave, popular capitalism, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Transnistria, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois

They joined together in 1660 to found the Royal Society for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. Their first meeting was addressed by the architect Christopher Wren. Their early membership included a number of magicians, whose influence was not overtaken by the new school of scientists, such as Isaac Newton, for another twenty years. With Newton, modern science came of age (see Chapter VIII); and the example of the Royal Society radiated across Europe. As always, old ideas mingled with the new. By the second half of the seventeenth century, Europe’s leading thinkers were largely agreed on a mechanical view of the universe operating on principles analogous to clockwork.

Others, such as Sebald Schwaertzer, served as imperial controller of mines at Rudolfov and Joachimsthal. [DOLLAR] Heinrich Kuhnrath (1560–1605), author of the grandiose Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae Christiano-kabalisticum, came from Leipzig. Michał Sędziwój or ‘Sendivogius’ (1566–1636), whose Novum Lumen Chymicum (1604) ran into 54 editions and would be thoroughly studied by Isaac Newton, came from Warsaw. He was connected to the powerful faction of pro-Habsburg magnates in Poland, who had contacts with Oxford and who brought John Dee to Cracow. John Dee’s dubious assistant, Edward Kelley, classed as Cacochimicus, probably died in prison in Prague. Their company included the ill-fated Giordano Bruno [SYROP], the astronomers Kepler and Brahe, and an English poetess called Elizabeth Jane Weston.

In Madrid, Murillo was engaged on a series of 22 paintings for the Church of the Capuchins. In Paris, Claude Lorrain painted Europa. In London, in the wake of the Great Fire, Christopher Wren was planning his spectacular series of churches; and Richard Lower performed the first human blood transfusion. In Cambridge, the young Isaac Newton had just cracked the theory of colours. In Oxford, Hooke was proposing systematic meteorological recordings. In Munich, the Theatinerkirche was in mid-construction. In February 1667 Frans Hals, the portraitist, had just died; Jonathan Swift, the satirist, was being conceived. There can be no doubt that the protracted reconstruction of St Peter’s constituted a central event in the era of Church reform.


pages: 432 words: 128,944

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes

Apollo 11, colonial exploitation, Columbine, disinformation, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, friendly fire, Google Earth, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, music of the spheres

2 In 1862 the British Association for the Advancement of Science elected a Scientific Committee to investigate ‘Hygrometric and other Conditions of the Upper Air’. It decided to do this with a series of sponsored scientific balloon ascents. Among the committee’s fourteen signatories were many leading names in British science, notably the Astronomer Royal, Professor Sir George Airy; Sir David Brewster, who had written Isaac Newton’s biography; Sir John Herschel, the best-known public scientist in Britain; and John Tyndall, who had inherited Humphry Davy’s position at the Royal Institution.9 The man they chose to prosecute these researches, and put the science back into ballooning, was a fifty-three-year-old meteorologist named James Glaisher (1809–1903).


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Even highly intelligent people overestimate their ability to time the correction of market mispricing. Legendary investors such as Julian Robertson and George Soros misjudged the new economy bubble and damaged their reputations. Warren Buffett stayed resolutely on the sidelines, and was derided for his failure to ‘get it’. Isaac Newton famously lost money in the South Sea Bubble, an early Ponzi scheme. As the new economy bubble expanded, I asked myself often, ‘Do people in financial conglomerates selling products really believe these things, or are they cynical in their deception?’ I came to realise that the truth lay somewhere in between: neither naïveté nor fraud provided sufficient explanation.


pages: 566 words: 122,184

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Eratosthenes, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Louis Daguerre, millennium bug, Multics, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

For over two thousand years, mathematicians wrestled with Aristotle's logic, attempting to corral it using mathematical symbols and operators. Prior to the nineteenth century, the only person to come close was Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1648–1716), who dabbled with logic early in life but then went on to other interests (such as independently inventing calculus at the same time as Isaac Newton). And then came George Boole. George Boole was born in England in 1815 to a world where the odds were certainly stacked against him. Because he was the son of a shoe-maker and a former maid, Britain's rigid class structure would normally have prevented Boole from achieving anything much different from his ancestors.


pages: 351 words: 123,876

Beautiful Testing: Leading Professionals Reveal How They Improve Software (Theory in Practice) by Adam Goucher, Tim Riley

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, Debian, Donald Knuth, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Grace Hopper, index card, Isaac Newton, natural language processing, off-by-one error, p-value, performance metric, revision control, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, SQL injection, the scientific method, Therac-25, Valgrind, web application

Although no one understands exactly what beauty is, there does seem to be a useful relationship between beauty, simplicity, and truth. When this relationship is applied in mathematics and the physical sciences, it is often known as Occam’s Razor. It assumes that beautiful and simple explanations of natural phenomena are more likely to be true than ugly and convoluted ones. Sir Isaac Newton put it this way: “We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” Although we can find examples of this principle being applied in structured programming, object-oriented design (OOD), and design patterns, beauty and simplicity aren’t yet common considerations in bug management or QA test design.


pages: 353 words: 355

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

NASA is trying to do some long-range planning on its mission deep into the twenty-first century, and although warp speed is a long shot, if possible, it could change everything. Without it, we're stuck in our boring little solar system. With it, who knows? Oi maybe well devise an antigravity device. We really don't know much about gravity despite studying it since Isaac Newton got bonked by an apple. We don't understand why it exists, where it comes from, or how it works. We know that all other forms of energy exist at a particle level, and a particle of gravity, called the gravitron, has been theorized, but we've never found one. Other theories of gravity have been similarly weak.


pages: 398 words: 120,801

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, airport security, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, citizen journalism, Firefox, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, mail merge, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Bayes, web of trust, zero day

That's because M1k3y is in you and in me--Little Brother is a reminder that no matter how unpredictable the future may be, we don't win freedom through security systems, cryptography, interrogations and spot searches. We win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon. Be like M1k3y: step out the door and dare to be free. &&& Bibliography No writer creates from scratch -- we all engage in what Isaac Newton called "standing on the shoulders of giants." We borrow, plunder and remix the art and culture created by those around us and by our literary forebears. If you liked this book and want to learn more, there are plenty of sources to turn to, online and at your local library or bookstore. Hacking is a great subject.


pages: 434 words: 124,153

Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business climate, Cape to Cairo, financial independence, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, profit motive, surplus humans, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, women in the workforce

Tobacco’s influence over English learning extended beyond the classroom. It reacquired an association it had enjoyed among the Aztecs, whereby smoking was identified with meditation. As, to English eyes, smoke was drunk, it must therefore nourish something, but as it had no substance, this therefore only could be the spirit. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist since Aristotle, smoked incessantly. Whether this habit contributed or not to his inventive genius is impossible to determine, for Newton smoked from his infancy until his death bed. The weed was so integral to his identity that he was once observed ‘in a fit of mental abstraction, using the finger of the lady he was courting as a tobacco stopper, as he sat and smoked in silence beside her’.


Hedgehogging by Barton Biggs

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, diversification, diversified portfolio, eat what you kill, Elliott wave, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, global macro, hiring and firing, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game, éminence grise

The historian Charles Kindelberger relates how the chronicle of manias and panics is full of cases of rational men who sensed an engulfing madness, sold out, and then were sucked back in and ruined by the speculative atmosphere. The great Master of the Mint and the epitome of the rational scientist, Isaac Newton, said, in the spring of 1720, in the midst of the South Sea Company bubble, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies but not the madness of people” and sold his shares in the South Sea Company at a solid 100% profit. However, as the stock continued to climb, the infectious speculative enthusiasm overcame him, he bought back at a much higher price even more stock, and was wiped out in the crash.


pages: 414 words: 128,962

The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland by Rory Stewart

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, connected car, Etonian, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Khyber Pass, land reform, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, rewilding, Silicon Valley

Legal rulings, court investigations, sentences, incentives and pardons all demonstrated the attempts of the Scottish state to impose a bureaucratic veneer and logic on this tribal war. And then there were the artefacts in their houses. I had handled the dagger the Stewart had used to stab the Graham. This was not some distant medieval past. The killer of the Graham lived well past the Union of the Crowns, till 1680, and his life overlapped with Isaac Newton’s. Many of the feuding families still kept magical objects in their houses. In one home, a crystal; in another, a ‘fairy-bolt’, or arrowhead, encased in fifteenth-century silver, that was worn by the women of the family when pregnant. They had inherited secret Gaelic spells, to be spoken while stirring the objects through water.


pages: 531 words: 125,069

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt

AltaVista, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, demographic transition, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, hygiene hypothesis, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microaggression, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, Wayback Machine

In Part III, we’ll ask: Why, and why now? Where did the three Great Untruths and the culture of safetyism come from, and why did they spread so quickly in the last few years? PART III How Did We Get Here? CHAPTER 6 The Polarization Cycle For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Isaac Newton’s third law of motion We began this book with a presentation of three Great Untruths—ideas so out of tune with human flourishing that they harm anyone who embraces them. In Part II, we narrated a variety of campus events that have attracted national and sometimes global attention, and we showed how some students and professors involved in these events seem to have embraced the Great Untruths.


pages: 433 words: 124,454

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

Clearly Einstein was a genius in deciding that electromagnetic waves had to have particle properties, but there also is some history here. Remember in Chapter 2 how Young had resolved the physics controversy, which had raged for over a century, about whether sunlight was made up of particles or waves? The particle picture of sunlight had been championed by none other than Sir Isaac Newton, the grand old man of English physics; he had called the particles corpuscles. Young’s experiment, and Maxwell’s elegant explanation of sunlight as an electromagnetic wave, had appeared to settle the controversy; sunlight consisted of waves. Now this young, upstart patent officer was proposing that the biggest physics controversy for more than two centuries should be settled as a tie!


pages: 435 words: 127,403

Panderer to Power by Frederick Sheehan

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California energy crisis, call centre, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversification, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norman Mailer, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, place-making, Ponzi scheme, price stability, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, VA Linux, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Greenspan’s dyspeptic (for him) outburst was probably in reaction to staff economist Michael Prell’s earlier discussion of an IPO prospectus. The indefatigable Prell had discussed VA Linux, which entered the carnival on December 9, 1999. VA Linux jumped 700 percent on its first day of trading. It was valued at $9 billion. Prell compared the current atmosphere to that of England’s South Sea Bubble fiasco in 1720 which so devastated Isaac Newton, he would not discuss it for the rest of his life. He quoted from the South Sea share offering: “ ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.’”28 25 For FOMC comments, see William A. Fleckenstein with Frederick Sheehan, Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), pp. 78–79. 26 FOMC meeting transcript, December 21, 1999, p. 49.


pages: 400 words: 129,320

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer, Jim Mason

agricultural Revolution, air freight, biodiversity loss, clean water, collective bargaining, dumpster diving, food miles, Garrett Hardin, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, means of production, rent control, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Whole Earth Review

Fish do have nervous systems that enable them to respond to noxious, tissuedamaging stimuli that would be painful in us, but these reactions, Rose said, do not imply consciousness 41 Anglers, not surprisingly, welcomed that conclusion. Rose's view did not go uncontested. The following year Proceedings of the Royal Society, the journal of one of the oldest and most respected scientific bodies in the world (Sir Isaac Newton once served as its president) published an article by Dr. Lynne Sneddon and other scientists at the Roslin Institute and the University of Edinburgh. Sneddon and her colleagues injected bee venom and acetic acid into the lips of captive rainbow trout and found that they rubbed their lips into the gravel at the bottom of their tank and performed a rocking motion that is common in mammals who appear to be in pain.


pages: 471 words: 124,585

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Repeated crises (in 1847, 1857 and 1866) made it clear that this was an excessively rigid straitjacket, however; in each case the Act had to be temporarily suspended to avoid a complete collapse of liquidity.h It was only after the last of these crises, which saw the spectacular run that wrecked the bank of Overend Gurney, that the editor of The Economist, Walter Bagehot, reformulated the Bank’s proper role in a crisis as the ‘lender of last resort’, to lend freely, albeit at a penalty rate, to combat liquidity crises.42 The Victorian monetary problem was not wholly solved by Bagehot, it should be emphasized. He was no more able than the other pre-eminent economic theorists of the nineteenth century to challenge the sacred principle, established in Sir Isaac Newton’s time as Master of the Mint, that a pound sterling should be convertible into a fixed and immutable quantity of gold according to the rate of £3 17s 10½d per ounce of gold. To read contemporary discussion of the gold standard is to appreciate that, in many ways, the Victorians were as much in thrall to precious metal as the conquistadors three centuries before.


pages: 407 words: 121,458

Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff by Fred Pearce

additive manufacturing, air freight, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blood diamond, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, demographic transition, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food miles, ghettoisation, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kibera, Kickstarter, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, profit motive, race to the bottom, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, the built environment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

For 1,000 years, the Ancient Egyptians, for whom gold represented the sun god, maintained a mining colony far away in modern-day southern Sudan to secure their gold. Tutankhamun was found buried in a gold coffin weighing more than 100 kilos. Ancient Britons were mining gold 4,000 years ago. The Romans crossed the Sahara for gold. Macedonian gold mines funded Alexander the Great’s conquest of the world. Alchemy was the great science of the Middle Ages; Isaac Newton spent more time trying to turn base metal into gold than he did researching gravity and the laws of nature. Later, Europeans colonized the New World for gold, and spent decades searching for Eldorado. The gold rushes of California and Australia and South Africa and the Klondike globalized the world’s economy in the nineteenth century.


The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams

Alfred Russel Wallace, behavioural economics, centre right, conceptual framework, intentional community, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, Menlo Park, out of africa, Plato's cave, social intelligence, theory of mind

For instance, the Standard Welsh word glas denotes hues ranging from what in English is called green through blue to grey. By contrast, the Ibo word ojii denotes a range of hues from grey through brown to black. Why, then, do we think of the spectrum as comprising seven colours, when other cultures acknowledge fewer? It was Isaac Newton who decided on the seven colours. Having poor colour vision himself, Newton asked a friend to divide up the spectrum. When the friend obliged and split it into six colours, Newton insisted on seven colours because of the significance of the number seven in Renaissance thought, and, as Newton himself said, seven corresponded to ‘the seven intervals of our octave’.


The Regency Revolution: Jane Austen, Napoleon, Lord Byron and the Making of the Modern World by Robert Morrison

British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, financial independence, full employment, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, New Urbanism, railway mania, stem cell, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, wage slave

He was, besides, an outstanding lecturer – eloquent, imaginative, and highly knowledgeable – and his crowd-pleasing talks and demonstrations at the Royal Institution greatly increased the prestige of science. In April 1812, the Regent knighted him for services to chemistry, the first knighthood for a scientist since Sir Isaac Newton more than a century earlier.70 Shortly thereafter Davy gathered his lectures in two volumes, Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) and Elements of Agricultural Chemistry (1813). Davy’s most important contribution, however, came in the months following Waterloo when he invented the miner’s safety lamp.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

The reading room contains sixteen bronze statues grouped into pairs: Moses and Saint Paul (religion), Christopher Columbus and Robert Fulton (commerce), Herodotus and Edward Gibbon (history), Michelangelo and Beethoven (art), Plato and Francis Bacon (philosophy), Homer and Shakespeare (poetry), Isaac Newton and Joseph Henry (science). Edwin Blashfield’s mural on the top of the dome was titled—naturally—The Evolution of Civilization. In its design, statues, murals and lists of honorific names, the Boston Public Library (constructed during 1888–1895), outlined a cultural program similar to that of the Library of Congress.


pages: 476 words: 121,460

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Fraenkel would later recall receiving ‘a long manuscript of an author unknown to me, Johannes von Neumann, with the title “Die Axiomatisierung der Mengenlehre” (“The Axiomatization of Set Theory”) … I don’t maintain that I understood everything, but enough to see that this was outstanding work and to recognize ex ungue leonem.’23 ‘To know the lion by his claw’ – the Latin words uttered by Johann Bernoulli 200 years earlier, on recognizing by its brilliance an anonymous work by Isaac Newton. Fraenkel asked von Neumann to make his theory more comprehensible to mere mortals. The revised manuscript, with the ‘The’ changed to a more modest ‘An’, was published in 1925.24 Over the next three years, von Neumann expanded the paper and published the longer version with the ‘An’ changed back to a ‘The’.25 In it, to Hilbert’s delight, he placed set theory on solid ground and provided a simple way out of Russell’s paradox.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

If they were not, then we would expect the recent dramatic increase in population size to be associated with ever-expanding human misery, but in fact we’ve seen the opposite. Think about how much worse the world would be if Benjamin Lay, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman had never existed, or if Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, or Isaac Newton had never been born. Remember, you are population too!36 If you think you have made the world a better place, then you must think that new people can as well. In addition to the positive knock-on effects of having children, if your children have lives that are sufficiently good, then your decision to have them is good for them.


pages: 1,205 words: 308,891

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, Akira Okazaki, antiwork, behavioural economics, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, British Empire, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, Costa Concordia, creative destruction, critique of consumerism, crony capitalism, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, Ferguson, Missouri, food desert, Ford Model T, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, George Akerlof, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, immigration reform, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Harrison: Longitude, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lake wobegon effect, land reform, liberation theology, lone genius, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, open economy, out of africa, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, Pier Paolo Pasolini, pink-collar, plutocrats, positional goods, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, rent control, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, the rule of 72, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, very high income, wage slave, Washington Consensus, working poor, Yogi Berra

The earliest significant case of religious toleration was in Hungarian Transylvania, whose Diet in the town of Torda declared in 1568 that “no one is permitted to threaten to imprison or banish anyone because of their teaching, because faith is a gift from God.”5 The act would have applied even to a Unitarian, such as Thomas Aikenhead of Edinburgh or, secretly, Isaac Newton of Cambridge, had they had the good fortune to live in Transylvania. In Britain until the Doctrine of the Trinity Act in 1813 Unitarians were discriminated against or, early on, hanged. Diarmaid MacCulloch explains the Transylvanian toleration as arising from the princes wanting to mollify the varied faiths of their nobility.

The economist and theologian Paul Oslington notes that “a project of reading God’s nature from creation” was the framework for British thought generally for a century and a half down to 1830, “a project in which most of the major figures in what we would now call British science participated, including Francis Bacon, John Ray, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton.”21 A “postmillennial” eschatology (eschatology being the study of the last thing, the eschaton) is viewed as plain heresy by Roman Catholics and to this day elicits smiles from European theologians. Dating to the Westminster Confession of 1646, it emerged vigorously in the American colonies, most prominently in a 1739 sermon by Jonathan Edwards.


pages: 950 words: 297,713

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, British Empire, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Etonian, European colonialism, Ford Model T, ghettoisation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, Mount Scopus, new economy, plutocrats, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

To honour their presence, a local newspaper publishes a Portuguese translation of one of their articles, an attempt to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity in layman’s terms: ideas which would suggest that space is somehow curved, that time is slippery, and that light itself is bent by the gravitational pull of large objects (such as the sun). The eclipse, they explain, is a test. Einstein’s theories predict a certain amount of deflection of distant starlight caused by the pull of gravity. The theories of Isaac Newton predict a much lower deflection. Assuming the equipment is good enough, photographs of the eclipse, coupled with other astronomical data about the location of the stars and some mathematical wizardry, should allow scientists to decide between the two theories. The self-appointed intellectual caste of Belém grapple with the philosophical consequences of relativity.

He latches on to the German translator of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, another Thule Society member, as someone who understands Hitler as he sees himself: as an artist. LONDON: The teams that travelled to observe the eclipse in Brazil and Principe earlier in the year finally present their findings to the public. The Royal Astronomical Society is packed. A portrait of Isaac Newton hangs on one wall. Rumours of the results have been circulating in the physics community for a few weeks now–Einstein and his colleagues have already exchanged celebratory poems. But it falls to Britain’s Astronomer Royal, the successor to Newton–and a mild sceptic of relativity as a theory–to announce the results to the wider world.


pages: 444 words: 128,592

When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession by Irvin D. Yalom

always be closing, Isaac Newton, Murano, Venice glass, the scientific method

Private practice was the only venue available to him, and the great independent discovery the only route to the fame he so much craved. The idea of himself as an original thinker making an independent discovery was, thus, crucially important to Freud, whose creative energy depended on this romantic image of himself. “Even Einstein,” Freud said, “had the advantage of a long line of predecessors from Isaac Newton forward, whereas I had to hack every step of my own way alone, through a tangled jungle.” Nietzsche, grounded in classical philosophy, especially the earliest philosophers—the pre-Socratic Greeks—had a very different attitude towards priority. “Am I called upon,” Nietzsche asked, “to discover new truths?


pages: 435 words: 136,906

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

To live with passion while eluding the tragedies of heart disease, debilitating anxiety, severe headaches, back problems, hostility, depression, and sleep disturbances—to name a miserable few—you will need to get serious about loosening up. If that sounds contradictory, that’s because it is. The easiest way to bring your life into balance is to think in terms of opposites. In fact, this investment in balance parallels Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, which generally states that for every type of action, there needs to be an equally intense and opposite type of reaction. For example, if you do physical labor all day as a construction worker or sculptor, it stands to reason that your hands and body need a rest while your mind and spirit revitalize.


pages: 494 words: 132,975

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics by Nicholas Wapshott

airport security, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, collective bargaining, complexity theory, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, if you build it, they will come, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, means of production, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price mechanism, public intellectual, pushing on a string, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Yom Kippur War

It was clear to those who attended that they were witnessing something out of the ordinary. As Tarshis recalled, “As the weeks passed, only a stone would not have responded to the growing excitement [the lectures] generated.”30 Michael Straight, an American undergraduate, recalled, “It was as if we were listening to Charles Darwin or Isaac Newton. The audience was hushed as Keynes spoke.”31 By the end of the series, Keynes had worked through his ideas to his own satisfaction and was ready to consign to his publisher, Macmillan, the final set of corrected proofs of a work that many would view as the most influential body of economic theory written in the twentieth century.


pages: 453 words: 142,717

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space by Eugene Cernan, Donald A. Davis

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, full employment, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, space junk, Teledyne, white flight

Alone on the surface, I hopped and skipped my way back to Challenger, my thoughts racing wildly as I sought to encompass this experience. Just being there was a triumph of science to be celebrated for ages, but it was more than a personal dream come true, for I felt that I represented all humanity. There was a sense of eternity about Apollo. Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have been able to see farther than others, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” Every man and woman who put in long hours to get us to the Moon now stood with me beside the lunar lander in that odd Sun-washed darkness. Every astronaut who had gone into space, who made it possible for me to fly a little higher, stay a little longer, was at my side.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

A teacher’s knowledge of how to conduct a class, a consultant’s knowledge of how to run a business, a doctor’s knowledge of how to treat some symptoms, or a journalist’s knowledge of how to investigate events and report a story—these bodies of knowledge get larger and richer each time they are brought to bear. Economists call this the ‘shoulders of giants effect’4—just as Isaac Newton’s understanding of the world built on the work of those who came before him (‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulder of giants’, Newton said, though reputedly in sarcasm rather than earnest), so too with other types of knowledge. Put differently, the use and reuse of existing knowledge can often lead to the generation or production of new knowledge.


pages: 566 words: 153,259

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy by Seth Mnookin

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, illegal immigration, index card, Isaac Newton, John Gilmore, loss aversion, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, placebo effect, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

This story also illustrates the necessity of framing a null hypothesis in the broadest way possible: “At least one swan is black” would not have been a valid null hypothesis, since it would have left room for the discovery of a red swan or a green swan or any other color of swan that would have invalidated the original hypothesis without satisfying the null hypothesis. One of the most famous examples of the null hypothesis at work involves two men often referred to as the greatest scientists the world has ever known: Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. While still in his mid-twenties, Einstein became obsessed with an apparent contradiction between two widely accepted theories explaining the workings of the physical universe: Newton’s laws of motion and a series of equations formulated by a nineteenth-century Scottish physicist named James Clerk Maxwell.


pages: 434 words: 135,226

The Music of the Primes by Marcus Du Sautoy

Ada Lovelace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dava Sobel, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eratosthenes, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, German hyperinflation, global village, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, music of the spheres, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, P = NP, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine, William of Occam, Wolfskehl Prize, Y2K

BOOKSHOP Now you can buy any of these great paperbacks from Harper Perennial at 10% off recommended retail price. FREE postage and packing in the UK. Fermat’s Last Theorem Simon Singh 1 84115 791 0 £8.99 The Code Book Simon Singh 1 85702 889 9 £9.99 Longitude Dava Sobel 1 85702 5717 £6.99 Isaac Newton James GleickO 00 716318 5 £7.99 Nature via Nurture Matt Ridley 1 84115 746 5 £8.99 The Curious Life of Robert Hooke Lisajardine0007151756 £8.99 Total cost———— 10% discount———— Final total———— To purchase by Visa/Mastercard/Switch simply call08707871724orfaxon08707871725 To pay by cheque, send a copy of this form with a cheque made payable to ‘HarperCollins Publishers’ to: Mail Order Dept (Ref: BOM), HarperCollins Publishers, Westerhill Road, Bishopbriggs, G64 2QT, making sure to include your full name, postal address and phone number.


Stocks for the Long Run, 4th Edition: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy J. Siegel

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fixed income, German hyperinflation, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Money creation, Myron Scholes, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, Vanguard fund, vertical integration

Turning points are rarely identified until several months after the peak or trough has been reached. By then, it is far too late to act in the market. 13 Blue Chip Economic Indicators, February 10, 2002, p. 16. This page intentionally left blank 13 CHAPTER WHEN WORLD EVENTS IMPACT FINANCIAL MARKETS I can predict the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of crowds. ISAAC NEWTON As the sun rose over New York City on a beautiful Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, traders expected a dull day on Wall Street. There was no economic data coming out of Washington, nor any earnings releases scheduled. The previous Friday the markets had fallen on a horrible employment report, but on Monday the markets had bounced back slightly.


pages: 582 words: 136,780

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, cable laying ship, company town, Easter island, global village, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, lateral thinking, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, seminal paper, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, undersea cable

This idea, that volcanoes were the consequence of the steady burning of a finite store of earthly combustibles, exerted a grip on the scientific mind for centuries. Then, as chemistry developed as a science, so its innumerable secrets offered themselves as the favoured sources for all the necessary heat, and were widely accepted as doing so. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a great many seers – Isaac Newton among them – believed that so-called exothermic chemical reactions were the answer. By 1807, when the Geological Society of London, the world's oldest such body, was founded, the oxidation of newly discovered alkaline metals, such as sodium and potassium, was thought to be an answer. Even as late as the 1920s there were two now notoriously blinkered scientists who clung to what might seem today quite fatuous chemical theories.


pages: 487 words: 132,252

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography by Stephen Fry

Alistair Cooke, back-to-the-land, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Live Aid, loadsamoney, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Winter of Discontent

I know how insufferably awful I must appear when I tell you that I wanted to go to Cambridge because of the Bloomsbury Group and a parcel of poofy old bien-pensant writers and traitors, but there we are. It wasn’t because of Peter Cook and John Cleese and the tradition of comedy, much as I admired that, nor was it because of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and the tradition of science, much as I admired that too. Cambridge’s beauty as a university town had some influence, I suppose. I saw it before I ever saw Oxford, and it pierced my heart in a way that first love always does. But it really was, pretentious as it may sound, the intellectual and the ethical tradition that appealed to my puritanical and self-righteous soul.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Not the universities with their thinkers, but the places and people in distress, the inmates of asylums and concentration camps, the helpless decision-makers in bureaucracy and the helpless soldiers in foxholes—these will be the ones to lighten man’s way, to refashion his knowledge of disaster into something creative. We may be entering a new age. Our heroes may not be intellectual giants like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein, but victims like Anne Frank, who will show us a greater miracle than thought. They will teach us how to endure—how to create good in the midst of evil and how to nurture love in the presence of death. Should this happen, however, the university will still have its place. Even the intellectual man can be an example of creative suffering.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

The number of 6-person discoveries was of course lower, but the exact ratio between these multiples produced a pattern known in statistics as a Poisson distribution. This is the pattern you see in mutations on a DNA chromosome and in other rare chance events in a large pool of possible agents. The Poisson curve suggested that the system of “who found what” was essentially random. Certainly talent is unequally distributed. Some innovators (like Edison, or Isaac Newton, or William Thomson Kelvin) are simply better than others. But if geniuses aren’t able to jump far ahead of the inevitable, how do the better inventors become great? Simonton discovered that the higher the prominence of a scientist (as determined by the number of pages his biography occupies in encyclopedias), the greater the number of simultaneous discoveries he participated in.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The marginal value of having information from multiple markets (from, say, China plus the United States plus Europe) would, in this view, be sufficiently small that we could ignore the “unfair” advantage deriving from different regulatory regimes. 42.Online disinformation presents a particular challenge, especially in a world in which the “truth-telling institutions” are under attack (see chapter 1). Discussing the appropriate policy response would, however, take us beyond this short book. CHAPTER 7: WHY GOVERNMENT? 1.Sir Isaac Newton in 1675 said: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” 2.I first articulated some of these ideas in a little book, The Economic Role of the State (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 3.Or “Samuelsonian pure public goods,” after Paul A. Samuelson, who first articulated clearly the differences between such goods and ordinary “private” goods, in “The Pure Theory of Public Expenditure,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 36 (1954): 387–9.


The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Asilomar, Bayesian statistics, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Edmond Halley, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John Snow's cholera map, Loebner Prize, loose coupling, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, Monty Hall problem, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, personalized medicine, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Plato's cave, prisoner's dilemma, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test

The back-door criterion was one of the first beneficiaries of the translation, while the do-calculus came second. The avalanche, however, is not yet over. Advances in such areas as counterfactuals, generalizability, missing data, and machine learning are still coming up. If I were less modest, I would close here with Isaac Newton’s famous saying about “standing on the shoulders of giants.” But given who I am, I am tempted to quote from the Mishnah instead: “Harbe lamadeti mirabotai um’haverai yoter mehem, umitalmidai yoter mikulam”—that is, “I have learned much from my teachers, and more so from my colleagues, and most of all from my students” (Taanit 7a).


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

McLean understood that transport companies’ true business was moving freight rather than operating ships or trains. That understanding helped his version of containerization succeed where so many others had failed. To my consternation, though, I quickly learned that many people quite fancy the tale of McLean’s dockside epiphany. The idea of a single moment of inspiration, of the apple landing on young Isaac Newton’s head, stirs the soul, even if it turns out to be apocryphal. In contrast, the idea that innovation occurs in fits and starts, with one person adapting a concept already in use and another figuring out how to make a profit from it, has little appeal. The world likes heroes, even if the worshipful story of one person’s heroic effort is rarely an accurate representation of the complex path of technological advance.


pages: 517 words: 139,824

The Difference Engine by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling

card file, Charles Babbage, clockwatching, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, spinning jenny, the scientific method

Somerville also wears a fillet of bronze marked with astronomical symbols, a covert symbol of the high post this femme savante occupies in the councils of European science. Lady Ada, her arms bare save for a signet-ring on her right forefinger, places a laurel wreath about the brow of a marble bust of Isaac Newton. Despite the careful placement of the camera, the strange garb does not flatter Lady Ada, and her face shows stress. Lady Ada was forty-one years old in late June 1855, when this daguerreotype was taken. She had recently lost a large sum of money at the Derby, though her gambling-losses, common knowledge among her intimates, seem to have covered the loss of even larger sums, most likely extorted from her.


pages: 520 words: 129,887

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future by Robert Bryce

Abraham Maslow, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Bernie Madoff, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jevons paradox, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas L Friedman, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Mills, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 27. 3 Marshall Brain, “How Horsepower Works,” n.d., http://www.howstuffworks.com/horsepower.htm/printable. 4 Joule invented the British Thermal Unit (Btu). 5 One joule is the amount of energy needed to move an object with a force of 1 newton (N) over a distance of 1 meter (m). The newton is a unit of force named after Isaac Newton. One watt is equal to 1 joule per second (1 W = 1 J/s). Americans are well acquainted with the watt from buying lightbulbs, hair dryers, and various other appliances. 6 Wikipedia, “Joule,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joule. 7 Richard A. Muller, Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines (New York: W.


pages: 349 words: 134,041

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives by Satyajit Das

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bretton Woods, BRICs, Brownian motion, business logic, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, currency risk, disinformation, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Haight Ashbury, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass affluent, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Journalism, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Parkinson's law, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Salesforce, Satyajit Das, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, technology bubble, the medium is the message, the new new thing, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, volatility smile, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Writing in 1995, Merton foreshadowed the events that were to unfold three years later at LTCM: ‘Any virtue can become a vice if taken to extreme’. After the fall, one of the LTCM staff observed that ‘the models tell you where things will be in five years but they don’t tell you what happens before you get to the moment of certainty.’ Isaac Newton, one of the founding figures of modern science, faced his own moment of certainty. He lost £20,000 (a very large sum even today) in the stock market as a result of the South Sea share bubble. Chastened, Newton said: ‘I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.’ DAS_C08.QXP 8/7/06 4:49 PM Page 211 7 Games without frontiers – the inverse world of structured products In 2005 Leo Melamed, one of the founders of the financial futures markets, drew confused looks at a conference when he remarked, ‘What the hell is a swap anyway?


pages: 458 words: 134,028

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes by Mark Penn, E. Kinney Zalesne

addicted to oil, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Biosphere 2, call centre, corporate governance, David Brooks, Donald Trump, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, Future Shock, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, haute couture, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, index card, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, life extension, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mobile money, new economy, Paradox of Choice, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white picket fence, women in the workforce, Y2K

I suspect the lefty boom will bring a surge in the promotion of sheer creative energy, driven by an idea that is at the heart of this book—that small groups of people, sharing common experiences, can increasingly be drawn together to rally for their interests. Lefties in particular represent innovation and self-expression. Einstein was a lefty. So were Ben Franklin and Isaac Newton. More lefties may also mean more self-expression. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who are allowed to follow their left-handedness are also more likely to follow other instincts: In one study, gay participants were 39 percent more likely to be left-handed than heterosexual participants. More lefties could mean more military innovation: Famous military leaders, from Charlemagne to Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon—as well as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf—were left-handed.


pages: 447 words: 141,811

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

Yet the prophet Mani made no attempt to offer a mathematical formula that could be used to predict human choices by quantifying the respective strength of these two forces. He never calculated that ‘the force acting on a man is equal to the acceleration of his spirit divided by the mass of his body’. This is exactly what scientists seek to accomplish. In 1687, Isaac Newton published The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, arguably the most important book in modern history. Newton presented a general theory of movement and change. The greatness of Newton’s theory was its ability to explain and predict the movements of all bodies in the universe, from falling apples to shooting stars, using three very simple mathematical laws: Henceforth, anyone who wished to understand and predict the movement of a cannonball or a planet simply had to make measurements of the object’s mass, direction and acceleration, and the forces acting on it.


pages: 480 words: 138,041

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

And really, how hard is it to sell people on a disorder whose “symptoms” can bestow what Lawrence Osborne called “extraordinary gifts”? Osborne wasn’t talking about special education dollars, but about Glenn Gould and Vladimir Nabokov and Ludwig Wittgenstein, all diagnosed—posthumously, of course—into a Hall of Fame that, depending on which website you consult, also includes Isaac Newton, Emily Dickinson, and Albert Einstein. Even for those who will fall short of greatness, the diagnosis has its appeal. And its charms are on the increase, at least according to the Aspie who predicted to Osborne that “society will actually become more and more dependent on people with Asperger’s to usher it through the difficulties ahead.”


pages: 303 words: 67,891

Advances in Artificial General Intelligence: Concepts, Architectures and Algorithms: Proceedings of the Agi Workshop 2006 by Ben Goertzel, Pei Wang

AI winter, artificial general intelligence, backpropagation, bioinformatics, brain emulation, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, epigenetics, friendly AI, functional programming, G4S, higher-order functions, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, John Conway, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Occam's razor, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, semantic web, statistical model, strong AI, theory of mind, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Y2K

Stephen Wolfram has used the term “computational irreducibility” [4] to capture one version of this idea. Physical systems obey laws that govern their behavior, and Wolfram's suggestion is that those laws can be viewed as if they were computations being carried out by a physical system in order to calculate the next set of values for its physical state. What we have known ever since the time of Isaac Newton is that we can reduce these laws to equations that allow us to short-circuit the physical computations and predict what a physical system will do before it does it. If we want to know where a planet will be next week, we can use equations that do not take a whole week to complete, whereas the computations that the planet is effectively executing when it follows its local laws of nature do take a week.


pages: 525 words: 149,886

Higher-Order Perl: A Guide to Program Transformation by Mark Jason Dominus

always be closing, Defenestration of Prague, digital rights, Donald Knuth, functional programming, higher-order functions, Isaac Newton, Larry Wall, P = NP, Paul Graham, Perl 6, slashdot, SpamAssassin

(back) 3 Perhaps I should have included a longer explanation of this point, since I seem to be the only person in the world who is bothered by the phrase “Your call will be answered in the order it was received.” It always seems to me that my call could not have an order. (back) 4 /ˆ(?{local$d=0})(?:\((?{$d++})|\)(?{$d--})(?(?{$d<0})(?!))|(?>[ˆ()]*))*(?(?{$d!=0})(?!))$/. (back) 5 Isaac Newton discovered and wrote about the method first, but his write-up wasn’t published until 1736. Joseph Raphson discovered the technique independently and published it in 1671. (back) 6 Actually they’re alternating between 1.414213562373094923430016933708 and 1.414213562373095145474621858739, but who’s counting?


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

The method used in this book is unusual, employed only very rarely in Western social science.6 However, it is a remarkably effective way of showing how large a total is while simultaneously highlighting how that total is also changing, over both very short periods of time and—most important—overall. Furthermore, timelines drawn as they are drawn in this book allow the second derivative of change, the change in the rate of change, to also be appreciated. The short appendix at the end of this book gives more details of how these particular graphs can be both drawn and read. Isaac Newton and those of his time who understood rates of change could easily have comprehended the method that is used to make the timelines shown in this book, which are statistical graphs. The first known statistical graph dates back to 1623, just a few decades before Newton was born.7 What is new today is how widely we share the understanding of such concepts, which in the past very few were allowed to be taught.


pages: 440 words: 132,685

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross

Albert Einstein, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, death of newspapers, distributed generation, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Livingstone, I presume, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, plutocrats, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, urban renewal, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers

Edison, Batchelor, and the phonograph were installed in the office of the Senate’s committee on patents, then the House’s committee, attracting drop-in visits from members and leaving Congress without a quorum for nearly an hour. After Edison’s return home, the press added new expressions to the lexicon of hagiography. Having been honored by the most distinguished men in the country, the New York Sun reasoned, Edison had received more attention than if Robert Fulton, Sir Isaac Newton, or Galileo had appeared. Beneath Edison’s unassuming appearance, a reporter for another paper sensed something else hiding beneath his hat: “a kingly crown.” CHAPTER THREE FLIGHT MAY–AUGUST 1878 THE PHONOGRAPH GAVE EDISON an opportunity in mid-1878 that would never reappear in his eighty-four-year-long life.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

The Empire of Truth and Reason is only acknowledged in it; and under their protection an innocent War is waged against any one whatever. Friends ought to be on their Guard, there, against their Friends, Fathers against Children […] Every body, there, is both Sovereign and under every-body’s Jurisdiction.51 No one escaped critique and revision. Not even the greatest scientist of the age, Isaac Newton. He had claimed it was impossible to correct chromatic distortion in lenses, which results in a mismatch so colours do not combine as they should. Others challenged Newton’s conclusion. In an almost perfect example of the open science ideals of the Enlightenment era, the Royal Society did not turn to religious authorities or ancient books to settle the matter, but to John Dollond, the son of Huguenot refugees and a silk-weaver who had taught himself optics.


pages: 454 words: 134,482

Money Free and Unfree by George A. Selgin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disintermediation, Dutch auction, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Y2K

Because the gold coinage at the time consisted only of guineas, which (after an initial attempt to rate them at 20 shillings in 1662) were allowed to float against silver, there was as yet strictly speaking no “mint price” of gold, or implied mint gold-silver equivalent. But the transition to bimetallism was completed with Isaac Newton’s decision, in 1717, to officially rate the guinea at 21 shillings, which established a mint price for gold of £3 17s 10½d per troy ounce. Although Newton hadn’t intended it, his rating of the guinea undervalued silver, and so cut off the flow of that metal to the mint. England thus found itself on a de facto gold standard, which (despite great inconvenience caused by the lack of silver coin) prevailed until it gave way to the paper pound in 1797.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

*In the mid-eighteenth century the German-born but London-based astronomer William Herschel and his sister Caroline between them discovered a score of comets, twenty-five hundred nebulae, and, most notably, the planet Uranus. William’s son John became in turn so accomplished in the field that he was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Sir Isaac Newton. And Alexander Herschel, John’s second son, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was the world’s leading nineteenth century expert on meteorites. *He fathered eighteen children by his two wives. *The fact that a secretive revolutionary organization tried to topple him from the throne as soon as he assumed office in December 1925—the group thereafter being known as the Decembrists—left him understandably nervous during the first years of his reign.


pages: 517 words: 139,477

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies by Jeremy Siegel

Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, carried interest, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, compound rate of return, computer age, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, fundamental attribution error, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, index arbitrage, index fund, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John Bogle, joint-stock company, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, machine readable, market bubble, mental accounting, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Northern Rock, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

in Journal of Portfolio Management, vol. 18 (Fall 1991), pp. 27-34. The material benefited significantly from discussions with Professor Paul Samuelson. 16 * * * When World Events Impact Financial Markets I can predict the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of crowds. —ISAAC NEWTON As the sun rose over New York City on a beautiful Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, traders expected a dull day on Wall Street. There were no economic data coming out of Washington, nor any earnings releases scheduled. The previous Friday the markets had fallen on a horrible employment report, but on Monday the markets had bounced back slightly.


pages: 453 words: 132,400

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Bonfire of the Vanities, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, fear of failure, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Necker cube, pattern recognition, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vilfredo Pareto

Astronomical work certainly didn’t help his career in the Church, and for much of his life the main rewards he had were aesthetic, derived from the simple beauty of his system compared to the more cumbersome Ptolemaic model. Galileo had been trained in medicine, and what drove him into increasingly dangerous experimentation was the delight he took in figuring out such things as the location of the center of gravity of various solid objects. Isaac Newton formulated his major discoveries soon after he received his B.A. at Cambridge, in 1665, when the university was closed because of the plague. Newton had to spend two years in the safety and boredom of a country retreat, and he filled the time playing with his ideas about a universal theory of gravitation.


pages: 435 words: 136,741

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius(tm) by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, do what you love, fear of failure, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, urban sprawl, Vision Fund, Walter Mischel

To live with passion while eluding the tragedies of heart disease, debilitating anxiety, severe headaches, back problems, hostility, depression, and sleep disturbances—to name a miserable few—you will need to get serious about loosening up. If that sounds contradictory, that’s because it is. The easiest way to bring your life into balance is to think in terms of opposites. In fact, this investment in balance parallels Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion, which generally states that for every type of action, there needs to be an equally intense and opposite type of reaction. For example, if you do physical labor all day as a construction worker or sculptor, it stands to reason that your hands and body need a rest while your mind and spirit revitalize.


pages: 522 words: 150,592

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms & a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester

Beryl Markham, British Empire, cable laying ship, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, financial engineering, friendly fire, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Isaac Newton, Louis Blériot, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Piper Alpha, polynesian navigation, Suez canal 1869, supervolcano, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Oceans have their own very peculiar physical attributes—a list of inherences and essentials that at the very least would include such matters as the topography of the sea’s invisible underneath, the temperature and chemistry of the water, and the movement of the ocean’s currents and its tides. And early scientists did indeed notice and inquire: in the seventeenth century alone we had Robert Boyle writing on the sea’s salinity, Isaac Newton offering his views on the causation of tides, and Robert Hooke—the famously ill-tempered polymath and philosopher who is better known for establishing the principles of elasticity, inventing sash windows, championing microscopy, first seeing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, and creating an elegant escapement mechanism for watches—designing a host of devices and methods that might be used for research into the deep seas


pages: 519 words: 148,131

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, in 1821, Great Britain went on the gold standard. That meant that the Bank of England stood ready to buy or sell unlimited quantities of pounds sterling for gold at the rate of 3 pounds, 17 shillings, 101/2 pence per ounce. (That ratio had been determined more than a century earlier by Sir Isaac Newton, of all people, who enjoyed the well-remunerated but largely no-show job of Master of the King’s Mint.) Because the United Kingdom dominated the world economy and world trade in the nineteenth century, and the Bank of England was, in effect, the world’s de facto central bank, all major trading nations soon pegged their currencies to gold.


pages: 504 words: 143,303

Why We Can't Afford the Rich by Andrew Sayer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, asset-backed security, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, biodiversity loss, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, declining real wages, deglobalization, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, G4S, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green new deal, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", James Dyson, job automation, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, land value tax, long term incentive plan, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, popular capitalism, predatory finance, price stability, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Alperovitz and Daly begin their book by quoting billionaire Warren Buffett: ‘society is responsible for a very significant share of what I have earned [sic]’.5 Buffett, and also Bill Gates, head of Microsoft, acknowledge that they would not be where they are were it not for the fact that they were born into a very rich, technologically advanced society and they have been beneficiaries of a vast inheritance of knowledge, particularly science. It was no less a figure than Isaac Newton who said ‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. If Buffett and Gates had been born into a society without an electricity supply, without a history of scientific development, we would not have heard of them. Of course, these facts alone do not explain why they are so much richer than other people from their own country – for that we would need to consider other factors, especially the privatisation of parts of the commons and its use as a source of unearned income; but they do underscore the importance of what we inherit for our current standard of living.


pages: 582 words: 160,693

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbine, compound rate of return, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, debt deflation, ending welfare as we know it, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Gilder, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, Isaac Newton, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Macrae, offshore financial centre, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, phenotype, price mechanism, profit maximization, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, spice trade, statistical model, telepresence, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto

The beginning of something we may never understand"1 -Danny Hillis PREMONITIONS The coming of the year 2000 has haunted the Western imagination for the past thousand years. Ever since the world failed to end at the turn of the first millennium after Christ, theologians, evangelists, poets, and seers have looked to the end of this decade with an expectation that it would bring something momentous. No less an authority than Isaac Newton speculated that the world would end with the year 2000. Michel de Nostradamus, whose prophecies have been read by every generation since they were first 1 Danny Hillis, "The Millennium Clock," Wired, Special Edition, Fall 1995, p.48. 1 published in 1568, forecast the coming of the Third Antichrist in July 1999.2 Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, connoisseur of the "collective unconscious," envisioned the birth of a New Age in 1997.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

Since that time, the discipline of geopolitics has acquired the status of the unalterable foundation of world order, the ultimate logic on which all other human activity rests: The control over territory trumps all else. When forces collide, one must give way. But the physics of classical geopolitics is being superseded by the physics of complexity. Our times are analogous to a century ago when quantum mechanics shook up the neat rationalism of Isaac Newton’s classical physics with its findings: Units are difficult to quantify and in perpetual motion; invisible objects can occupy space; gravity matters more than location; there are no causal certainties, only probabilities; and meaning is derived relationally rather than from absolutes. It is time for geopolitics to have its own complexity revolution.


pages: 577 words: 149,554

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey by Michael Huemer

Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Phillip Zimbardo, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Stanford prison experiment, systematic bias, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, unbiased observer, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Even if Rawls succeeded in identifying all of the appropriate procedural constraints on moral arguments, a person’s satisfying these constraints – failing to be biased, failing to commit fallacies, and so on – would not guarantee the correctness of his conclusions. The correctness of one’s conclusions, whatever one’s field of inquiry, depends partly on the correctness and completeness of the information from which one reasons. This is easily seen in examples involving scientific reasoning. Isaac Newton held mistaken theories due, not to any procedural error in his thinking about physics, but rather to the incompleteness of his information – specifically, his ignorance of relativistic and quantum mechanical phenomena. The same principle holds good for normative theories, where the needed information is, at least in part, evaluative.


pages: 586 words: 159,901

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom by Doug Henwood

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bond market vigilante , book value, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, kremlinology, labor-force participation, late capitalism, law of one price, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, London Interbank Offered Rate, long and variable lags, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, market bubble, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, microcredit, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, proprietary trading, publication bias, Ralph Nader, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The triumph of the international gold standard was the result of the Enlightenment and the consolidation of British industrial and financial power; the political economists of the 18th and early 19th centuries provided the theory, and the development of capitalist finance provided the impetus from practice. With Sir Isaac Newton as Master of the Mint, Britain set the value of the pound sterling at 123.274 grains of gold at the beginning of the 18th century. That standard was suspended in 1797, because of the financing needs of the Napoleonic Wars. When peace came, creditors' calls for restoration of the gold standard were resisted by industrialists and landowners.


pages: 573 words: 157,767

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

It purported to explain everything from the orbits of the planets and the nature of light to the tides, from volcanoes to magnets, why water forms into spherical drops, how fire is struck from flint, and much, much more. His theory was almost all dead wrong, but it held together surprisingly well and is strangely plausible even in today’s hindsight. It took Sir Isaac Newton to come up with a better physics, in his famous Principia, an explicit refutation of Descartes’s theory. Descartes didn’t think it was just his mind that was wonderful; he thought that all normal human minds were wonderful, capable of feats that no mere animal could match, feats that were beyond the reach of any imaginable mechanism, however elaborate and complicated.


pages: 490 words: 146,259

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

There, no doubt wearing what would become his trademark attire—a flowing garment “like an Artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves”—he developed the intense study habits that he continued throughout his life.18 He typically worked eighteen hours a day, breaking only “to allow [for] meat and drink (and some refreshing after) two hours every day” and “to sleep four hours every night.”19 In 1546, when still a teenager, Dee was appointed to a founding fellowship at Trinity College, which was newly established by Henry VIII. Officially, he held his post in the study of Greek, although mathematics was his true calling and greatest strength. The college that would later boast Sir Isaac Newton among its professors did not yet have a lecturer in mathematics. As John Aubrey, the contemporary biographer, put it, “Astrologer, Mathematician and Conjurer were accounted the same things.”20 In 1547, Dee crossed the English Channel to study civil law at the University of Louvain, in modern-day Belgium, after Cambridge had lost its star law professor with Sir Thomas Smith’s move to court.


pages: 653 words: 155,847

Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes

Albert Einstein, animal electricity, California gold rush, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Copley Medal, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dmitri Mendeleev, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Simon Kuznets, tacit knowledge, Ted Nordhaus, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Vanguard fund, working poor, young professional

Falling out of favor with the landgrave, his Hessian patron, he had decided in 1706 to return to England. He carried with him plans for a steam-powered paddlewheel boat to present to the Royal Society, hoping for sponsorship. In London, unfortunately, his alignment with Leibniz worked against him. Isaac Newton had been elected president for life of the Royal Society in 1703. Both Leibniz and Newton had independently formulated the powerful mathematical system known as the calculus, and Newton and his followers were fighting a priority battle with Leibniz. Papin described his steamboat to the Royal Society in February 1707.


pages: 386

Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821 by George Anthony Selgin

British Empire, correlation coefficient, flying shuttle, George Gilder, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, large denomination, lone genius, profit motive, RAND corporation, school choice, seigniorage, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen

Although the guinea was originally assigned an official value of 20S, guineas never traded at that rate. Instead, they commanded a premium that rose as high as 30S in 1694, when the silver coins were badly degraded, settling afterward at 21 S 6d-the rate at which guineas were received by officers of the revenue following the Great Recoinage (of silver) of 1696-99. In 1717, Isaac Newton, who was then master of the mint, convinced the government to lower the official rating of the guinea to 21 s, where it remained throughout the remainder of the century. Five guinea, two guinea, and half guinea coins were also minted during the eighteenth century. Quart~r guineas were tried as well, in 1718.


pages: 566 words: 151,193

Diet for a New America by John Robbins

Albert Einstein, carbon footprint, clean water, disinformation, Flynn Effect, haute cuisine, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, ocean acidification, placebo effect, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Review

He performed so badly in his high school courses, except mathematics, that a teacher told him to drop out, saying, “You will never amount to anything, Einstein.”36 Charles Darwin did so poorly in school that his father told him, “You will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.”37 Thomas Edison was called “dunce” by his father and “addled” by his high school teacher and was told by his headmaster that he “would never make a success of anything.”38 Henry Ford barely made it through school with the minimum grasp of reading and writing.39 Sir Isaac Newton was so poor in school that he was allowed to continue only because he was a complete flop at running the family farm.40 Pablo Picasso was pulled out of school at the age of 10 because he was doing so badly. His father hired a tutor to prepare him to go back to school, but the tutor gave up on the hopeless pupil.41 Giacomo Puccini, the Italian opera composer, was so poor at everything as a child, including music, that his first music teacher gave up in despair, concluding the boy had no talent.42 If we can be so far amiss in recognizing types of intelligence that are a bit different from the norm and yet belong to members of our own species who are destined to make great contributions, it seems likely we might fail to recognize some forms of intelligence that belong to beings of other species.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Crash and Panic What do Julian Robertson, the concept of losers average losers, the dot-com stock crash, and October 2008 have in common? Bubbles. The 2008 crash is no different from the tulip bubble made famous in Holland. In 1720, when the south sea bubble was at its height, even the greatest genius of his time, Sir Isaac Newton, got sucked into the hysteria. Investing as if his brilliance in science carried over to his finances, Newton eventually lost £20,000. Although bubbles might appear as short-term blips in economic history, more often the aftermath is long term, resulting in severe recessions and government intervention that usually makes the situation worse.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But here lies the contradiction. Capitalism’s operating logic is designed to fail by succeeding. Let me explain. In his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, posits that the market operates in much the same way as the laws governing gravity, as discovered by Isaac Newton. Just as in nature, where for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so too do supply and demand balance each other in the self-regulating marketplace. If consumer demand for goods and services goes up, sellers will raise their prices accordingly. If the sellers’ prices become too high, demand will drop, forcing sellers to lower the prices.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Some risks, he wrote, can be assessed because there is some evidence upon which to build some probability distribution. Other events – the probability of war or the position of the wealthy in a future social system – do not permit a reasoned, risk-based judgement, because we do not have the facts upon which to base such a judgement, and we never will. Moreover, human affairs are not like the laws of physics.31 Isaac Newton made the point well: ‘I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’ Statistics pertaining to the activities of human beings have to acknowledge human inconstancy and irrationality. Happily ignoring the accumulated wisdom of Russell, Knight, Keynes and Newton, from the 1960s onwards, a group of mathematical economists hypothesised that the financial markets were different.


pages: 566 words: 155,428

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, book value, break the buck, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, friendly fire, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, price mechanism, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, the payments system, time value of money, too big to fail, vertical integration, working-age population, yield curve, Yogi Berra

Speculative markets have succumbed to occasional bubbles for as long as there have been speculative markets. Indeed, one of the first common stocks ever issued, in the South Sea Company in England, was hyped into the first stock-market bubble—the famed South Sea Bubble of 1720—which devastated, among others, a pretty smart fellow named Isaac Newton. And the Dutch had managed to grow a gigantic bubble in—of all things—tulip bulbs almost a century earlier. No, while we may be lucky enough to nip a few bubbles in the bud, we will never stamp them out. The herding behavior that produces them may well be programmed into our DNA. Our best hope is to minimize the consequences when bubbles go splat—as they inevitably will.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

New inventions, particularly those that combine existing ideas and technology such as the car, the telephone, and online auctions, may be natural occurrences not acts of genius. Any number of people might have made these innovations given the ideas swirling around in the community of thinkers. The simultaneity of major discoveries—calculus (Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz), the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray), and the natural selection theory of evolution (Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace)—supports that inference. In sum, many-model thinking shows advantages and disadvantages to patents. The deeper, more nuanced understanding the models provide argues for a more flexible patent policy.


pages: 513 words: 152,381

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

In her seminal work on the rights of future persons, Annette Baier (1981) makes a related point: “The crucial role we fill, as moral beings, is as members of a cross-generational community, a community of beings who look before and after, who interpret the past in light of the present, who see the future as growing out of the past, who see themselves as members of enduring families, nations, cultures, traditions.” As does John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971, § 79): “The realizations of the powers of human individuals living at any one time takes the cooperation of many generations (or even societies) over a long period of time.” 36 Seneca (1972), pp. 279–91. Sixteen centuries later, in 1704, Isaac Newton made a similar remark (Newton & McGuire, 1970): “To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. ’Tis much better to do a little with certainty, & leave the rest for others that come after you…” In 1755, Denis Diderot expressed related ideas in his Encyclopédie (Diderot, 1755, pp. 635–48A): “… the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.” 37 Perhaps even more astounding is that some of the mysteries of comets whose depth inspired Seneca to write this passage have only recently been revealed—and contributed directly to our understanding of existential risk: “Some day there will be a man who will show in what regions comets have their orbit, why they travel so remote from other celestial bodies, how large they are and what sort they are” (Seneca, 1972, p. 281).


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

The engineers were looking at the end of 2001. The new Moon for December 2001 would fall on December 17, with the full Moon on or around December 28. Students across the globe could begin studying the mission and its physics and technology in the fall. One of the engineers pointed out that December 25 was Isaac Newton’s birthday. Rex Ridenoure, Blastoff’s chief mission architect and number-two hire (after a Czech-born engineer named Tomas Svitek), went over some of the systems challenges, including transmitting video, images, and data from both lunar rovers back to Earth. The plan, he explained, was to transmit video and data from the rovers independently to the lander—the mother ship—via the same sort of radio links (a 2.4 GHz microwave radio band) used by remote-controlled cars and toy drones.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

In response, more and more Americans began looking back fondly to times before the late 1960s, times that seemed by comparison so reassuringly familiar and calm and coherent. In other words, that curious old American nostalgia tic expressed itself as it hadn’t for decades—in fact, it took over with an intensity and longevity it never had before. The multiple shocks of the new triggered a wide-ranging reversion to the old. It turned out Isaac Newton’s third law of motion operates in the social universe as well as physics: the 1960s actions had been sudden and powerful, and the reactions starting in the 1970s were equal and opposite, with follow-on effects that lasted much, much longer. Some of the origins of this 1970s plunge into nostalgia, in fact, had showed themselves a bit earlier.


The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

Ordinarily, the agency could compensate for the meager speeds of heavy spacecraft by taking indirect flight paths and using planets encountered along the way to yank and shove the robotic pilgrim outward, inward, or onward.225 The laws of physics being immutable, and the salient numbers known, NASA’s orbital dynamicists could do this all day, running the numbers to sling spacecraft precisely, one planet to the next: free propulsion from Isaac Newton.226 It was incomparably the best bargain in space exploration. But then television tabloid journalism got involved, and everything became complicated. In 1997, while waiting at Cape Canaveral for liftoff, the Cassini mission was beset suddenly by political protest. Cassini carried three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which were powered by the decay of plutonium 238.


pages: 551 words: 174,280

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Michelson would not have put the expansion of the universe, or the existence of parallel universes, or the non-existence of the force of gravity, on any list of possible discoveries whose probability was ‘exceedingly remote’. He just didn’t conceive of them at all. A century earlier, the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange had remarked that Isaac Newton had not only been the greatest genius who ever lived, but also the luckiest, for ‘the system of the world can be discovered only once.’ Lagrange would never know that some of his own work, which he had regarded as a mere translation of Newton’s into a more elegant mathematical language, was a step towards the replacement of Newton’s ‘system of the world’.


pages: 522 words: 162,310

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

Then a century later came Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the Constitution, and the First Amendment. All that was indeed progress. Disbelief was eventually permitted, at least legally. But during our founding 1600s, as giants walked in Europe and the Age of Reason dawned—Shakespeare, Galileo, Bacon, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza—America was a primitive outlier. Individual freedom of thought in early America was specifically about the freedom to believe whatever supernaturalism you wished. Four centuries later that has been a freedom, revived and unfettered and run amok, driving America’s transformation


pages: 512 words: 165,704

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, cellular automata, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Donald Shoup, endowment effect, extreme commuting, fundamental attribution error, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, hive mind, human-factors engineering, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, Induced demand, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, lake wobegon effect, loss aversion, megacity, Milgram experiment, Nash equilibrium, PalmPilot, power law, Sam Peltzman, Silicon Valley, SimCity, statistical model, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, traumatic brain injury, ultimatum game, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

As the researchers observed, the drivers “may be trading one automobile-related risk for another.” See “Driving Distractions in New York City,” Hunter College, November 2007. Epilogue: Driving Lessons to pass the front: For an excellent discussion of the physics of oversteering and understeering, as well as driving in general, see Barry Parker, The Isaac Newton School of Driving: Physics and Your Car (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). to maintain our course?: W. O. Readinger, A. Chatziastros, D. W. Cunningham, J. E. Cutting, and H. H. Bülthoff, “Gaze-Direction Effects on Drivers’ Abilities to Steer a Straight Course,” TWK Beiträge zur 4.


pages: 564 words: 163,106

The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine by M. D. James le Fanu M. D.

Barry Marshall: ulcers, clean water, cuban missile crisis, discovery of penicillin, double helix, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, rising living standards, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, tacit knowledge, telerobotics, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method, V2 rocket

The first, already alluded to, is that genes are, for obvious evolutionary reasons, not a particularly important cause of disease in humans, so the medical applications of this new knowledge was likely to be limited. Second, despite the elucidating power of the techniques of The New Genetics, the genes are so obviously very complex as to defy any profound understanding of how they work. Perhaps Isaac Newton’s famous observation more adequately expresses what might be hoped for: ‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself now and then, finding a smoother pebble than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’


pages: 559 words: 174,054

The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug by Bennett Alan Weinberg, Bonnie K. Bealer

British Empire, clean water, confounding variable, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, Honoré de Balzac, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lao Tzu, placebo effect, Plato's cave, spice trade, trade route, traveling salesman

He evidently believed, in this case at least, that the whole was less than the sum of its illustrious parts, because he derisively records in his history that a club was built, “at Tillyards, where many pretended wits would meet and deride all others.” The first participants included Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, Sir Edmund Halley, the great astronomer, and Sir Isaac Newton, originator of the calculus, celestial mechanics, and the postulates of classical physics. The members’ avid curiosity prompted hands-on scientific investigation: Sloane, Halley, and Newton are said to have dissected a dolphin on a table in the coffeehouse before an amazed audience. The Oxford Coffee Club quickly absorbed the membership of a competing science club, which had been set up concurrently by an Oxford tutor, Peter Sthael of Strasbourg.


pages: 710 words: 164,527

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

A great admirer of Einstein, whom he had met in Berlin in 1926, Keynes, it would surely seem, quite consciously emulated Einstein’s approach of turning on their heads eternal mechanisms the world thought it understood. “Einstein actually did for Physics what Mr Keynes believes himself to have done for Economics,” observed Arthur Pigou, one of the old school that Keynes sought not merely to overturn but to embarrass with his book.88 Isaac Newton had claimed that time was absolute and fixed, and who but a madman questioned this? Einstein did. Time was relative, he believed, and he subsequently proved it. Keynes’s controversial claim of having erected a new General Theory was a transparent mimicking of Einstein’s “general” (as contrasted to his merely “special”) theory of relativity.89 Classical economists—that is, the only ones who were reputable in the 1920s—believed in Say’s Law, expressed by Keynes as “supply creates its own demand,” and Keynes set out to prove that this was false.90 Say did not write the precise words Keynes ascribed to him, and there is endless controversy over what exactly “Say’s Law” comprises.


pages: 628 words: 170,668

In the Shadow of the Moon: A Challenging Journey to Tranquility, 1965-1969 by Francis French, Colin Burgess, Walter Cunningham

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Gene Kranz, Isaac Newton, lost cosmonauts, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Scaled Composites, SpaceShipOne, X Prize

Years later, Borman also concluded that he was probably suffering from sas, which seems to strike randomly and even today can still affect any space traveler, no matter what precautions might be taken. It would take them three days to get to the moon. In communicating with Mike Collins in Mission Control later in the mission, Anders pointed out that it was Isaac Newton, not the crew, who was driving the spacecraft. As they arced between the gravity fields of Earth and moon, the influence that each had on the spacecraft was constantly changing. The tug of Earth’s gravity slowed the spacecraft to the point where it was only speeding away from the Earth at two thousand miles per hour, some twelve times slower than their speed when leaving Earth orbit.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Back in the early 1940s, the US Supreme Court used the term to refer to a truck carrying a bullhorn.19 It’s not just political concepts that change in meaning across time and place. The same has historically been true of terms in science OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 78 FUTURE POLITICS and technology. Before Sir Isaac Newton, for instance, the words force, mass, motion, and time had no precise scientific meaning. Newton endowed them with the strict definitions that have lasted for centuries. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, natural philosophers ‘mathematicized’ the word energy, which previously meant vigour or intensity, into a central concept in the discipline of physics.20 Today, a computer is a machine that sits on your desk.


The Companion Guide to London by David Piper, Fionnuala Jervis

British Empire, cakes and ale, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Ford Model T, gentrification, haute couture, Isaac Newton, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Nelson Mandela, South Sea Bubble, V2 rocket

Best perhaps, in the mind’s eye at least, to tour the whole building first, swiftly to establish its geography. Up the nave then to the central obstruction of the choir-screen with the organ, a crash of gaudy nineteenth-century red and gold, green and blue containing, pale as if drowned, the marble figures of Sir Isaac Newton and of Lord Stanhope; right round it and up the north aisle to the crossing of the transepts, with the high altar central beneath it and a huge lift of space left and right to the rose windows that close each transept. On into the chancel with its apsed end, and off the curve of the apse the radial chapels on your left bulging with the haphazard lumber of the dead, and the Plantagenet tombs on your right.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

For centuries, across Europe and in the Islamic world, mankind had sought ways to turn mundane materials into far more precious gold and silver. In the medieval world, alchemists included everyone from garden-variety con artists to skilled technicians of metallurgy to some of the most brilliant scientists of the day. Sir Isaac Newton, it was once said, was not in fact the first modern scientist, but the last of the alchemists. (This was said, as it happens, by an economist of wide-ranging intellectual interests named John Maynard Keynes.) Alchemists were an insular group, speaking a language that outsiders couldn’t grasp and disdainful of the uninitiated.


pages: 614 words: 174,226

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society by Binyamin Appelbaum

90 percent rule, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, greed is good, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, plutocrats, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now

Paper Fish Conclusion Acknowledgments Footnotes Notes Index Introduction When modern science appeared, medieval Christianity was a complete, comprehensive system which explained both man and the universe; it was the basis for government, the inspiration for knowledge and art, the arbiter of war as of peace and the power behind the production and distribution of wealth — none of which was sufficient to prevent its downfall. — Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles (1998)1 I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. — Isaac Newton (1720) In the early 1950s, a young economist named Paul Volcker worked as a human calculator in an office deep inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He crunched numbers for the people who made decisions, and he told his wife that he saw little chance of ever moving up.2 The central bank’s leadership included bankers, lawyers, and an Iowa hog farmer, but not a single economist.3 The Fed’s chairman, William McChesney Martin, was a stockbroker with a low opinion of the species.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

The legend of the mechanic magician would last for a long time—for example, it was perpetuated in the character of the inventor Spallanzani in Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffman.72 In terms of productivity-enhancing technological improvements, the Renaissance was largely a continuation of the Middle Ages in that most technologies seemingly saved more capital than labor. Some progress was made in mining, including the introduction of underground rail transport and a variety of pumping devices.73 Mining was probably the industry that benefited the most directly from scientists and science. Galileo as well as Isaac Newton were concerned with many mining engineering problems, ranging from air circulation to the raising of coal, but their insights did nothing to reduce the number of workers required in the mines. All the same, agriculture still constituted the largest sector of the economy, and improvements in farming techniques had the largest impact on aggregate productivity.


pages: 665 words: 159,350

Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg

Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, autonomous vehicles, British Empire, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, East Village, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Elliott wave, Erdős number, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, Geoffrey Hinton, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, government statistician, GPT-3, greed is good, Henri Poincaré, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Bachelier, machine translation, Mercator projection, Mercator projection distort size, especially Greenland and Africa, Milgram experiment, multi-armed bandit, Nate Silver, OpenAI, Paul Erdős, pets.com, pez dispenser, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Snapchat, social distancing, social graph, transcontinental railway, urban renewal

The rule for figuring out each day’s increase is the same tomorrow as it was today. And under our slightly more dressed-up model, what happens tomorrow is whatever the bloop-bloop machine makes out of what happens today. The rate of growth may differ from day to day, but it’s always the same machine. Taking this outlook makes us heirs to Isaac Newton. His first law asserts that an object in motion will keep moving at the same speed and in the same direction, unless some force is applied to it. Tomorrow’s motion is the same as today’s. But most moving objects we’re interested in don’t groove along through frictionless vacuum in an eternal line.


Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition by Kindleberger, Charles P., Robert Z., Aliber

active measures, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, death of newspapers, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, edge city, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Hyman Minsky, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, junk bonds, large denomination, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, price stability, railway mania, Richard Thaler, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, very high income, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

They managed to increase the prices of the stock day by day until most of the shares in the firms had been sold to the gullible investors who were congratulating themselves on how much money they had made. When one of these investors tried to convert the paper profits into cash, there suddenly were no buyers. For a further example of an outside destabilizing speculator who bought high and sold low, there is the story of the great Master of the Mint, Isaac Newton, the world-class scientist. In the spring of 1720 he stated: ‘I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.’ On 20 April, accordingly, he sold his shares in the South Sea Company for £7000, a 100 percent profit. Later an infection from the mania gripping the world that spring and summer caused him to buy a larger number of shares near the market top and he lost £20,000.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

More controversially, he insisted that examinations on the ‘national catechism’ should be used to see if people were worthy of citizenship and that idle parasites such as aristocrats and ‘metaphysicians’ should be deprived of their leadership positions. Unfortunately, Saint-Simon undermined his own credibility by creating a new version of Christianity, complete with patron saints such as Isaac Newton and a new priestly class of intellectuals, which was intended to do for the meritocratic age what Roman Catholicism had done for the feudal age: reconcile people to their preordained place in the world. For the most part, the masses would accept the rule of people who possessed better qualifications than they did, he argued – nobody but a fool believed that bridges should be designed by the most popular person rather than the best qualified – but if people ever chafed at the bit, then religion could be used to appeal to their poetic and imaginative faculties.


pages: 559 words: 164,795

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, dark matter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, German hyperinflation, haute couture, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, uranium enrichment

Even in the early 1920s, when Einstein – living in Berlin – had become famous worldwide, and was feted by fellow scientists and journalists and society figures, and even the film comedian Charlie Chaplin, there were significant numbers of nationalists and agitators who loathed the new universe that he postulated. Einstein insisted that the general theory of relativity was not a revolution. He had not usurped Isaac Newton; instead, he had applied his laws to a universe that the seventeenth-century mathematician could never have conceived of, and, by doing so, caused them to evolve. Newton’s gravity could not explain the greater forces at work in the galaxy; Einstein imagined the bending of light and the slowing and speeding up of time.


pages: 626 words: 181,434

I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Conway, John von Neumann, language acquisition, mandelbrot fractal, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, publish or perish, random walk, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, Turing machine

Let me be a little more explicit about this distinction between Principia Mathematica and PM. The former is a set of three hefty tomes, whereas PM is a set of precise symbol-manipulation rules laid out and explored in depth in those tomes, using a rather arcane notation (see the end of this chapter). The distinction is analogous to that between Isaac Newton’s massive tome entitled Principia and the laws of mechanics that he set forth therein. Although it took many chapters of theorems and derivations before the rather lowly fact that one plus one equals two (written in PM notation as “s0 + s0 = ss0”, where the letter “s” stands for the concept “successor of ”) was rigorously demonstrated using the strict symbol-shunting rules of PM, Gödel nonetheless realized that PM, though terribly cumbersome, had enormous power to talk about whole numbers — in fact, to talk about arbitrarily subtle properties of whole numbers.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Quoted in Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market: 191. 24. Quoted in ibid: 260. 25. Paul De Grauwe, Leonardo Iania and Pablo Rovira Kaltwasser “How abnormal was the stock market in October 2008?” (11 November 2008) (www.eurointelligence.com/article.581+M5f21b8d26a3.0.html). 26. Stephen Hawking, during a 1994 debate with Roger Penrose at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge; in Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose (1996) The Nature of Space and Time, Princeton University Press, New Jersey: 26. 27. Fischer Black “Noise” (1986) Journal of Finance 41: 529–43. 28. John Maynard Keynes (2006) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Atlantic Books, New Delhi: 140. 29.


pages: 733 words: 184,118

Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age by W. Bernard Carlson

1960s counterculture, air gap, Albert Einstein, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, packet switching, Plato's cave, popular electronics, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, undersea cable, yellow journalism

Plato’s philosophers could look directly at the fire and even the sun outside the cave to know the truth. Only philosophers, concluded Plato, could fathom universal truths, ideals. As we shall see, Tesla was like Plato’s philosopher, someone who chose to seek out and understand ideals. As Tesla told one biographer, he was inspired by a saying from Sir Isaac Newton: “I simply hold the thought steadily in my mind’s eye until a clear light dawns upon me.”16 In harnessing nature for his inventions, Tesla spent a great deal of time and energy trying to discern the fundamental principle on which to base an invention and then worked to manifest that ideal as a working device.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

‡ Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 1 This is different from a “trail,” which is an audition for a full-time job and typically entails 1–2 nights of working a single station or dish. 2 I tried the pellet-firing M&P .45 replica, but the trigger pull was too heavy for useful simulation. 3 An allusion to our now familiar friend: absurd imagery. 4 Ed uses physicists here, but I’m a meathead and find Arnie easier than Isaac Newton. 5 Starting from this book’s official publication date, November 20, 2012. This means no later than February 12, 2013.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

It is always good to be reminded that chemistry is the child of alchemy, much of which consisted of looking into the chemical powers of substances. The main efforts went into creating value by transforming metals into gold by the method of transmutation. The necessary substance was called the philosopher’s stone—lapis philosophorum. Many people fell for it, a list that includes such scholars as Albertus Magnus, Isaac Newton, and Roger Bacon and great thinkers who were not quite scholars, such as Paracelsus. It is a matter of no small import that the operation of transmutation was called the Magnus Opus—the great(est) work. I truly believe that the operation I will discuss—based on some properties of optionality—is about as close as we can get to the philosopher’s stone.


Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity by Lawrence B. Afrin M. D., Kendra Neilsen Myles, Kristi Posival

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, megacity, microbiome, mouse model, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, pre–internet, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

A similar principle can be found in the writings of many earlier philosophers including Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus (13th century), Maimonides (12th century), Ptolemy (2nd century), and even Aristotle (4th century BC). Later expressions, too, of the Razor can be found in the writings of other luminaries such as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. The Razor has been key in some of the greatest scientific discoveries including Dalton’s atomic theory, Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and Planck’s theory of quantum mechanics. The “grand unified theory” sought by physicists to explain our entire universe, if ever found, will be the ultimate demonstration of the principle of the Razor.


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

Santa Clara County, his boyhood home, seemed like the perfect place to build a transistor factory that could stay a technological jump ahead of the competition. The electronics industry watched anxiously as Shockley opened Shockley Laboratories Inc. near El Camino Real in Mountain View. They knew that the man was just brilliant enough to do anything. It was like Sir Isaac Newton announcing he was going to build a mill of his own design in seventeenth-century England. Shortly, Shockley announced that he was hiring—and the applications that poured into Mountain View represented the cream of electronics research. Shockley, justly renowned as a superb judge of talent, hired eight of the very best: Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Jean Hoerni, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts.


How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, autism spectrum disorder, Drosophila, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, framing effect, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, nocebo, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Shai Danziger, Skype, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, systems thinking, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces.8 We are, I believe, in the midst of a revolution in our understanding of emotion, the mind, and the brain—a revolution that may compel us to radically rethink such central tenets of our society as our treatments for mental and physical illness, our understanding of personal relationships, our approaches to raising children, and ultimately our view of ourselves. Other scientific disciplines have seen revolutions of this kind, each one a momentous shift away from centuries of common sense. Physics moved from Isaac Newton’s intuitive ideas about time and space to Albert Einstein’s more relative ideas, and eventually to quantum mechanics. In biology, scientists carved up the natural world into fixed species, each having an ideal form, until Charles Darwin introduced the concept of natural selection. Scientific revolutions tend to emerge not from a sudden discovery but by asking better questions.


Frommer's England 2011: With Wales by Darwin Porter, Danforth Prince

airport security, Ascot racecourse, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, Columbine, congestion charging, country house hotel, double helix, Edmond Halley, gentrification, George Santayana, haute couture, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, sustainable-tourism, the market place, tontine, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

CAMBRIDGE: TOWN & GOWN 89km (55 miles) N of London; 129km (80 miles) NE of Oxford CAMBRIDGE & EAST ANGLIA Cambridge: Town & Gown 15 The university town of Cambridge is a collage of images: the Bridge of Sighs; spires and turrets; drooping willows; dusty secondhand bookshops; carol singing on Christmas Eve in King’s College Chapel; dancing until sunrise at the May balls; Elizabethan madrigals; narrow lanes upon which Darwin, Newton, and Cromwell once walked; the “Backs” where the college lawns sweep down to the River Cam; tattered black robes of hurrying upperclassmen flying in the wind. Along with Oxford, Cambridge is one of Britain’s ancient seats of learning. In many ways, their stories are similar, particularly the age-old conflict between town and gown. Cambridge can name-drop with the best of them, citing alumni such as Isaac Newton, John Milton, and Virginia Woolf. Cambridge continues to graduate many famous scientists such as physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time. In the 1990s, Cambridge became known as a high-tech outpost, or a “silicon fen,” if you will. High-tech ventures continue to base themselves here—start-up companies produce £2 billion a year in revenues.

For entrance to the college, inquire at the Porter’s Lodge. Trinity College is open to visitors March to November, Monday to Friday from 9am to 4pm. There’s a charge of £1 adults, 50p seniors and children. Insider’s tip: It’s fun to contemplate what went on here before you arrived. Pause at Neville’s Court, where Isaac Newton first calculated the speed of sound. Take in the delicate fountain of the Great Court, where Lord Byron used to bathe naked with his pet bear. Why a bear? The university forbade students from having dogs, but there was no proviso for bears. Years later, Vladimir Nabokov walked through that same courtyard dreaming of the young lady he would later immortalize as Lolita.


pages: 516 words: 1,220

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks

business process, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, facts on the ground, failed state, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Naomi Klein, no-fly zone, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, Seymour Hersh, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The more Skelton heard the Bush administration talk, the more he worried. The last of the Truman Democrats sensed he was about to be run over by the first of the twenty-first-century Republicans. For George W. Bush was a bit of a revolutionary, having much more in common with the freewheeling 1960s than did Isaac Newton Skelton, a restrained son of the middle border. In the following months Skelton would begin asking questions—including, why did there appear to be no plans for postwar Iraq?—and got few answers. For the next several years his unhappy role would be that of a congressional Cassandra, his foresight accurate but disregarded.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Although the transition to money relied on the state, paradoxically it was the institution of strong metallic standards for money that provided the financial infrastructure in which credit money could thrive. These standards were put in place in England, initially through reforms carried out under Elizabeth I by Thomas Gresham in 1560–61, but chiefly through the creation of the Bank of England in 1694, and subsequently during Isaac Newton’s governance of the Royal mint in 1699–1727. Such standards are crucial to providing the socially and politically secure monetary space, underpinned by a stable political system and a solid fiscal system, that provided an infrastructure for the emergence of capitalist credit money (Ingham 2004b: 124–31).


pages: 650 words: 203,191

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

To most Europeans it seemed perfectly obvious that neither could survive without the other. The sacred elites governed with the secular, and monarchs were legitimized by the incantations of clerics. Nor were science and religion yet the sworn enemies that they seemed to become by the twentieth century. Isaac Newton, whose physics had swept the intellectual board, thought that the natural world was regulated by God, whose interventions adjusted the imperfections of nature. For most European thinkers, the natural order was fixed: adaptation (in Charles Darwin’s sense) was unimaginable or unneeded. Much the same went for the socio-economic regime.


pages: 665 words: 207,115

Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge

fudge factor, gravity well, Isaac Newton, job automation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, technological singularity, Vernor Vinge, VTOL

Besides trying to kill Mike, he played Celest like a master. The gravity-well maneuver is one I've never seen discovered unaided." "Mike told me. It's slick, but I see a lot of players do it. We almost all use it. Is it really that clever?" "Depending on your background, it's more than clever. Isaac Newton didn't do a lot more when he deduced elliptical orbits from the inverse square law." "Look, Paul... I'm truly sorry, but even with Bill and Irma, it's just too dangerous." Mike thought about the pain in his arm. And then about the twin sisters he had once had. "Uh, Boss, could you and I have a little talk?"


Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

To reach the 900-year-old College Garden ( 10am-6pm Tue-Thu Apr-Sep, to 4pm Tue-Thu Oct-Mar) , enter Dean’s Yard and the Little Cloisters off Great College St. Nave & South Transept The south transept contains Poets’ Corner , where many of England’s finest writers are buried and/or commemorated; a memorial here is the highest honour the monarch can bestow. On the western side of the cloister is Scientists’ Corner , where you will find Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb ; a nearby section of the northern aisle of the nave is known as Musicians’ Aisle where baroque composers Henry Purcell and John Blow are buried. (George Frederic Handel is also buried at the Abbey but in the south transept.) The two towers above the west door are the ones through which you exit.


pages: 669 words: 195,743

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

I think of them as the wave school and the particle school—my little parody of the classic wave-or-particle conundrum about the nature of light. Back in the seventeenth century, as your keen memory for high-school physics will tell you, Christiaan Huygens proposed that light consists of waves, whereas Isaac Newton argued that light is particulate. They each had some experimental grounds for believing as they did. It took quantum mechanics, more than two centuries later, to explain that wave-versus-particle is not a resolvable dichotomy but an ineffable duality, or at least an artifact of the limitations of different modes of observing.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

As Regis McKenna later observed, “Woz was fortunate to hook up with an evangelist.”6 On April Fools’ Day, 1976, the two Steves and a third partner, Ron Wayne, started Apple Computer Co. The first logo, designed by Wayne, had the retro-hippie design beloved by techie newsletters like the PCC and Dr. Dobb’s. It featured Isaac Newton sitting under a tree, surrounded by words uttered not by Newton, but by William Wordsworth: “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought—alone.” The inaugural sales flyer was similarly loopy, with a typo in the first sentence.7 Jobs persuaded Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop to buy fifty units of the Apple I, which Terrell agreed to do under one condition: no kits.


pages: 685 words: 203,431

The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant

George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, long peace, mass immigration, means of production, MITM: man-in-the-middle, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, plutocrats, science of happiness, Socratic dialogue, the market place, the scientific method

Newton had just died: Voltaire attended the funeral, and often recalled the impression made upon him by the national honors awarded to this modest Englishman. “Not long ago,” he writes, “a distinguished company were discussing the trite and frivolous question, who was the greatest man,—Cæsar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? Some one answered that without doubt it was Isaac Newton. And rightly: for it is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not to those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.”19 Voltaire became a patient and thorough student of Newton’s works, and was later the chief protagonist of Newton’s views in France. One must marvel at the quickness with which Voltaire absorbed almost all that England had to teach him—its literature, its science, and its philosophy; he took all these varied elements, passed them through the fire of French culture and the French spirit, and transmuted them into the gold of Gallic wit and eloquence.


pages: 1,060 words: 265,296

Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes

Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, book value, British Empire, business cycle, Cape to Cairo, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, computer age, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial intermediation, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, Index librorum prohibitorum, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Arrow, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Murano, Venice glass, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, out of africa, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, rent-seeking, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

It mattered litde who said what, but what was said; not perception but reality. D o I see what you say you saw? Such an approach opened the way to purposeful experiment. In­ stead of waiting to see something happen, make it happen. This re­ quired an intellectual leap, and some have argued that it was the renewal and dissemination o f magical beliefs (even Isaac Newton be­ lieved in the possibility o f alchemy and the transmutation o f matter) that led the scientific community to see nature as something to be acted upon as well as observed. "In striking contrast to the natural philosopher," writes one historian, "the magician manipulated na­ ture." Well, at least he tried.

Scientists also needed to calculate better and faster, and here John Napier's logarithms were as important in their day as the inven­ tion o f the abacus in an earlier time, or o f calculators and computers later. And they needed more powerful tools of mathematical analy­ sis, which they got from René Descartes's analytic geometry and, even more, from the new calculus o f Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz. These new maths contributed immensely to experiment and analysis. Routinization: The third institutional pillar of Western science was the routinization o f discovery, the invention o f invention. Here was a widely dispersed population of intellectuals, working in different lands, using different vernaculars—and yet a community.


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

An enterprising woman named Hildegarde Licht stopped by Apple in her white van to pick up boxes of parts and components. During the day, she drove around Silicon Valley dropping off the boxes and picking up completed circuit boards. This haphazard system probably accounted for the high failure rates of early Apple computers. In August 1977, Byte had a full cover picture of Isaac Newton sitting under an Apple tree. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with Apple computers. When people mentioned Apple and computers together, they were usually talking about APL (A Programming Language), which many people just pronounced Apple. In 1977, customers greeted the debut of the Apple II with silence.


pages: 927 words: 216,549

Empire of Guns by Priya Satia

banking crisis, British Empire, business intelligence, Corn Laws, cotton gin, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, hiring and firing, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent-seeking, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, technological determinism, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, zero-sum game

Indeed, guns and coin also share common roots in the seventeenth-century trade to Africa: the Royal African Company provided gold to the Royal Mint from 1668 to 1722 for the coin that gave English currency its name: the guinea. These were Britain’s first “milled” coins (as opposed to hammered): they were stamped with a screw press from blanks punched from strips of metal flattened in a horse-powered rolling mill. The Royal Mint at Tower Hill, the corporation where the scientist Isaac Newton served as warden (during the Great Recoinage of 1696) and then master (from 1699 until his death, in 1727), was the official site of coin production in the realm, but there were other mints, too. Until 1975, the Royal Mint was not a government-owned company; in our period, it was no less a private firm than the mints around Birmingham that competed with it.


pages: 824 words: 218,333

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

In Touched with Fire, an authoritative study of the link between madness and creativity, the psychologist-writer Kay Redfield Jamison compiled a list of those “more or less touched” that reads like the Who’s Who of cultural and artistic achievers: Byron (of course), van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Jack Kerouac—and on and on. That list can be extended to include scientists (Isaac Newton, John Nash), musicians (Mozart, Beethoven), and an entertainer who built an entire genre out of mania before succumbing to depression and suicide (Robin Williams). Hans Asperger, the psychologist who first described children with autism, called them “little professors” for good reason. Withdrawn, socially awkward, or even language-impaired children, barely functional in one “normal” world, might produce the most ethereal version of Satie’s Gymnopédies on the piano or calculate the factorial of eighteen in seven seconds.


pages: 388 words: 211,074

Pauline Frommer's London: Spend Less, See More by Jason Cochran

Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, British Empire, congestion charging, context collapse, David Attenborough, Easter island, electricity market, Etonian, Frank Gehry, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Multics, Nelson Mandela, Skype, Stephen Fry, urban planning

Red m Co Lem Bor oug h e Lan Brick 9:17 PM Druid Alder 12/23/08 To Brid wer ge R d. 09_308691-ch05.qxp Page 141 City of London Attractions ey St. Rd 141 09_308691-ch05.qxp 142 12/23/08 Chapter 5 9:17 PM Page 142 Why You’re Here: The Sights of London Lord Tennyson. Ben Jonson is commemorated here but is actually buried in the Nave near Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Now for a few Abbey secrets: That oak seat between the Sanctuary and the Confessors’ Chapel, near the tomb of Henry V, is the Coronation Chair. Unbelievably, every English monarch since 1308 has been crowned on this excruciating-looking throne. The slot under the seat is for the 152kg (336-lb.)


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

In order to write today's academic or news article, I need access to yesterday's articles and reports. In order to write today's novel, movie, or song, I need to use and rework existing cultural forms, such as story lines and twists. This characteristic is known to economists as the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, recalling a statement attributed to Isaac Newton: "If I have seen farther it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." 8 This second quirkiness [pg 38] of information as a production good makes property-like exclusive rights less appealing as the dominant institutional arrangement for information and cultural production than it would have been had the sole quirky characteristic of information been its nonrivalry.


pages: 796 words: 223,275

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Universities created a class of highly literate and mobile intellectuals and professionals who accepted positions as lawyers, doctors, administrators, professors, and notaries in urban communities throughout Christendom. They also provided homes and some autonomy for intellectuals of many stripes—including Isaac Newton and Daniel Bernoulli—which created competition among the growing number of wealthy aristocrats who, after their own university education, wanted to surround themselves with leading thinkers and eventually scientists.41 By the 16th century, a mobile community of individualistic and analytically-oriented thinkers had begun to form a loose web called the Republic of Letters that networked much of western and central Europe.


pages: 846 words: 232,630

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

So, from a set of tiny biases in the initial probabilities and competences of the building blocks, a process of snowballing self-improvement is initiated. 3. THE LAWS OF THE GAME OF LIFE This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an Intelligent and Powerful Being. — ISAAC NEWTON 1726 (passage translated in Ellegard 1956, p. 176) The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming. — FREEMAN DYSON 1979, p. 250 It is easy to imagine a world that, though ordered, nevertheless does not possess the right sort of forces or conditions for the emergence of significant depth


pages: 797 words: 227,399

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

The two men were talking about Vaucanson’s duck, the mechanical wonder of its age, or, as present-day scientists call it, “the Defecating Duck.” Jacques de Vaucanson was born in Grenoble, France, in 1709. At the age of twenty-six, he moved to Paris, then the center of culture and science during the Age of Enlightenment. Inspired by Isaac Newton’s idea of the universe as a great clock that had been set in motion by the Creator, the Deist philosophers of the time saw the world as guided by mechanical forces. They believed that everything, from gravity to love, could be understood if you could just scientifically reason it out. Arriving in this cauldron of rationality gone wild, Vaucanson became fascinated with the concept of using reason and mechanics to reproduce life itself.


pages: 778 words: 239,744

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Burning Man, choice architecture, clean water, cognitive dissonance, false flag, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Future Shock, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, lifelogging, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, place-making, post-industrial society, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, the market place, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

What do I know? I know that human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions. In between times, their positions and trajectories are indecipherable even to themselves. I know that in planets, such interactions are called conjunctions, and that Isaac Newton came upon the notion of gravity by the alchemy that is called the attraction of souls. I know that Albert Einstein proposed two persons hanging in space alone in a universe that contained nothing else, and observed that if one of them is spinning, there is no way to determine which. Everything depends upon its relationship to everything else for its meaning.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

—William James, 18952 It’s March 2011 and I have just arrived at a three-day retreat about geoengineering in the Buckinghamshire countryside, about an hour and a half northwest of London. The meeting has been convened by the Royal Society, Britain’s legendary academy of science, which has counted among its fellows Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking. In recent years, the society has become the most prominent scientific organization to argue that, given the lack of progress on emission reduction, the time has come for governments to prepare a technological Plan B. In a report published in 2009, it called upon the British government to devote significant resources to researching which geoengineering methods might prove most effective.


pages: 809 words: 237,921

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, central bank independence, centre right, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kula ring, labor-force participation, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, openstreetmap, out of africa, PageRank, pattern recognition, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Skype, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, the market place, transcontinental railway, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks

Then one would know the time in Greenwich, and the time where you were. The difference between these times allowed you to calculate longitude. The trouble was that clocks were inaccurate, based on pendulums which got hopelessly out of whack at sea, or made of metals which expanded or contracted under different climatic conditions. The great physicist Isaac Newton, charged by the government to advise them on ways to calculate longitude, was deeply committed to the idea that this must come through astronomy and star positions. Though he agreed that in principle the clock solution worked, in practice it was dead in the water because by reason of the motion of the ship, the Variation of Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the Difference of Gravity in different Latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made.


pages: 1,014 words: 237,531

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel

agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, disruptive innovation, Easter island, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, means of production, Multics, Network effects, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer lending, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, secular stagnation, South China Sea, spinning jenny, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Just as in imperial China, the potential for random intervention was significant. In 1580 the religious leadership persuaded the sultan to destroy a newly built observatory in Istanbul—in the same year that the king of Denmark had built one for Tycho Brahe, which was to provide Johannes Kepler with valuable data that in turn contributed to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of gravity and motion. And all of these European scholars accessed information in printed works. Restraints loosened only after Napoleon’s invasion of the Middle East, as Ottoman hegemony began to erode.33 This was not a unique outcome. In India, Mughal rulers such as Aurangzeb had championed adherence to orthodox Islam.


pages: 800 words: 240,175

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy by Michael Knox Beran

anti-communist, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, company town, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, fulfillment center, George Santayana, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, old-boy network, phenotype, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, éminence grise

Susanna’s daughter Gertrude would marry Amos Pinchot, the father, by his second wife, of Mary and Tony Pinchot, who under their married names, Meyer and Bradlee, were to become luminaries, together with the journalist Joseph Wright Alsop V, better known as Joe Alsop, in the court of John F. Kennedy. Another of Susanna’s daughters, Sarah May, married Theodore Dwight Sedgwick III, the grandfather of Edie Sedgwick. Still another daughter, Edith (after whom Edie Sedgwick was named), married the architect Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes: the couple was famously painted by Sargent. Frances Fincke, Mildred Minturn’s guest at Murray Bay, was herself part of this world. Her father, Frederic Fincke, had been at Harvard with Edith Wharton’s future husband, Teddy Wharton; her nephew, Reginald Fincke Jr., would be in Joe Alsop’s form at Groton.


America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

While the United States was unknown, Franklin was famous. He personalized his representation of America in ways that appealed to French opinion, even to its sense of style. The 1766 portrait of Franklin in London by David Martin is that of a gentleman scholar, wearing reading glasses and studying a book, and watched over by Isaac Newton. In France, artists painted Franklin as the frontier philosophe in his famous marten fur cap (from Canada), wearing plain brown suits, with no wig, and adored by playful Parisian ladies. Franklin’s likeness graced medals, prints, snuffboxes, rings, and even a chamber pot that Louis XVI gave to an enthusiastic Franklin fan.


Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities by Vaclav Smil

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon tax, circular economy, colonial rule, complexity theory, coronavirus, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, endogenous growth, energy transition, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, Gregor Mendel, happiness index / gross national happiness, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, knowledge economy, Kondratiev cycle, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, optical character recognition, out of africa, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Republic of Letters, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, South China Sea, synthetic biology, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, three-masted sailing ship, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, yield curve

Its market for ideas flourished in early modern Europe between 1500 and the end of the Enlightenment, with political fragmentation supporting intellectual inquiries, a precondition that was absent at that time anywhere else, including technically adept China. According to Mokyr, the origins of economic growth have to do more with enlightened reasoning (Desiderius Erasmus, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton) than with any distinct technical or business practices. Again, other interpretations of those European origins are available (notably Allen 2009) but there can be no doubt that reducing the moving forces to machines and profits would be a grossly reductionist view. Growth Interactions I agree with Grossman and Helpman (1991) that it is better not to draw any specific inferences about the underlying causes of economic growth because the factors involved are dynamically linked within a complex system, making the exogenous-endogenous dichotomy largely an artificial construct.


She Has Her Mother's Laugh by Carl Zimmer

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, CRISPR, dark matter, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flynn Effect, friendly fire, Gary Taubes, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, lolcat, longitudinal study, medical bankruptcy, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, W. E. B. Du Bois

Bateson and other scientists were confirming the patterns that Mendel had observed. Those patterns were so trustworthy and so profound, Bateson said, that they deserved one of the loftiest titles in science: “Mendel’s Law.” A scientific law predicts some aspect of the universe, usually with a short, sweet equation. Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion that came to bear his name. Robert Boyle is memorialized with Boyle’s law, which predicts the pressure of a gas from its volume. Mendel’s work likewise gave heredity a numerical clarity. Parents have a fifty-fifty chance of passing down either of their two copies of a given gene.


The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

In the sense that women controlled land and its produce and also most other productive resources, but men controlled most of the important political offices. 3. UNFREEZING THE ICE AGE 1. The authoritative account, well into the nineteenth century, was that of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, first published in 1650, though it is important to note that none other than Sir Isaac Newton proposed an alternative calculation, suggesting the actual date was 3988 bc. 2. The phrase we owe to Thomas Trautmann’s (1992) account of this ‘time revolution’. While the field of anthropology came into existence during the ‘decade of Darwin’ (i.e. between the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871), it was not actually Darwinism but archaeological excavations that established the timescale of human prehistory as we know it.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

In April 2010, in a lecture to the Royal Society in London, I recalled that we owe our “contemporary way of life” to the astonishing scientific progress made during Europe’s Age of Enlightenment in the seventeenth and early-​eighteenth centuries.40 That progress occurred, as economic historians have reminded us, within a politically fragmented Europe but one that was united in the marketplace of ideas.41 Indeed, political fragmentation was a source of creative energy as nations sought to gain the intellectual and scientific lead. Nations promoted and competed for the best minds. Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton were among the intellectual giants. Universities, academies, and learned societies “sprang up all over Europe,” which created a ferment of innovative excitement.42 Europe was successful then as a republic of letters, not as a political organization that tried to coordinate European nations through rules and committees.


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

This deceptively simple five-part framework had the great virtue of clarity: just as John von Neumann's abstract functional design for EDVAC would later do for computer engineering, Shannon's outline gave him a way to think about the architecture of communication and what a given system was supposed to accom- plish, preventing him from getting bogged down in the vagaries of vacuum tubes and cable connections. It provided the generality he needed to devise a truly fundamental theory of communications, in much the same way that Sir Isaac Newton had derived a fundamental theory of physics from just three gen- erallaws of motion and one universal law of gravitation. And yet it simultane- ously gave him a framework that he could tailor to any given problem, much as Newton's laws could be applied to the fall of an apple or the motions of the Moon.


pages: 956 words: 267,746

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion ofSafety by Eric Schlosser

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, impulse control, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, launch on warning, life extension, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, packet switching, prompt engineering, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Stanislav Petrov, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, too big to fail, two and twenty, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche

They provided a good, strong push, enough to lift the warhead above the earth’s atmosphere. But for the remaining half hour or so of flight, it was propelled by gravity and momentum. Ballistic missiles were extraordinarily complex machines, symbols of the space age featuring thousands of moving parts, and yet their guidance systems were based on seventeenth-century physics and Isaac Newton’s laws of motion. The principles that determined the trajectory of a warhead were the same as those that guided a rock thrown at a window. Accuracy depended on the shape of the projectile, the distance to the target, the aim and strength of the toss. Early versions of the Atlas and Titan missiles had a radio-controlled guidance system.


pages: 945 words: 292,893

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

To the extent that the truss structure prevented those things from happening—to the extent, in other words, that it succeeded in its basic function of holding all the modules and arklets in a fixed configuration—it was undergoing stress, exerting forces on those arklets to prevent them from doing what they wanted to do. Humans in those arklets would notice themselves drifting and bumping into the walls as their natural trajectories, as ordained by Sir Isaac Newton, were perturbed by the structure of Izzy. The larger Izzy grew, and the more arklets and modules were connected to her, the greater those forces became, and the closer she came to breaking. There was another, even more compelling reason for limiting Izzy’s sprawl. She was taking shelter behind Amalthea.


Theory of Games and Economic Behavior: 60th Anniversary Commemorative Edition (Princeton Classic Editions) by John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern

Abraham Wald, Albert Einstein, business cycle, collective bargaining, full employment, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, linear programming, Nash equilibrium, Parkinson's law, Paul Samuelson, profit motive, RAND corporation, the market place, zero-sum game

It is microscopic in contrast to the three historic macroscopic systems of Smith (explicit among his followers), Marx, and Keynes, and as far from them as nuclear physics is from astronomy. Somewhere in economic thought the macroscopic and microscopic approaches may meet, as astronomy and earthbound physics did in Isaac Newton. Keynes in his major work, General Theory, in 1936 made the last heroic effort to cope with economic life on the basis of such aggregates as national income, consumption, savings, and investment. Keynes rested his case on an equilibrium of aggregates (e.g., income equals consumption plus investment), but to protect the equilibrium at a high level against the dynamic “stagnation” of capital (similar to Marx’s “falling rate of profit”), manipulation of at least one variable was required (such as Roosevelt’s credit policies).


pages: 1,051 words: 334,334

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

centre right, classic study, company town, Eratosthenes, experimental subject, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ought to be enough for anybody, plutocrats, random walk

Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day—pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn't, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must've been like for William. Of course he took it as a parable—knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in crosscountry movement. It was a little early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air. William must've been waiting for the one pig that wouldn't die, that would validate all the ones who'd had to, all his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying . . . possessed by innocence they couldn't lose . . . by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life. . . .


pages: 976 words: 329,519

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

At 10 a.m. on 1 July 1913 it sent the first global time signal, directed at eight different receiving stations dotted around the world. Thus, as one French commentator boasted, Paris, ‘supplanted by Greenwich as the origin of the meridians, was proclaimed the initial time centre, the watch of the universe’. In the universe described by the mathematician and natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) time was uniform and absolute and flowed in a single direction. Not coincidentally, this concept provided the underpinning for that most universal of nineteenth-century ideas, the idea of progress. The concept of a uniform time proceeding everywhere in a linear fashion enhanced people’s ability to imagine a distant past beyond their own experience, in which things had been different.


The Rough Guide to England by Rough Guides

active transport: walking or cycling, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, bike sharing, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, car-free, Columbine, company town, congestion charging, Corn Laws, country house hotel, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Downton Abbey, Edmond Halley, Etonian, food miles, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, housing crisis, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, period drama, plutocrats, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl

The Restoration A Stuart was back on the English throne, but Charles II had few absolutist illusions – the terms of the Restoration were closely negotiated and included a general amnesty for all those who had fought against the Stuarts, with the exception of the regicides – that is, those who had signed Charles I’s death warrant. Nonetheless, there was a sea change in public life with the re-establishment of a royal court and the foundation of the Royal Society, whose scientific endeavours were furthered by Isaac Newton (1642–1727). The low points of Charles’s reign were the Great Plague of 1665 and the 1666 Great Fire of London, though the London that rose from the ashes was an architectural showcase for Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and his fellow classicists. Politically, there were still underlying tensions between the monarchy and Parliament, but the latter was more concerned with the struggle between the Whigs and Tories, political factions representing, respectively, the low-church gentry and the high-church aristocracy.


pages: 1,437 words: 384,709

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, death from overwork, Donner party, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, fixed income, full employment, God and Mammon, Isaac Newton, jitney, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, nuclear winter, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Works Progress Administration

Leucippus, a Greek philosopher of the fifth century B.C. whose name survives on the strength of an allusion in Aristotle, proposed the concept; Democritus, a wealthy Thracian of the same era and wider repute, developed it. “ ‘For by convention color exists,’ ” the Greek physician Galen quotes from one of Democritus’ seventy-two lost books, “ ‘by convention bitter, by convention sweet, but in reality atoms and void.’ ” From the seventeenth century onward, physicists postulated atomic models of the world whenever developments in physical theory seemed to require them.85 But whether or not atoms really existed was a matter for continuing debate. Gradually the debate shifted to the question of what kind of atom was necessary and possible. Isaac Newton imagined something like a miniature billiard ball to serve the purposes of his mechanical universe of masses in motion: “It seems probable to me,” he wrote in 1704, “that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end to which he formed them.”86 The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who organized the founding of the Cavendish Laboratory, published a seminal Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873 that modified Newton’s purely mechanical universe of particles colliding in a void by introducing into it the idea of an electromagnetic field.


pages: 1,351 words: 385,579

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, bread and circuses, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, California gold rush, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, Columbine, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, crack epidemic, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demographic transition, desegregation, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, experimental subject, facts on the ground, failed state, first-past-the-post, Flynn Effect, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fudge factor, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, global village, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Hobbesian trap, humanitarian revolution, impulse control, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, lake wobegon effect, libertarian paternalism, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, nuclear taboo, Oklahoma City bombing, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Republic of Letters, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, security theater, Skinner box, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, Turing machine, twin studies, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Calvin would have to invade France and all other nations, wipe out cities, put all the inhabitants to the sword, sparing neither sex nor age, not even babies and the beasts.46 The arguments were picked up in the 17th century by, among others, Baruch Spinoza, John Milton (who wrote, “Let truth and falsehood grapple . . . truth is strong”), Isaac Newton, and John Locke. The emergence of modern science proved that deeply held beliefs could be entirely false, and that the world worked by physical laws rather than by divine whims. The Catholic Church did itself no favor by threatening Galileo with torture and committing him to a life sentence of house arrest for espousing what turned out to be correct beliefs about the physical world.


pages: 1,799 words: 532,462

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Friedman, The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined (Cambridge: University Press, 1957), 17. John Wallis duped Huygens with a number of anagrams; see Christiaan Huygens, Œuvres Complètes (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1888), I, 338, 396, 402; II, 306. 773 Wren: Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co., 1855), II, 263; N&Q, 5:12:316. 773 Kinsey: Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Institute for Sex Research (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1953), 59. 774 Ovid: Artis Amatoriae iii.627-630; i.489 for HIM instead of her; i.137; also Amorum i.4.16ff., ii.5.18. 774 Winthrop: Harry Andrew Wright, “Those Human Puritans,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, L (new series) (April 17, 1940), 80-90. 774 Wetherell: 40 Atlantic Reporter 728, also at 70 Vermont 274; Windham County Clerk, letter, July 25, 1963. 774 Jonathan Swift: Journal to Stella, ed.


The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York by Caro, Robert A

Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, benefit corporation, British Empire, card file, centre right, East Village, Ford Model T, friendly fire, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, land reform, Lewis Mumford, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Right to Buy, scientific management, Southern State Parkway, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

New York: Yeshiva University (unpublished thesis). Sobin, Dennis P.: Dynamics of Community Change: The Case of Long Island's Declining "Gold Coast." Port Washington, N.Y.: Ira J. Friedman; 1968. Stiles, Lela: The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe. Cleveland and New York: World; 1954. Stokes, Isaac Newton Phelps: The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909. 6 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead; 1915-1928. Strunsky, Simeon: No Mean City. New York: Dutton; 1944. Talese, Gay: The Bridge. New York: Harper & Row; 1964. : The Kingdom and the Power. New York and Cleveland: World; 1969. Thompson, Benjamin F.: History of Long Island from Its Discovery and Settlement to the Present Time.