Highlights
-
2024-11-17 11:13 Belief came first. Being an infant is terrifying. Being a toddler is almost as scary. All species, every one of them, navigates the world because they have belief. Belief in what is going to happen next, hope that things will be as they were.
-
2024-11-17 11:16 Belief and engineering don’t go well together. I’m carefully using the word engineering here instead of the word science, because there are plenty of scientists who have fallen into the trap of belief. Einstein had a very famous battle decades long with Niels Bohr, the guy who sketched out how the atom might work. Einstein, of course, is physics royalty, but Bohr wasn’t far behind. Their argument was about quantum mechanics.
-
2024-11-16 21:32 This is action based on belief that the cost of accepting an alternative way to think about the physics of the universe was too high for those in the Copenhagen school.
-
2024-11-17 11:14 Consider the galaxy GN Z11. This galaxy is more than 10 billion light years away, which means that if you aim a powerful telescope at it, you will see light that is more than 10 billion years old. Light takes a while to travel. Light from the sun, the light you can see out your window, is eight minutes old. It’s stale by the time it gets here.
-
2024-11-17 11:14 So if we can accept the fact that the light from the sun is eight minutes old, the very same math will show us that light from GNZ 11 is more than 10 billion years old. But if light from that galaxy is more than 10 billion years old, it means that the universe is also more than 10 billion years old. But if you are walking around with a belief that the universe is much, much younger than that, you have a problem. And your problem is that there are forces encouraging you to maintain your belief. At the very same time that engineering and math and the scientific method are showing you that it can’t be true.
-
2024-11-17 11:16 Because belief actually changes how humans live. Belief will heal an illness. In many cases, belief will increase performance. Wade Boggs famously ate chicken before every single game. Is there a direct connection between chicken and playing baseball? Extremely unlikely. However, did having a comforting superstition help Wade Boggs play better baseball? It’s entirely likely.
-
2024-11-17 11:14 The reason they’re so long is that for most of his career, Michael Jordan wore a pair of shorts under his shorts. Shorts from the University of North Carolina, which he wore to remind himself of how to play better. Which he wore because he was superstitious, which he wore because he had belief. Did it make Michael Jordan play better?
-
2024-11-17 11:14 It’s entirely possible. But it’s belief that made him play better, not the fact that he was wearing a particular pair of shorts
-
2024-11-17 08:42 Raised more than half of the money he stole from people after he was profiled on the front page of the Boston Post as a con man.