Fun fact. I actually searched for the unabridged version of this book. Apparently I missed the joke at first… got me there.

The inside of the book jacket starts with this: “Despite our clever linguistic abilities, humans are spectacularly ill-equipped to comprehend what’s happening in the universe. Our senses and intuition routinely mislead us.”

And you wonder why LLMs have so many delusions…

“If only Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry were on tap to all of us, all the time: we could turn to them whenever we wanted delicious explanations, narratives, and theories to make sense of the material world. But we do have this deeply addictive book as a companion. The pair have such a gift for making life, numbers, and the forces at work in the universe all the richer, stranger, funnier, and more marvelous.”

That is quite high praise from Stephen Fry on the back cover! I never heard Adam and Hannah’s radio show on BBC 4 unfortunately, but it sounded like a blast the way Hannah has talked about it on The Rest is Science with VSauce (Michael Stevens). I’m glad that Hannah and Michael have continued that tradition with their two-episode-a-week podcast.

…

From the introduction: “Peekaboo exemplifies quite how badly equipped humans are for comprehending the universe and everything in it. We’re not born with an innate understand of the world around us. We have to learn that stuff – including people – doesn’t just vanish when we are not looking at it.”

Sadly, I’ve known adults that apparently never learned this, either…

Notably many animals never learn “object permanence.” Mostly because their brains don’t have a reason to care.

“The tiny mites that live in your eyebrows are oblivious to the concept of symbiotic commensalism whereby they innocuously feed off us.” LOL.

Clearly, Rutherford the geneticist is taking the lead here in this intro, but he’s great, too. 

Concerning how our biological hardware has barely changed in 250,000 years: “Much of our biological hardware is largely unchanged from a time when none of these highfalutin ideas about how the universe works were of much concern to anyone.”

This is something that should be true even if people (like me, sometimes) trust “gut feelings.”:

“Whatever way you look at it, intuition is a terrible guide.” 

And it typically is. So, apparently my “gut” is more probability based than I appreciate it for, despite being so grumbly and indecisive most of the time. What I often think of as intuition now is more likely just life experience creating a vast network of probabilistic matrices that come to me as “intuition” when it’s just a delayed answer to some question I didn’t know I was asking, like I’m playing some bizarre version of Jeopardy with a bunch of answers but with very little or even no categorical context to reverse engineer the questions.

Yeah, people forget Isaac Newton was an alchemist first, “real scientist” second. Galileo was an astrologer by day, astronomer by night. 

My favorite example of the early days of “serious” science: “Early biologists thought that sperm contained a homunculus, a teeny tiny version of a person, and that the woman’s job was merely to act as a vessel to incubate this mini-person until it was a full-size baby.”

Is that where the term ‘bun in the oven’ came from? Oh were they shocked when they figured out the truth! Yet plenty of people still act like the homunculus idea is somehow still fact… even though we know full well the DNA is split 50/50 and that old idea is incredibly silly (even if intuitive.)

“Science has gotten an awful lot wrong over the years. One could argue that it is, in fact, science’s job to get things wrong, as that is the place from which we can start to be less wrong, and after a few rounds get things right.”

“Science and math are a toolkit, the ultimate shed, crammed full of the most wonderful instruments and ideas, devices and gizmos to augment our abilities and expand our senses so that we can observe more and more of reality.”

…

Chapter 1 begins by talking about the Library of Babel, the algorithm based website based on Juan Luis Borges’ short story about a library that has every possible page that could ever be printed with every possible combination of letters and spaces. I need to mess around more with the Babel library…

“Infinity holds a shining promise of an exhaustive catalog of everything – overwhelmed by an unending swamp of despair.” Epic description.

“Endless possibilities mean zero potential in the real world.” 

At first, I wasn’t sure how to read that sentence, at least out of context. It’s true that having endless possibilities doesn’t translate at all to potential. In fact, having endless possibilities means if you comb through a library like this, you may never discover anything but gibberish in a lifetime. But more generally speaking, I would say that possibilities we have ARE endless, and if we keep pondering the possibilities too long, we won’t ever realize any of our potential, just be stuck flipping through pages of random letters and spaces for our limited lifespan. Essentially, you need to have some reasonable restriction of possibility to realize potential; that’s how I’m reading this.

Great point about DNA being made of just four chemical bases: A, T, C, and G. So could a Babel-type library work to our advantage in that case? Well, not really.

However, Fred Hoyle wasn’t that big a fan of evolution and came up with a theory he called the “Junkyard Tornado,” a term I absolutely love. That isn’t how evolution works anyway, of course, but it’s still funny, though unfortunately and unintendedly that theory has become a favorite of creationists and intelligent design fans. Even I was one of the latter for many years before I realized that natural selection just made way more sense and intelligent design, while a convenient explanation for many things, isn’t necessary for our universe to exist as it does.

Basically, natural selection – which even creationists can vibe with – keeps what is already working going and keeps finding ways to improve. It’s like transforming one word into other actual words (the example Rutherford/Fry use here is swapping out one letter at a time to transform DOG in a number of steps to WOLF). 

I love this: “When the errors generate duds, nature selects against them and tosses them out, because they make the host organism less healthy, less sexy – or even more unhealthy, actually dead. When the errors are novel, not a problem, or are even useful, nature selects them for survival.” 

Thus, evolution by natural selection. Can’t really argue with that as we see it all the time in nature. So while yes there is randomness to it, there is an inevitable order brought to the disorder.

I love this whole paragraph: “The library of all possible genes contains everything that evolution has thrown away, and millions of things that evolution never bothered to try in the first place. The reality of the living world is that nature is a much more efficient librarian than a random whirlwind. Nature is a curator.”

…

Onto chapter two: “LIfe, the Universe, and Everything” – obviously a nod to Douglas Adams.

“…either there is life elsewhere in the universe, or we are alone. From a scientific point of view, this is a win-win: either answer would be astonishing.”

I disagree. If we’re alone, the universe is a sad, lonely place. If there is life, a lot of it would likely be bacterial, which I agree with the authors is rather dull, however foundational.

“The real fun is to go big, and imagine what fantastical forms alien beasts might take. There is a very definite element to science that is formalized playtime. We have license to play around with ideas and experiment and speculate.”

This is a trio of sentences worth pondering momentarily. Isn’t a writer a sort of scientist? Words are both our tools and building blocks and sentences are our chemicals. Grammar is what allows them to be legible and understood. Am I simply one who works with words like a chemist would with elements or mathematicians with numbers, formulas, and other mathy things? (Perhaps I’m more of an alchemist trying to turn lead to gold and crap into god knows what). Is the perfect sentence just an equation? (Expressing some idea as precisely as possible in the common vernacular of one’s native tongue) Sure human language isn’t as elegant as arithmetic (not even close) but universal as it may be, math is as much a human language as any. 

(This is something I need to come back to because I’m thinking I’m onto a whole book length dissertation here.)

I would’ve loved to see that bipedal ancestor of the crocodile although I’m not too keen on meeting him!

Great point that habitually bipedal creatures are actually quite rare on earth. Most other intelligent life in the universe likely wouldn’t be. I’ve considered that myself and a lot of my own alien races in my own fiction are bipedal only for narrative conscience. (Felona can actually walk on all fours without difficulty, for example.)

“If real aliens are out there, they will be far wilder and weirder than any prosthetics the wardrobe department at 20th century Fox can glue on to an actor. Evolution is much more imaginative than we are. It’s constrained only by what works, not by what’s dreamed of in our philosophy.”

Perhaps we need to throw all the philosophy out the window and just go full stream of consciousness, use some AI tool to dump all the gibberish and voila we can all be the next Plato or Aristotle… lol

Also, other intelligent life likely wouldn’t be of similar size to us. Microbeings are even more likely than macro beings. So most intelligent life could be microscopic. Even trek got this right on a few occasions!

I’d love for us to find life on one or more of our solar system’s moons. I believe it to be completely possible because we’d probably have to get super close to see it. We haven’t dared get that close to any of these far out celestial bodies just yet. (And I still think there may be life on mars, just well below the surface…)

It’s incredible to me that whales started out as “a sort of a cross between a big dog and an angry otter” around 50 million years ago as Pakicetus.

…

Next up are “the Crustacean Chronicles…” lots of stuff about barnacles. Interesting but not super exciting, except what it takes for them to mate…

This makes me feel better: “You can’t just scale up a giant version of a terrestrial insect, with spindly legs and a bulbous body. Super-sized spiders might terrify your dreams, but they’re just not possible.”

But watch out: “If that’s reassuring, we’re not so sure: evolution on a different planet will have cooked up something much more frightening, even if it is much less familiar.”

You know how small animals can lift many times their body weight, and people try to upscale it to human proportions as a sort of example? Well it isn’t quite accurate when you try to upscale it that way. 

“… more often than not, scaling things up or down – as you have to do if you’re making them bigger or smaller – doesn’t mean you can calculate the resulting change in such simple arithmetical terms.”

Basically if you scale up an insect, strength only scales in two dimensions, not three. It scales disproportionally to weight, which is in three dimensions. 

For example: “Ants are strong not despite their size: they’re strong because of their size. An ant weighing a pint 5 milligrams can carry a leaf of 250 milligrams; but scale it up to the size of a standard-issue adult male human, and it wouldn’t have the strength to lift 15 kilos – far below its own body weight. Its legs would crumble as it tried to stand. In fact, these expanded ants would barely be able to lift their own heads and look us in the eyes as they admitted our superior biology.” Okay that last bit is a bit mean. Ants are really cool. But yes. Super sized insects actually do not work. 

And that nonsense of comparing how a flea can jump so high when scaled up to human size… nope. Air resistance is a thing and even in a vacuum it wouldn’t be nearly as high as some may lead you to believe proportionally. Also terrestrial creatures don’t do so hot in a vacuum…

Also ant man shouldn’t be able to breathe. His lungs wouldn’t work. Sorry buddy. 

I’ve never thought about how insects actually absorb oxygen by osmosis…

“There is a natural upper limit to how big a beast can be before gravity wins – and in the end, gravity always wins.” Damn gravity.

“… life on Earth is bounteous, bonkers, and wonderful, but it is the only life we know of…” 

Indeed it is. I just love that description. 

Also this is probably very true and something I’ve thought about before: “If there is [other life in the universe], it may simply be too far away for us to ever discover it. If there isn’t, that makes the Earth an even more precious place c and we should redouble our efforts to protect it.”

There is science fiction that assumes that Earth really is it for life and in order to expand beyond Earth, we have to use all the science available to us to bend alien worlds to suit our will. I like to think that isn’t the case, but it is entirely possible that whatever life we find nearby our solar system is going to be, at best, extremely basic. And even if there are advanced alien civilizations, they’re likely thousands of light years away, meaning that due to time dilation, even if they spotted us and want to check out our planet, it will be well beyond our lifetimes. I just hope we find life on Titan or Europa. That would be amazing. I don’t even care what it is. It would mean that there IS life out there, intelligent or otherwise.

In either case, we need to protect what we’ve got, because it’s at the very least incredibly special in our neck of the galactic woods.

“An organism is crafted by the cosmic happenstance of where it lives.” Great sentence.

…

Chapter 3 is titled “The Perfect Circle.”  Fran Zwicky “coined the insult ‘spherical bastard’ for colleagues he didn’t like, on account of their being bastards from whichever direction you looked at them.”

I had no idea that circles were called “1-spheres” by mathematicians, and regular spheres are called “2-spheres.” Thanks for this entirely pointless knowledge, Hannah!

That means a 4D sphere is a “3-sphere” and “if held above our world in an extra dimension, would cast a perfect three-dimensional, ball-shaped shadow, like a floating orb of darkness, a perfect sphere of shade.” That is pretty awesome. Sadly, we are only aware of three dimensions.

“Such a thing sounds like nonsense, but reality is sometimes stranger than fiction.” That is definitely my own experience.

“Much of physics plays with the idea that we are not living in a three-dimensional world at all, but in one with up to 26 dimensions – a universe where hyperdimensional spheres and orb-like shadows are everywhere.”

That then begs the question, why 26 dimensions? According to Google AI’s paraphrasing: “Physicists arrive at 26 dimensions in bosonic string theory because it is the exact mathematical threshold required to prevent severe physical inconsistencies, such as anomalies and “tachyons” (particles that travel faster than light). In these equations, 25 dimensions represent space and one represents time.” I’ve kind of always thought of time as the fourth dimension, but who knows where time actually falls on the hierarchy of dimensions… I must return to this at some point in the future after I’ve fully explored solving more pressing three-dimensional matters.

I didn’t realize this, but it makes sense: “All astronauts come back to Earth needing glasses for at least a few months because their eyes have become elongated, meaning that the focal point generated by the lens is in front of the retina, which causes short-sightedness.” Most recover, but some don’t, especially ones who have been in space for six months total like Doug Wheelock whose vision never recovered and had to be grounded. This would seem to have major implications for a Mars mission. And we don’t know why this is, either.

I actually did know this, but Emily didn’t: Plato’s real name was Aristocles. That was his nickname that stuck. “Platon” means broad or wide in Greek. He was apparently quite a wide-bodied fellow.

Most people know about Erastothenes figuring out the circumference of the earth within ten to fifteen percent using relatively inexact measurements. But I didn’t know about Al-Biruni in the 2nd century CE who figured out the radius of the earth within less than a percent of today’s measurement. Now THAT is impressive.

And even Columbus ended up figuring out that the Earth wasn’t perfectly round; his conclusion was pretty silly but he was actually right. The Earth is actually an oblate spheroid.  Newton later, correctly, surmised that because the Earth rotates, and that because it’s fluid beneath the mantle, that it would bulge at the equator. And it does, by about 13 miles at the equator than at the poles. Not a lot, but it’s there.

…

It still breaks my brain that Aphrodite was born from Cronus hacking off Ouranos’s genitals. Like how does that work?

It’s still laughable that anyone can believe the world is only 6,000 years old, but funny enough, that coincides with the beginning of written human history. So it doesn’t come from nowhere. It is funny to me that October 23, 4004 BCE was chosen as the “date of Creation,” I think it would be quite fun to celebrate the World’s birthday on that day every year and read its horoscope. 

(Also October 23 was considered the autumnal equinox back then, when Primate of All Ireland Ussher figured this out in the 1600’s, and so many things went wrong for it to be so far off at that point.)

“It will never not amuse us that one of the most senior rankings in the Christian hierarchy [Primate] is also the taxonomic name for monkeys and apes, but that is a trivial aside.” Trust me, most Christians know better and are likely in on the joke.

I still love how the Gregorian calendar (which we are still on today) just erased October 5 through October 14 1582 from existence. Those days simply do not exist. A lot of missed birthdays that year and no one was born on those dates. Fun times.

Honestly, Ussher’s scholarship was great. He was just relying too much on the Bible being a history book. But so wasn’t everyone else in his domain!

I still think that radioactivity is still one of the coolest things in science because of how accurately it allows us to date stuff.

…

I knew that the day wasn’t truly 24 hours, and that it was an average. What I didn’t realize: “A day in September – if you define it by the time that ellipses between two consecutive points when the Sun is highest in the sky (noon to noon) – is almost a full half an hour shorter than one in February.” So when days feel shorter and longer, they actually ARE!

This is how we ended up with Greenwich Mean time, which changed the measurement of a day to Earth spinning on its axis, which only varies by a few seconds each day. They used pendulums for over 275 years. Quartz proved a nice solution that was a bit more accurate, but today we use atomic clocks at the highest level. We still call it GMT, though, for time zone purposes, even though officially we take the readouts of 70 different atomic clocks worldwide and calculate the official UNIVERSAL time, known as Universal Coordinated Time, which is strangely enough abbreviated to UTC. That’s because of the beautiful fact that the atoms we use, cesium, all resonate at the same frequency all across the universe. 

Also, coral has revealed that the earth is indeed slowing down. 430 million years ago the year was actually like 420 days. Happy 420. But by the time that the earth slows down enough where our calendar has to change to account for it, well, that’s going to be quite awhile, like millions of years from now.

Oh but wait, there’s more: there are also “leap seconds” meant to keep things in sync. I wonder how often this happens. Well, a leap second can have profound consequences, in air traffic control and most especially the stock market, where trades happen in split seconds. Gotta love these high-frequency algorithms that can make huge market shifts possible within a dozen milliseconds. 

Speaking of which, that’s how the Flash Crash of May 2010 happened; these algorithms work at such blinding speeds that a small miscalculation can cause insane things to happen. The market quickly recovered, but that was still quite a scare. What actually happened was because clocks weren’t perfectly synchronized, there were trades that were seen as bought before they actually sold… because they only tracked to the nearest second, which recognizing how fast these things run, was a pretty serious oversight. They now use microseconds, and the markets get direct access to the universal time… yet flash crashes still happen every 2-3 years. Of course we haven’t gotten around to banning the predatory practice of high-frequency trading, which would solve a lot of them… Fun times. (AI is actually being implemented to overcome a lot of the ‘meme stock’ nonsense at least.)

Because of how things can change in the markets due to microseconds, leap seconds are being considered to be dropped entirely, as many big companies implement them across their own systems completely differently.

Human circadian rhythms are so weird. I know my own seems to shift wildly. And in experiments where people were underground, their circadian rhythms expanded to as much as 48 hours from their usual 24 hours and change. No one knows why this happens. But what it does is make people think they’ve been underground half as long as they actually have… very bizarre.

I’ve definitely noticed this myself, and I love what researchers call this phenomenon: “Our brains, honed as they are to detect novelty, registered the anomaly as lasting gfar longer than the boringly repetitive other images Time seems to slow down when something strange happens. The researchers call this Time’s Subjective Expansion for an Expanding Oddball – which would also be a good title for a concept album.” I agree. 

This is worth noting down for me: “… alas, our neurons don’t have the power to change the laws of nature. BUt our minds radically change how we perceive reality. The threat of danger or excitement activates our brains to register more, and record more, of that particular situation. We construct reality inside our heads, where the mechanics and psychology of our brains give us time-bending skills.” I wonder sometimes how advantageous they really are, besides giving us some really interesting anecdotes about life-threatning traumatic situations. We see the opposite be true with social media doomscrolling; people just scrolling their lives away.

I love this conclusion to chapter five: “Our minds are vast spaces that absorb, interpret, process, filter and sometimes deny reality. To put it bluntly, we humans are wondrous beings, who can transcend time and space with our inventions and knowledge. And we are simultaneously deeply flawed, and absolutely atrocious at seeing this amazing universe as it really is. The first step to true enlightenment is knowing this very fact.”

…

Chapter 6 is called Live Free… but unfortunately Living is very expensive!

“Our lives are lived forward but understood backward.”

“Are we all merely puppets on the invisible strings of cosmological forces well beyond our understanding, let alone our control?”

“We also like to poke around the edges of serious subjects and prod at them sideways.”

The big thinker in this early part of the chapter is when Belgian astronomer Adolphe Quetelet discovered a “terrifying exactitude with which crimes reproduce themselves” in the number of murders, rapes, and robberies each year in France, no matter what courts and prisons did. Even the methods employed by criminals remained almost identical from year to year. “We know in advance,” Quetelet said, “how many individuals will dirty their hands with the blood of others. How many will be forgers, how many poisoners.”

This would seem to make such crimes predictable and predetermined. “Man’s free choice disappears… when the observations are extended over a great number of individuals…” He was correct, of course. But to me, it seems that the court and prison systems are themselves entirely ineffective. The fault is at a societal level. And no amount of gun laws will change things, the methods will simply shift.

Emily brought up a great point that investing in public safety is the solution, because it’s preventative societal care. The courts and prisons are a punitive measure for when public safety isn’t able or allowed to do their job properly or it was beyond their control in the first place.

“If we put the question of human agency to the side for a moment, what’s particularly interesting when you look at free will in the animal kingdom is just how often one species has evolved to exploit the lack of agency in another.” And humans have done that to ourselves, too…

“Nature is not so much cruel as utterly indifferent to suffering, and endlessly creative.”

Some of the parasites they describe in this book don’t sound real. But I’m absolutely sure that they are.

…

Apparently, the influenza virus makes people more gregarious, in order to help it spread? I find this interesting as it has done very much the opposite to me… but flu vaccine research has shown this is very possible!

“… there will be some of you looking at this very sentence whose recent behavior has been titled ever so slightly by a pathogen without even knowing it.” After all, toxoplasmosis and influenza can be carried entirely while being entirely asymptomatic! Just like COVID actually.

Yeah, brain tumors CAN make people do some wild, and horrible, stuff, can’t they? “Perhaps free will isn’t a binary choice after all, but more like a spectrum.” Nothing in life is binary except being alive and being dead.

“Are we slaving away as zombies to automatic lives that are already perfectly planned out?” I actually don’t think so. I believe the answer is much more complex.

…

Aside: It seems to me, from my own pondering of my dreams, that it is the subconscious and unconscious that drive our actions more than our conscious mind. It’s sort of like being in a self-driving car and all the conscious mind can do is make emergency stops and route changes. It’s how people can consciously be aware that they are about to become a trainwreck and can’t stop it because they let their subconscious get away from them, and their unconscious mind go haywire. It’s a matter of momentum; if you let the deeper part of yourself, and the part right beneath your skin, get too much of a headstart, sheer physics won’t let you do anything but witness the crash, which sometimes can prove fatal. 

In this way, I think consciousness is more like a trinity: the unconscious is our instinct driven entirely by predictions made from pure experience, and the subconscious is the self we bury right beneath our skin that hides all the things we’d rather not show, but still act upon. The conscious mind is just that driver who sometimes can make mechanical adjustments and last-second course corrections, but it’s the third with, strangely enough, the least agency. It takes an extreme level of mindfulness for the conscious mind to take control. And even then, sometimes our unconscious is already so wasted that we’re always playing catchup, hoping the subconscious will at least play along long enough to have a decent life while running outdated flawed hardware and extremely glitchy software. (This was a heck of an aside!)

(And it continues!) Speaking of the unconscious, I felt compelled to read this book over another one today, because I felt it was “too heavy” for a day I’m trying to be more restful. And here I am pondering the very nature of my own consciousness and wondering if I’m even in control at all. I don’t think our actions are predetermined, but they certainly precede our conscious awareness of the decisions that are already being made without our direct knowledge. Our conscious mind is just getting the report a split second or two too late to have any say most of the time. OK, moving on… before this becomes its own essay, which it probably should!

…

“Though we humans have a capacity for greatness, we are nevertheless bound to the same rules as the rest of the universe, though our senses do not witness these mevhanics. Here the unresolved question of personal free will ultimately maps on to a puzzle that mathematicians and physicists have been grappling with for some time: do the laws of nature accommodate chance, or human agency? Or does the universe run on train lines, every decision already being predetermined and predictable?”

If we’re able to figure out the true nature of spacetime in the fourth dimension, something I was pondering last night before I read this section (absolutely true), we may not get an answer we like. Perhaps this is all just a grand cinema with puppet strings hidden in multiple dimensions beyond our comprehension…

I have to copy this passage verbatim because it’s one I want to do a deep-dive on in the future:

“In 1814, [PIerre-Simon Laplace] imagined a super-intelligent omniscient being who kenw the precise location and momentum of every atom in the universe. If, as Laplace believed, there was no such thing as randomness, then the entire state of the universe would be predetermined by the recent past, and whatever lay ahead in the future would be the direct effect of how things presently stood. It was as though the world and everything that surrounded it was a gigantic mechanical clock of cause and effect – ticking forward, tick-tock-tick-tock, each click of the cog according to the immutable mathematical laws of physics, with no space for error, nothing left to chance. The universe, he believed, ran on rails.”

Importantly, this is entirely independent of any religious belief. When I was a teenager, I used to like to say “things aren’t as random as they first appear.” This is, of course, absolutely true. But, while yes we’ve come to the conclusion that the universe is more about probability than anything else, the way things work seems to hold the idea of things being random and totally by chance in abeyance. What I’ve come to believe over my four decades of living on this earth is that some of us just happen to be in the right place at the right time while many others are in the worst possible place at the worst possible time. It’s not that things are fated so much as there is a level of inevitability that we as puny little 3-dimensional humans can’t yet quantify properly. We’re too busy trying to calculate the probability that some guy is gonna catch a strange-shaped “ball” and run safely into an entirely arbitrary rectangular “goal” area.

Interestingly, Cicero (in 44 BCE) came to a similar conclusion to Laplace…

“… if there could be any mortal who could observe with his mind the interconnection of all causes, nothing indeed would escape him. For he who knows the causes of things that are to be necessarily knows all the things that are going to be… for the things which are going to be do not come into existence suddenly, but the passage of time is like the unwinding of a rope, producing nothing new but unfolding what was there at first.”

What Laplace came up with became known as “Laplace’s demon.” And demonic it certainly is, to think that this omniscient being knows everything that’s going to happen and we are all suckers to think it could be any other way!

“Despite being a very big deal in laying the foundations of probability theory, Laplace thought that uncertainty was ultimately just down to lack of knowledge, which in turn was a product of our inability to see the world as it really is. He said that science had just invented the idea of chance and probability to make up for our fragility and the fact that we know less than his demon. Chance, he wrote was, ‘but an expression of man’s ignorance.’”

Laplace is right that we are incredibly ignorant. But I’ve also seen examples, many of them, that chance IS a thing. Whether it’s all an illusion or not remains to be seen. But I do think probability IS a real thing, even if it reflects some predetermined ordination of occurrences. I think, just from how humans have dominated the earth (mostly for worse than better) that nature wouldn’t have simply allowed this to happen in its regular workings. I do believe humans have at least SOME agency, even if it’s minuscule in the grand scheme of the Universe. It’s why I truly believe human beings can’t be alone in the universe as the dominant intelligent species of a little blue marble. The likelihood that we’re alone just doesn’t make mathematical sense.

…

I need to re-read Slaughterhouse Five. Those aliens were pretty neat, and funny enough, they sound a lot like the Prophets in DS9… where they can see “time in its totality at all times.”

Lots of great philosophical debates about free will in this chapter. I’m not going to spoil them all here in these notes.

“Luck relies on our liability to see things as they really are.” Which is how you can “make” your own luck. You just need to see things that most other people don’t. 

This book came out a couple years before the prediction markets really took off, but you can understand now why they’ve become so popular.

We’re all data addicts, and yet, more perfect data does NOT lead to more accurate predictions. Thanks to chaos and quantum mechanics!

“…even if you know the underlying laws of nature, even if there really is no such thing as chance, even if the universe is a chain of cause and effect, unless you can measure and calculate everything to a literally infinitesimal level of detail – unless you can know the location, velocity and momentum of every atom in the universe — Laplace’s demon is dead. Without that level of detail, prediction becomes impossible.”

The subatomic world is highly unpredictable. Imagine that. Don’t, because you might hurt your brain.

“Uncertainty takes many forms. It is our only way to bridge the gap between what reality is doing and what information you can practically extract from it. Our universe also doesn’t quite run like clockwork; at the quantum level it has true randomness at its core.”

The Many Worlds theory makes a lot of sense when you realize that electrons can either be a particle or a wave, or both simultaneously… reality is weird.

“According to the Many worlds theory, the universe isn’t random after all; there is no room for chance because everything that could happen does.”

Poor fruit flies being glued to sticks… I mean, it’s not like they got that much going on anyway, but still.

I love this paragraph to close out my notes for this chapter: “Whatever free will is, or isn’t, there is an underlying molecular mechanism that is happening in our neural circuits. Perhaps that creates a forgivable illusion, a lie we tell ourselves to convince us that we are in the driving seat, not puppets whose invisible nano-strings are beyond our control. Maybe free will is real, and we have complete control of our destinies. Or perhaps free will is real, and we are in the driving seat, but, with parasites, randomness, and chaos along for the ride, we don’t always have our hands on the wheel.” (pg 181-82)

Sounds about right to me.

…

Chapter 7 starts off pretty funny: “The end of the world is definitely coming. Mercifully, it’s unlikely to be anytime soon, so cool your jets.” We’re talking about apocalyptic predictions here.

“.. we humans are outstandingly good at defending our deeply held convictions, even when they’re proven to be spectacularly wrong.”

Funny, I was just thinking about this yesterday, and discussing it with Emily. Yet another bit of bibliomancy I’ve experienced.

Of course, the end WILL happen, at the heat death of the universe in about 10 to the 100th exponent years. Earth’s end will likely be in about a billion years when it gets too hot for much of anything to survive… and in about 5-7 our Sun will become a Red Giant and swallow everything about 20 million miles past Earth’s current orbit. Fun times.

Anyway, back to belief perseverance. It’s not just found in cult members, conspiracy theorists, or others extremely distrustful of authority. It can happen with even the smartest people out there.

Warren Buffett put it like this: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.”

Confirmation bias is a bitch. And we all do it to some degree, even Adam Rutherford and Hannah Fry, extremely bright people. It’s just mostly harmless, much of the time. Unfortunately, it also leads to a lot of big problems, especially in religion and politics… although I think Hannah is onto something with her Magic Orchid! (JK, but it’s a cute story.)

“We know what we like, and we like what we know.” Great section heading. 

On top of the YouTube algorithm feeding confirmation bias (it most certainly does which is why I curate what I watch so heavily), keep in mind that this bias actually benefits these tech companies by giving them incredible amounts of data on various demographics. That’s where the real money is made, selling it to not only advertisers, but anyone willing to take that data and weaponize it on a mostly unsuspecting, or at this point mostly apathetic, public.

While it’s true that psychic feed on confirmation bias, sometimes they get things scarily correct. I just find the psychology behind all of it fascinating. Like with horoscope readings and other sorts of readings that involve astrology and such, it just baffles me how accurate they seem to be. It’s just another form of bibliomancy; it’s all sort of an intuitive play on generally good advice tailored specifically for “you” when in reality, it’s just a welcome pick-me-up. And there is value in that, long as you don’t take it too seriously. And typically, I do take it too seriously… but I digress.

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Bert Forer’s work in discovering the “Fallacy of Personal Validation” is more important today than ever. It’s incredible just how you can pull some random sentences from an astrology magazine and suddenly people think that these sentences are deep insights personalized just for them. And in Forer’s experiment, the personality tests he gave out led to everyone getting exactly the same report. Good ole confirmation bias at its finest. 

That being said, I think even if astrology is entirely BS, it DOES have an effect on people. It CAN do good, by tricking us into taking relatively generic advice as sage wisdom. I find the whole industry entirely fascinating and sometimes, the advice is more pertinent than you would expect. Yes, it’s all based on educated guesses and a lot of generalized assumptions about certain demographics, but that doesn’t make it any less impactful, regardless of the source.

By the way, it was David Hannum not PT Barnum that said there was a “sucker born every minute.” Hilariously, it’s because Barnum scammed Hannum out of his own scam… 

Learned about the “File Drawer Problem” which are times when even science falls victim to confirmation bias. The authors ask “How much of science is missing?” No one cares about the boring stuff that proves exciting things are untrue. And a couple new words, neophilia (love of the new) and theorrhea (mania for a new theory. I have much of the latter… I wonder what I can take to treat that? 

Anyway, double-blind research is a thing in medicine for a reason, and interestingly enough, many scientific studies aren’t done in that way even when they could be for much more accurate findings. The bias in so many “studies” is absurd.

“The result of all this is that science is biased. It’s biased toward publishing dramatic results, novel results, results that affirm or enhance similar findings. It is biased toward big, positive statements.” (pg 211) 

That’s how you get funding, unfortunately enough. And because of findings that end up NOT being true once they were highly publicized, a lot of bad science gets spread everywhere, like “power posing” is the example they use here. The problem is when such claims are popular and potentially exciting, yet they can’t be replicated, leading to what’s called a “replication crisis.”

The sad thing is that sometimes people will tell you something entirely untrue as fact, and they do it thinking they are stating facts. Even scientists, and perhaps, especially scientists, who let their brilliant brains fool themselves.

“We don’t normally contextualize the complexities of our internal emotional states, and we learn to use language shortcuts.” (pg 236) This is just a beautiful sentence.

Sure, dolphins smile all the time. They’re extremely violent animals. My thinking: It’s not to hide their emotions; they’re just pure evil and enjoying every minute of it.

Rats at least do share the feeling of regret with us, even if the testing is a bit mean-spirited (the authors admit this). But even then, this is a bit reductive (they also admit that.)

Of all the emotions: “The greatest is love” – St. Paul. (He wasn’t really a saint but he said a lot of really important foundational Christian-ish stuff, so I’ll give the Catholic Church the benefit of the doubt here.) Also, “love” isn’t the word used in the King James version; it’s actually “charity.” I believe that this is a translation of a different Greek word for “love.” I should look more into this, as I’m fascinated by the 8 Greek forms of love, but I’m too lazy.

“Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston declared that they will both always love an unspecified person, but failed to detail the mechanism by which they plan to defy time’s absolute tyranny.” LOL.

“… the meaning of love is not only imprecise but context-dependent.”

How much of love is based entirely on the release of dopamine? No wonder it’s so easy to fall in love with social media celebrities…

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Back to the initial question of the chapter, does my dog love me? Well, the problem is that “the way in which we describe emotions is very human-focused.” 

“A subject such as emotions, and the inner mental state of a dog, is opinion-rich yet data-poor, which means it is a fertile ground for debate. And this is a topic that your authors disagree with each other about, which is a rare but happy occurrence.”

Adam believes dogs don’t actually “love” us in the way that humans love one another, or that we love our dogs. It’s not that they don’t feel something like love, but it’s a “dog feeling.” Adam is convinced that the “love” our dogs have is based heavily in the treat-reward system. 

Hannah thinks this is all nonsense. I agree with her: “Love is a two-way connection. It is biological vanity to define the action of loving by how it feels to experience it within a human body, rather than how it manifests itself outwardly, through the shared experience of loyalty, companionship and attachment. And by the latter metric, there is no doubt that dogs are entirely capable of love.”

Essentially, even though we don’t know exactly what our dogs are feeling when it comes to what we would call love, “we may as well believe that they do.”

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OK, chapter 9, the final chapter is called “The Universe Through a Keyhole”

This chapter actually starts with more dog-related anecdotes, this one concerning smell-test dogs. Funny enough, I’ve heard this story: dogs were trained to sniff out cash to prevent money from being smuggled across borders during conflicts (I’m assuming the Middle East nonsense). Well, they weren’t effective at all, but to no fault of the dogs. The cash in the training had been wrapped in plastic; the dogs were looking for plastic wrap!

“Dogs smell things in a very different way to humans. Where we breathe and smell through the same tube, they separate air for breathing from air for sniffing.”

Briefly, dog’s olfactory senses are far superior to ours because they have a greater surface area “for olfactory neurons to grab those odorous molecules from the air.” That being said, humans can train their own sense of smell to be pretty strong, too. But human experience isn’t nearly as dominated by smell as it is for dogs.

This means that dogs have a very different “umwelt” (subjective universe) than humans. In fact, many animals rely heavily on scent and it plays a vital role in their lives and their interactions with each other and the environment.

The Four F’s of evolution are mentioned here: Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing and Reproduction (yes, that’s supposed to be F—ing)

Well, this is fascinating. “We have almost 900 bits of the genome that are related to smell, but half of them have rotted.” That’s why our sense of smell has devolved in some sense and why some people can smell things that others can’t.

Some humans, though, have incredible senses of smell, and it’s possible for a human to detect a change in someone’s odor (which suggests a disease like Parkinson’s.) I’ve heard this story before; I’m sure it was featured on one of Hannah’s television programs. In any case, it was an enormous win for Parkinson’s research.

Interestingly, it seems that COVID is why my sense of smell has been heightened. I actually got it before the pandemic was actually a thing, around Christmas 2019, and I nearly died from it. In fact, I think part of my fatigue issues stem from long COVID. I had chronic fatigue before, but since then I have long bouts of fuzzy, hazy melancholic tiredness. (Like I have the past month or so.) But now I can smell things that most other people can’t. Especially rotting things. So, I traded a good chunk of my energy reserves to be able to smell rotting things that Emily can’t. Not a worthy tradeoff.

Also important to point out: “Vision is not an objective snapshot of reality.” I kind of knew this already, but it’s a good reminder.

“Sight dominates our sensual experience of the world. Of course, some people are born without sight, or become blind during their lives; but for most people the universe is bathed in light, and we take those photons into the darkness of our skulls and construct a rich, colorful view of reality.”

Essentially, we can’t take all these pretty photons for granted.

“We are so lacking in a universal language with which to describe our visual umwelt that many of you reading this could well be wandering around with a world-distorting genetic irregularity without even knowing it.” – I just really like this paragraph, and I think it can apply to much more than color-blindness.

I’ve never heard of the term, tetrachromats – women who can see in four primary colors and can differentiate between extremely small variations in shades of color. Oh how I’d love to be one of those! Actually, it seems I do have more sense of shades than most other people I know do… am I unknowingly a tetrachromat?

“No one else has experienced – or will ever experience – the world in quite the same way as you, which might just help explain the huge difference in the things that people like, the colors they think look good and the smells they prefer to avoid.” Keep this in mind when you think someone has bad taste; it’s probably you that has a perception problem. (JK)

This is a crazy, but beautiful way to think about the wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum: “If the entirety of this book, with 304 pages and 350,767 characters, were the EM spectrum, we would be able to actually read less than a sentence of it. The only bit visible to us would be around 12 letters, which amounts to: not a whole lot.” Yes, ‘not a whole lot’ is exactly 12 letters. That’s really nuts to think about.

Wow, I knew honeybees could see ultraviolet, but butterflies can see in nine, ten, or even FIFTEEN primary colors. Now I actually want to be a butterfly! Reindeer can see UV too, very useful in landscapes covered in ice and snow.

It’s just a great mystery why the mantis shrimp, which lives typically about a mile deep in the ocean, has such amazing vision. They see in 16 primary colors and 10,000 units in their compound eyes. What are we missing down there at the bottom of the sea to need such color range and resolution?

It’s a good thing I don’t have motion blindness. You can’t pour a cup of tea reliably, or drive a car, or watch YouTube. Guess all you can do is stare at art and read books.

I’m fascinated by how these saccades work to create our visual snapshot of what we see. I wonder if that’s why some days I just can’t focus on reading; that my eyes are somehow too tired to make the necessary movements and that’s why the words will blur. One of the horrible things about my chronic fatigue is that some days I can’t focus much at all, so I mostly just lay there and mostly listen to YouTube videos while I just lay there with my eyes closed. Today, as I’m forcing myself to finish up this book so I can’t finally move onto the next one, is one such day. (I’ve dealt with this ever since cancer, but the past couple years, it’s gotten worse, I suppose just from aging poorly and spending too much time on screens.)

Great point that pigeons, and many other birds, can’t enjoy cinema. It would all be a blurry mess to them. It’s just a neat quirk that we can string 16 still frames together in a second and it looks much like real life (the 24 frames per second was a quirk of combining film and sound and that’s just how fast the motor happened to run, and we stuck with it for a long time before we could do all the 60-120fps and higher stuff we can do with digital now. Yet still most films are in 24 fps with few exceptions.)

I love this passage, one of the best in the entire book: “We are each locked into our own umwelt, shackled by the inescapable bounds of our evolutionary history. We’re hopelessly tethered to what we can uncover while stuck on (or perhaps near) this planet, a speck of dust in the vastness of the cosmos. We see only the merest sliver of reality. We’re peering at the universe through a keyhole.”

But thanks to math and science (plus more than a bit of insatiable curiosity) we know there’s so much more to see, hear, smell, and touch, or even imagine. (paraphrasing here) The big lesson here is that we come with all these perceptual limits and glitches, but because we know better, we can know things beyond what our senses alone could ever tell us.

“Sciene is now – and will always be – the only way to compose the ultimate guide to everything.”

…

This was a phenomenal book, which is why I battled fatigue so hard to finish it. (It should’ve been finished in May, but spilled over to June 1st, so be it.) I’m not sure it’s one I’ll hold onto permanently, as I like to move books forward which I don’t plan on referring back to. But there is enough of a resources section that’s alone worth keeping my copy in hand.

So there may be in fact… More to come?