This Idea Is Brilliant

Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know

John Brockman

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062698223
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Brilliant but overlooked ideas you must know, as revealed by today's most innovative minds

What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? That is the question John Brockman, publisher of the acclaimed science salon Edge.org ("The world's smartest website"— The Guardian ), presented to 205 of the world's most influential thinkers from across the intellectual spectrum—award-winning physicists, economists, psychologists, philosophers, novelists, artists, and more. From the origins of the universe to the order of everyday life, This Idea Is Brilliant takes readers on a tour of the bold, exciting, and underappreciated scientific concepts that will enrich every mind.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel JARED DIAMOND on the lost brilliance of common sense* Oxford evolutionary biologist RICHARD DAWKINS on how The Genetic Book of the Dead could reconstruct ecological history* philosopher REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN on how to extend our grasp of reality beyond what we can see and touch* author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics CARLO ROVELLI on the interconnected fabric of information* Booker Prize–winning novelist IAN McEWAN on the Navier-Stokes equations, which govern everything from weather prediction to aircraft design and blood flow* cosmologist LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS on the hidden blessings of uncertainty* psychologist STEVEN PINKER on the fight against entropy* Nobel Prize–winning economist RICHARD THALER on the visionary power of the "premortem"* Grammy Award–winning musician BRIAN ENO on confirmation bias in the Internet age* advertising guru RORY SUTHERLAND on the world-changing power of sex appeal* Harvard physicist LISA RANDALL on the power of the obvious* Wired founding editor KEVIN KELLY on how to optimize your chances at success* Nobel Prize winner FRANK WILCZEK on the creative potential of complementarity* Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times reporter JOHN MARKOFF on the synthetic metamaterials that soon will transform industry and technology* euroscientist SAM HARRIS on the lost art of intellectual honesty*Berkeley psychologist ALISON GOPNIK on the role of life history in the human story, and many others.

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Scientia as a Meme
• The Longevity Factor
• The Illusion of Explanatory Depth
• Synaptic Transfer
• The Genetic Book of the Dead
• Exaptation
• The Virial Theorem
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics
• Emergence
• Natural Selection
• DNA
• Genetic Rescue
• Positive Feedbacks in Climate Change
• The Anthropocene
• The Noösphere
• The Gaia Hypothesis
• Ocean Acidification
• Intertemporal Choice
• Future Self-Continuity
• The Climate System
• The Universe of Algorithms
• Babylonian Lottery
• Class Breaks
• Recursion
• Referential Opacity
• Adaptive Preference
• Antagonistic Pleiotropy
• Maladaptation
• Epigenetics
• The Transcriptome
• Polygenic Scores
• Replicator Power
• Fallibilism
• Intellectual Honesty
• Epsilon
• Systemic Bias
• Confirmation Bias
• Negativity Bias
• Positive Illusions
• Russell Conjugation
• Empathic Concern
• Naïve Realism
• Motivated Reasoning
• Spatial Agency Bias
• Counting
• On Average
• Number Sense
• Fermi Problems
• Exponential
• Impedance Matching
• Homeostasis
• Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety
• Variety
• Allostasis
• The Brainstem
• The Principle of Least Action
• “The Big Bang”
• Multiverse
• Gravitational Radiation
• The Non-Returnable Universe
• The Big Bounce
• Affordances
• Enactivism
• Paleoneurology
• Complementarity
• The Schnitt
• Matter
• Substrate Independence
• PT Symmetry
• Gravitational Lensing
• The Cosmological Constant, or Vacuum Energy
• Invariance
• Unruh Radiation
• Determinism
• State
• Parallel Universes of Quantum Mechanics
• The Copernican Principle
• Rheology
• The Premortem
• It’s About Time
• Maxwell’s Demon
• Included Middle
• Relative Deprivation
• Antisocial Preferences
• Reciprocal Altruism
• Isolation Mismatch
• Mysterianism
• Relative Information
• Time Window
• Effective Theory
• Coarse-Graining
• Common Sense
• “Evolve” As Metaphor
• The Reynolds Number
• Metamaterials
• Stigler’s Law of Eponymy
• Comparative Advantage
• Premature Optimization
• Simulated Annealing
• Attractors
• Anthropomorphism
• Cognitive Ethology
• Mating Opportunity Costs
• Sex
• Supernormal Stimuli
• Costly Signaling
• Sexual Selection
• Phylogeny
• Neoteny
• The Neural Code
• Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
• Regression to the Mean
• Scientific Realism
• Fundamental Attribution Error
• Habituation
• General Standardization Theory
• Scaling
• The Menger Sponge
• The Holographic Principle
• The Navier-Stokes Equations
• The Scientist
• Bayes’ Theorem
• Uncertainty
• Equipoise
• Ansatz
• “On The Average”
• Blind Analysis
• Homophily
• Social Identity
• Reflective Beliefs
• Alloparenting
• Cumulative Culture
• Life History
• Haldane’s Rule of the Right Size
• Phenotypic Plasticity
• Sleeper Sensitive Periods
• Zone of Proximal Development
• Length-Biased Sampling
• Construal
• Double Blind
• The Law of Small Numbers
• Commitment Devices
• Illusory Conjunction
• Bisociation
• Conceptual Combination
• Boolean Logic
• Neurodiversity
• Case-Based Reasoning
• Media Richness
• Peircean Semiotics
• Historiometrics
• Population Thinking
• Bounded Optimality
• Satisficing
• De-Anonymization
• Functional Equations
• Decentering
• Transfer Learning
• The Symbol-Grounding Problem
• Abstraction
• Networks
• Morphogenetic Fields
• Herd Immunity
• Somatic Evolution
• Criticality
• Information Pathology
• Iatrotropic Stimulus
• Mismatch Conditions
• Actionable Predictions
• The Texas Sharpshooter
• Digital Representation
• Embodied Thinking
• The Trolley Problem
• Mental Emulation
• Prediction Error Minimization
• Impossible
• Optimization
• The Cancer Seed and Soil Hypothesis
• Simplistic Disease Progression
• Effect Modification
• The Power Law
• Type I and Type II Errors
• The Ideal Free Distribution
• Chronobiology
• Deliberate Ignorance
• The Need for Closure
• Polythetic Entitation
• Quines
• Verbal Overshadowing
• Liminality
• Possibility Space
• Alternative Possibilities
• Indexical Information
• Emotion Contagion
• Negative Evidence
• Emptiness
• Effect Size
• Surreal Numbers
• Standard Deviation
• The Breeder’s Equation
• Fixpoint
• Non-Ergodic
• Confusion
• Coalitional Instincts
• The Scientific Method
• Humility
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Also by John Brockman
• Copyright
• About the Publisher