# Edge 2012 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Archive year:** 2012 - **Response rows represented:** 192 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 189 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 3 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 6 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 6 - **Not yet promoted:** 186 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE2012-001 — Genes, Claustrum, and Consciousness — Vilayanur Ramachandran > What does this have to do with consciousness? Instead of focusing on pedantic philosophical issues, Crick and Koch began with their naïve intuitions. "Consciousness" has many attributes—continuity in time, a sense of agency or free will, recursiveness or "self-awareness," etc. But one attribute that stands out is subjective unity: you experience all your diverse sense impressions, thoughts, willed actions and memories as being a unity—not jittery or fragmented. This attribute of consciousness, with the accompanying sense of the immediate "present" or "here and now," is so obvious that we don't usually think about it; we regard it as axiomatic. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor & Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, UC, San Diego; Author, The Tell-Tale Brain - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Genes, Claustrum, and Consciousness](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/Consciousness Unifies What the Brain Keeps Distributed by Vilayanur Ramachandran|Consciousness Unifies What the Brain Keeps Distributed by Vilayanur Ramachandran]] ### EDGE2012-002 — The Scientific Method—An Explanation For Explanations — Nathan Myhrvold > Somewhere along the line a very different meme got started. Instead of forbidding inquiry into stories about the world people tried the other extreme of encouraging continual questioning. Stories about aspect of the world can be questioned skeptically, and tested with observations and experiments. If the story survives the tests then provisionally at least one can accept it as something more than a mere story; it is a theory that has real explanatory power. It will never be more than a provisional explanation—we can never let down our skeptical guard—but these provisional explanations can be very useful. We call this process of making and vetting stories the scientific method. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO and Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures; Co-Author (with Bill Gates), The Road Ahead; Author, Modernist Cuisine - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Scientific Method—An Explanation For Explanations](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-003 — Boscovich's Explanation Of Atomic Forces — Charles Simonyi > His arguments are very easy to understand and extremely convincing. Let's imagine two bodies, one of which is traveling at a speed of, say, 6 units, the other at a speed of 12 with the faster body catching up with the slower one along the same straight path. We imagine what transpires when the two bodies collide. By conservation of the "quantity of motion," both bodies should continue after collision along the same path, each with a speed of 9 units (in the case of inelastic collision, or in case of elastic collision for a brief period right after the collision) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Boscovich's Explanation Of Atomic Forces](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-004 — Commitment — Richard H. Thaler > Schelling gives many examples of how this can be done, but here is my favorite. A Denver rehabilitation clinic whose clientele consisted of wealthy cocaine addicts, offered a "self-blackmail" strategy. Patient were offered an opportunity to write a self- incriminating letter that would be delivered if and only if the patient, who is tested on a random schedule, is found to have used cocaine. Most cocaine addicts will probably have no trouble thinking of something to write about, and will now have a very strong incentive to stay off drugs. They are committed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Father of Behavioral Economics; Recipient, 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science; Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Author, Misbehaving - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Commitment](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-005 — Why Is Our World Comprehensible? — Andrei Linde > To understand the issue, consider some examples of an incomprehensible universe where mathematics would be inefficient. Here is the first one: Suppose the universe is in a state with the Planck density r ~ 1094 g/cm3. Quantum fluctuations of space-time in this regime are so large that all rulers are rapidly bending and shrinking in an unpredictable way. This happens faster than one could measure distance. All clocks are destroyed faster than one could measure time. All records about the previous events become erased, so one cannot remember anything and predict the future. The universe is incomprehensible for anybody living there, and the laws of mathematics cannot be efficiently used. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Stanford; Father of Eternal Chaotic Inflation; Inaugural Recipient, Fundamental Physics Prize - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Why Is Our World Comprehensible?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-006 — Pascal's Wager — Tim O'Reilly > "You must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then?...You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media, Inc.; Author, WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Pascal's Wager](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-007 — Fitness Landscapes — Stewart Brand > Fitness landscapes (sometimes called "adaptive landscapes") keep turning up when people try to figure out how evolution or innovation works in a complex world. An important critique by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert of early optimism about artificial intelligence warned that seemingly intelligent agents would dumbly "hill climb" to local peaks of illusory optimality and get stuck there. Complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman used fitness landscapes to visualize his ideas about the "adjacent possible" in 1993 and 2000, and that led in turn to Steven Johnson's celebration of how the "adjacent possible" works for innovation in Where Good Ideas Come From. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Fitness Landscapes](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-008 — Like Attracts Like — Marco Iacoboni > The beauty of this explanation is twofold. First, it accounts for the complex organization of the cerebral cortex (the most recent evolutionary component of the brain) using a very simple rule. Second, it deals with scaling issues very well, and indeed it also accounts for a specific phenomenon in a widespread human behavior, imitation. It explains how neurons packed themselves in the cerebral cortex and how humans relate to each other. Not a small feat. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA; Author, Mirroring People - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Like Attracts Like](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-009 — Einstein's Photons — Anton Zeilinger > Today, we know that the pattern even arises if we have such low intensities that only one, say, photon per second passes through the whole apparatus. If we wait long enough and look at the distribution of all of them, we get the interference pattern. The modern explanation is that the interference pattern only arises if there is no information present anywhere in the Universe through which slit the particle passes. But even as Einstein was wrong here, his idea of the energy quanta of light, today called photons pointed far into the future. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel laureate (2022 - Physics); Physicist, University of Vienna; Scientific Director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information; President, Austrian Academy of Sciences; Author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Einstein's Photons](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-010 — Untitled Response — Raphael Bousso > Yet, there are subtle hints that Quantum Mechanics, too, will suffer the fate of its predecessors. The most intriguing, in my mind, is the role of time. In Quantum Mechanics, time is an essential evolution parameter. But in General Relativity, time is just one aspect of spacetime, a concept that we know breaks down at singularities deep inside black holes. Where time no longer makes sense, it is hard to see how Quantum Mechanics could still reign. As Quantum Mechanics surely spells trouble for General Relativity, the existence of singularities suggests that General Relativity may also spell trouble for Quantum Mechanics. It will be fascinating to watch this battle play out. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Untitled Response](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-011 — The Inductive Economy of An Elegant Idea — Carolyn Porco > The first is an idea that was originally offered in the 1912 but met with such extreme hostility from the scientific establishment—not an unusual response, by the way, to an original idea—that it wasn't generally accepted until 50 years later. By that time, the sheer weight of evidence supporting it became so overwhelming that the notion was rendered irrefutable. And that notion was plate tectonics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Planetary Scientist; Cassini Imaging Team Leader; Director, CICLOPS, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Inductive Economy of An Elegant Idea](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-012 — Expected Value (and beyond) — Brian Knutson > Indeed, thinking about probability seems more complex and effortful than thinking about magnitude—requiring one not only to consider the next best thing, but also the one after that, and after that, and so on. Neuroimaging findings suggest that more recently evolved parts of the prefrontal cortex allow us not to "be here now"—but instead to transport ourselves into the uncertain future. Mental and neural evidence for differentiating magnitude and probability suggest a limit on the explanatory power of expected value. To some, this limit paradoxically makes expected value all the more intriguing. Scientists often love explanations more for the questions they raise than the questions they answer. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience; Stanford University - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Expected Value (and beyond)](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-013 — The Principle of Least Action — David Dalrymple > Starting from nothingness, or the absence of information, there is a flowering of possible refinements toward specifying a universe, one of which leads to our Big Bang, to particles, fields and spacetime, and ultimately to intelligent life. The reason that we had a long period of stellar, planetary and biological evolution is that this is the path to intelligent life, which required the least action. Imagine how much action it would take to create intelligence directly from nothing! Universes without intelligent life might require even less action, but there is nobody in those universes to wonder where they came from. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research affiliate, MIT Media Lab - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Principle of Least Action](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-014 — Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference — Dan Sperber > Eratosthenes brought together apparently unrelated pieces of evidence—the pace of caravans, the Sun shining to the bottom of a well, the length of the shadow of an obelisk—, assumptions—the sphericity of the Earth, its distance from the Sun—, and mathematical tools to measure a circumference that he could only imagine but neither see nor survey. His result is simple and compelling: the way he reached it epitomizes human intelligence at its best. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth's circumference](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-015 — "We Are Dreaming Machines That Construct Virtual Models Of The Real World" — Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran > The most beautiful and elegant explanation should be as strong and overwhelming as a brick smashing your head; it should break your life in two. For instance, as a result of that explanation, you should realize that even if you are dreaming your brain is active doing what he does best: creating models of reality or, in fact, creating the reality where you live in. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Director, Scientific Vortex, Inc. - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** ["We Are Dreaming Machines That Construct Virtual Models Of The Real World"](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Simulation/Dreams Reveal the Brain as a Reality-Making Machine by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran|Dreams Reveal the Brain as a Reality-Making Machine by Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran]] ### EDGE2012-016 — Seeing Oneself in a Positive Light — Emily Pronin > Another serious consequence of this motive involves prejudice and discrimination. A wide array of experiments in social psychology have demonstrated how members of different ethnic groups, different races, and even different bunks at summer camp see their "own kind" as better and more deserving than "outsiders" who belong to other groups—a perception that leads not only to ingroup favoritism but also to blatant discrimination against members of other groups. And, people are especially likely to discriminate when their own self-esteem has been threatened. For example, one study found that college students were especially likely to discriminate against a Jewish job applicant after they themselves had suffered a blow to their self-esteem; notably, their self-esteem recovered fully after the discrimination. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Princeton University - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Seeing Oneself in a Positive Light](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-017 — Bounded Rationality As An Explanation For Many of Our Ills — Mahzarin Banaji > Together the view of human nature that evolved over the past four decades has systematically changed the explanation for who we are and why we do what we do. We are error-prone in the unique ways in which we are, the explanation goes, not because we have malign intent, but because of the evolutionary basis of our mental architecture, the manner in which we remember and learn information, the way in which we are affected by those around us and so on. The reason we are boundedly rational is because the information space in which we must do our work is large compared to the capacities we have, including severe limits on conscious awareness, the ability to be able to control behavior, and to act in line even with our own intentions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Department Chair; Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Co-author (with Anthony Greenwald), Blind Spot - **Extract length:** 132 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Bounded Rationality As An Explanation For Many of Our Ills](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-018 — An Explanation of Fundamental Particle Physics That Doesn't Exist Yet — Antony Garrett Lisi > What is tetrahedral symmetry doing in the masses of neutrinos?! Nobody knows. But you can bet there will be a good explanation. It is likely that this explanation will come from mathematicians and physicists working closely with Lie groups. The most important lesson from the great success of Einstein's theory of General Relativity is that our universe is fundamentally geometric, and this idea has extended to the geometric description of known forces and particles using group theory. It seems natural that a complete explanation of the Standard Model, including why there are three generations of fermions and why they have the masses they do, will come from the geometry of group theory. This explanation does not yet exist, but when it does it will be deep, elegant, and beautiful—and it will be my favorite. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [An Explanation of Fundamental Particle Physics That Doesn't Exist Yet](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-019 — What Time Is It? — Dave Winer > How do I find the time? Either I do without or I keep my eyes fixed on a screen that has the time in the upper-right corner. It's gotten so that I resent that reality doesn't dispay the time in the upper-right corner. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Blogging and RSS Software Pioneer; Editor, Scripting News Weblog - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [What Time Is It?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-020 — In The Beginning Is The Theory — Helena Cronin > • Consider the tedious but tenacious argument 'genes versus environment'. I'll take a well-studied case. Indigo buntings migrate annually over long distances. To solve the problem of navigation, natural selection equipped them with the ability to construct a mental compass by studying the stars in the night sky, boy-scout fashion, during their first few months of life. The fount of this spectacular adaptation is a rich source of information that natural selection, over evolutionary time, has packed into the birds' genes—in particular, information about the rotation of the stellar constellations. Thus buntings that migrate today can use the same instincts and the same environmental regularities to fashion the same precision-built instrument as did their long-dead ancestors. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-director of LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science; Author, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [In The Beginning Is The Theory](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-021 — You Think, Therefore I Am — Alana Conner and Hazel Rose Markus > "I think, therefore I am." Cogito ergo sum. Remember this elegant and deep idea from René Descartes' Principles of Philosophy? The fact that a person is contemplating whether she exists, Descartes argued, is proof that she, indeed, actually does exist. With this single statement, Descartes knit together two central ideas of Western philosophy: 1) thinking is powerful, and 2) individuals play a big role in creating their own I's—that is, their psyches, minds, souls, or selves. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cultural psychologist, writer, and consultant | Davis-Brack Professor in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University; Co-author, Clash! How to Thrive in a Multicultural World, and Co-founder, Stanford SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions). - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [You Think, Therefore I Am](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-022 — Realism And Other Metaphysical Half-Truths — Tania Lombrozo > Nonetheless, each explanation has come under serious attack at one point or another. Take realism, for example. While many of our current scientific theories are admittedly impressive, they come at the end of a long succession of failures: every past theory has been wrong. Ptolemy's astronomy had a good run, but then came the Copernican Revolution. Newtonian mechanics is truly impressive, but it was ultimately superseded by contemporary physics. Modesty and common sense suggest that like their predecessors, our current theories will eventually be overturned. But if they aren't true, why are they so effective? Intuitive realism is at best a metaphysical half-truth, albeit a pretty harmless one. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Realism And Other Metaphysical Half-Truths](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-023 — How The Availability Of Some Plants And Animals Can Explain Thousands Of Years Of Human History — David Pizarro > One of the most elegant explanations I have encountered in the social sciences comes courtesy of Jared Diamond, and is outlined in his wonderful book "Guns, Germs, and Steel." Diamond attempts to answer an enormously complex and historically controversial question—why certain societies achieved such historical dominance over others—by appealing to a set of very basic differences in the physical environments from which these societies emerged (such as differences in the availability of plants and animals suitable for domestication). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Psychology, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [How The Availability Of Some Plants And Animals Can Explain Thousands Of Years Of Human History](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-024 — On Oceans and Airport Security — Kevin P. Hand > The same basic principle, the same fundamental physics, is largely responsible for our knowledge of oceans on some of these distant worlds. Jupiter's moon Europa provides a good example. Back in the late 1990's the NASA's Galileo spacecraft made several flybys of Europa and the magnetic field sensors on the spacecraft detected that Europa does not have a strong internal field of its own, instead it has an induced magnetic field that is created as a result of Jupiter's strong background magnetic field. In other words, the alarm went off. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [On Oceans and Airport Security](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-025 — Subjective Environment — Andrian Kreye > My observation had been a mere notion of the major difference between my native Europe and America, my adopted continent for a couple of decades. In Europe the present is perceived as the end point of history. In America the present is perceived as the beginning of the future. Philosophy or history, I hoped, would have an explanation for such a fundamental yet simple difference. Both can deliver parts of an explanation of course. The different paths the histories of ideas and the histories of the countries have taken just in the past 200 years are astounding. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Subjective Environment](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-026 — Help, I need somebody! — Seirian Sumner > "I could also be a gene becoming a genome, or a prokaryote becoming an eukaryote. I am part of the same, fundamental event in evolution's playground. I am the evolution of helping and cooperation. I am the major transition that shapes all levels of biological complexity. The reason I happen is because I help others like me, and we settle on a division of labour. I don't help because, paradoxically, I benefit. My secret? I'm selective: I like to help relatives because they end up also helping me, by passing on our shared genes. I've embraced the transition from autonomy to cooperation. And it feels good!" - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Reader, Behavioral Ecology, University College London - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Help, I need somebody!](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-027 — Sexual Conflict Theory — David M. Buss > Consider deception on the mating market. If a man is pursuing a short-term mating strategy and the woman for whom he has sexual interest is pursuing a long-term mating strategy, conflict between these interactants is virtually inevitable. Men are known to feign long-term commitment, interest, or emotional involvement for the goal of casual sex, interfering with women's long-term mating strategy. Men's have evolved sophisticated strategies of sexual exploitation. Conversely, women sometimes present themselves as costless sexual opportunities, and then intercalate themselves into a man's mating mind to such a profound degree that he wakes up one morning and suddenly realizes that he can't live without her—one version of the ‘bait and switch' tactic in women's evolved arsenal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Sexual Conflict Theory](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-028 — Ceaseless Reinvention Leads To Overlapping Solutions — David M. Eagleman > Take memory. Under normal circumstances, memories of daily events are consolidated by an area of the brain called the hippocampus. But in frightening situations—such as a car accident or a robbery—another area, the amygdala, also lays down memories along an independent, secondary memory track. Amygdala memories have a different quality to them: they are difficult to erase and they can return in "flash-bulb" fashion—a common description of rape victims and war veterans. In other words, there is more than one way to lay down memory. We're not talking about memories of different events, but different memories of the same event. The unfolding story appears to be that there may be even more than two factions involved, all writing down information and later competing to tell the story. The unity of memory is an illusion. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Incognito, Sum, The Brain - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Ceaseless Reinvention Leads To Overlapping Solutions](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-029 — A Hot Young Earth: Unquestionably Beautiful and Stunningly Wrong — Unattributed Edge contributor > Geologists howled in protest. They didn't know how old the Earth was, but they thought in billions of years, not millions. Charles Darwin—who was a geologist first and then a biologist later—estimated that it had taken 300 million years for a valley in England to erode into its current shape. The Earth itself, Darwin argued, was far older. And later, when Darwin published his theory of evolution, he took it for granted that the Earth was inconceivably old. That luxury of time provided room for evolution to work slowly and imperceptibly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [A Hot Young Earth: Unquestionably Beautiful and Stunningly Wrong](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-030 — Feynman's Lifeguard — Timo Hannay > For a start, the theory is genuinely profound, having to do with the behaviour and interactions of those (apparently) most fundamental of particles, photons and electrons. And yet it explains a huge range of phenomena, from the reflection, refraction and diffraction of light to the structure and behaviour of electrons in atoms and their resultant chemistry. Feynman may have been exaggerating when he claimed that QED explains all of the phenomena in the world "except for radioactivity and gravity", but only slightly. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Managing Director, SchoolDash; Co-organizer, Sci Foo Camp - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Feynman's Lifeguard](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-031 — Lemons are Fast — Barry C. Smith > There are cross-modal correspondences between taste and shape, between sound and vision, between hearing and smell, many of which are being investigated by neuroscientist Charles Spence and philosopher Ophelia Deroy. These unexpected connections are reliable and shared, unlike cases of synaesthesia, which are idiosyncratic—though individually consistent. And the reason we make these connections in the brain is to give us multiple fixes on objects in the environment that we can both hear and see. It also allows us to communicate elusive aspects of our experience. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor & Director, Institute of Philosophy School of Advanced Study University of London - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Lemons are Fast](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-032 — How Do You Get From A Lobster To A Cat? — John McWhorter > Not only was this boring—the problem was that molecular biology started making it ever clearer that arthropods and chordates trace back to the same basic body plan in a good amount of detail. The shrimp's little segments are generated by the same basic genes that create our vertebral column, and so on. Which leads to the old question again—how do you get from a lobster to a cat? Biologists are converging upon an answer that combines elegance with a touch of mystery while occasioning a scintilla of humility in the bargain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [How Do You Get From A Lobster To A Cat?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-033 — Russell's Theory of Descriptions — A. C. Grayling > One example Russell used to illustrate the idea is the assertion 'the present King of France is bald,' said when there is no King of France. Is this assertion true or false? One response might be to say that it is neither, since there is no King of France at present. But Russell wished to find an explanation for the falsity of the assertion which did not dispense with bivalence in logic, that is, the exclusive alternative of truth and falsity as the only two truth-values. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Master of the New College of the Humanities; Supernumerary Fellow, St Anne's College, Oxford; Author, War: An Enquiry - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Russell's Theory of Descriptions](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-034 — Flocking Behaviour In Birds — John Naughton > My favourite explanation is Craig Reynold's suggestion (first published in 1986, I think) that flocking behaviour in birds can be explained by assuming that each bird follows three simple rules—separation (don't crowd your neighbours), alignment (steer towards the average heading of your neighbours) and cohesion (steer towards the average position of your neighbours). The idea that such complex behaviour can be accounted for in such a breathtakingly simple way is, well, just beautiful. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge; Director, Wolfson College Press Fellowship Programme; Columnist, the Observer; Author, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Flocking Behaviour In Birds](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-035 — We're Apes — Michael Vassar > Phylogenetically, and in terms of their ecological niche and morphology, apes are less similar to small monkeys than to paleolithic humans. Therefore, absent evidence to the contrary, we should expect that we can predict ape behavior better by looking at paleolithic human behavior than by looking at monkey behavior. This is a testable claim. Naive subjects can try to predict ape behavior by using different pools of evidence, information about either monkeys or paleolithic humans. The amount that one can know about a by observing b is correlated to the amount one can know about b by observing a. This consideration really should narrow the range of hypotheses we consider when speculating upon our innate behavior. If all other apes and monkeys possess a feature, including 'innate behavior' in so far as 'innate behavior' is a valid conceptual construct, we probably also possess that feature. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder and Chief Science Officer, MetaMed Research - **Extract length:** 145 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [We're Apes](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-036 — Life Is a Digital Code — Matt Ridley > Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery...Now we believe that the DNA is a code. That is, the order of the bases (the letters) makes one gene different from another gene (just as one page pf print is different from another). You can see how Nature makes copies of the genes. Because if the two chains unwind into two separate chains, and if each chain makes another chain come together on it, then because A always goes with T, and G with C, we shall get two copies where we had one before. In other words, we think we have found the basic copying mechanismby which life comes from life...You can understand we are excited." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Writer; Fellow, Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences; Author,The Evolution of Everything - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Life Is a Digital Code](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-037 — Epigenetics — Helen Fisher > The 18th century philosopher, John Locke, was convinced that the human mind is an empty slate upon which the environment inscribes personality. With equal self-assurance, others have been convinced that genes orchestrate our development, illnesses and life styles. Yet social scientists had failed for decades to explain the mechanisms governing behavioral variations between twins, family members and culture groups. And biological scientists had failed to pinpoint the genetic foundations of many mental illnesses and complex diseases. The central mechanism to explain these complex issues has been found. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist, Rutgers University; Author, Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Epigenetics](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-038 — One Concidence; Two Deja Vues — Douglas Coupland > The underlying biodynamics of déja vus is probably ascribable to some sort of tingling neurons in a certain part of the brain, yet this doesn't tell us why they exist. They seem to me to be a signal from larger point of view that wants to remind us that our lives are distinct, that they have meaning, and that they occur throughout a span of time. We are important, and what makes us valuable to the universe is our sentience and our curse and blessing of perpetual self-awareness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer, Artist, Designer; Author; Google Artist in Residence - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [One Concidence; Two Deja Vues](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-039 — Back To The Beginning, The Mere Word — Virginia Heffernan > Richard Rorty's transformation of "survival of the fittest" to "whatever survives survives" is not in itself my favorite explanation, though I find it immensely satisfying, but it enacts a wholesome return to language away from the most rococo fantasies of science. In this case, a statement that looks to describe history and biology—controversially, no less—drops into a foundational locution, a tautology. Back to the beginning, the mere Word. Anytime an explanation, for anything, returns us to language, and its dynamics, I'm satisfied. Exhilarated. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Columnist, The New York Times Magazine; Editorial Director, West Studios; Author, Magic and Loss - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Back To The Beginning, The Mere Word](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-040 — Structural Realism — Amanda Gefter > Recent advances in theoretical physics have only made the situation worse. The holographic principle tells us that our four-dimensional spacetime and everything in it is exactly equivalent to physics taking place on the two-dimensional boundary of the universe. Neither description is more "real" than the other—one can be perfectly mapped onto the other with no loss of information. When we try to believe that spacetime is really four-dimensional or really has a particular geometry, the holographic principle pulls the rug out from under us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Structural Realism](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-041 — Frames of Reference — Dimitar D. Sasselov > A fundamental shift in our frame of reference, especially the one that defines our place in the world, affects deeply each and every one of us personally. We live and learn, the next generation is born into the new with no attachment to the old. In science it is easy. Human frames of reference go beyond mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Do we know how to transform between human frames of reference successfully? Are they more often than not "Lagrangian" and relative? Perhaps we could take a cue from science and find an elegant solution. Or at least—an elegant explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University; Director, Harvard Origins of Life Initiative; Author, The Life of Super-Earths - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Frames of Reference](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-042 — Complexity Out of Simplicity — Bruce Hood > As a scientist dealing with complex behavioral and cognitive processes, my deep and elegant explanation comes not from psychology (which is rarely elegant) but from the mathematics of physics. For my money, Fourier's theorem has all the simplicity and yet more power than other familiar explanations in science. Stated simply, any complex pattern, whether in time or space, can be described as a series of overlapping sine waves of multiple frequencies and various amplitudes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society, University of Bristol; Author, The Self-Illusion, Founder of Speakezee - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Complexity Out of Simplicity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-043 — Einstein's Revenge: The New Geometric Quantum — Eric R. Weinstein > The story of the geometric quantum begins at some point around 1973-1974, when our consensus picture of fundamental particle theory stopped advancing. This stasis, known as the 'Standard Model', seemed initially like little more than a temporary resting spot on the relentless path towards progress in fundamental physics, and theorists of the era wasted little time proposing new theories in the expectation that they would be quickly confirmed by experimentalists looking for novel phenomena. But that expected entry into the promised land of new physics turned into a 40-year period of half-mad tribal wandering in an arid desert, all but devoid of new phenomena. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Einstein's Revenge: The New Geometric Quantum](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-044 — Birds Are The Direct Descendents Of Dinosaurs — Gregory Paul > Because of the dinorevolution our understanding of the evolution of the animals that dominated the continents is far closer to the truth than it was. Energy efficient amphibians and reptiles dominated the continents for only 70 million years in the later portion of the Paleozoic, the era that had begun with trilobites and nothing on land. For the last 270 million years higher power albeit less energy efficient tachyenergy has reigned supreme on land, starting with protomammalian therapsids near the end of the Paleozoic. When therapsids went belly up early in the Mesozoic (the survivors of the group being the then all small mammals) they were not replaced by lower power dinosaurs for the next 150 million years, but by dinosaurs that quickly took aerobic exercise capacity to even greater levels. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Researcher; Author, The Princeton Field Guide of Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Birds Are The Direct Descendents Of Dinosaurs](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-045 — Our Universe Grew Like A Baby — Max Tegmark > Inflation has given us an embarrassment of riches—and embarrassing it is... Because this infinity of universes has brought about the so-called measure problem, which I view as the greatest crisis facing modern physics. Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this. Our physical world is clearly teeming with patterns and regularities, yet when we try quantifying them to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute; President, Future of Life Institute; Author, Life 3.0 - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Our Universe Grew Like A Baby](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-046 — The Gravitational Harmony of Quantum Fields — Stephon H. Alexander > As I continued to study quantum field theory over the years (and now teach the subject), I am amazed at the concise parallels between the quantum field paradigm of nature, music and improvisation. Connected to this theme is one of the coolest things I've learned; an idea that was pioneered by a true master in quantum field theory, Leonard Parker. The basic idea is that when we combine Einstein's discovery that the gravitational force arises from the curving of spacetime with the field paradigm of matter we get a very neat physical effect—which underlies Stephen Hawking's information loss paradox and the emergence of matter from the early universe that is devoid of stars and galaxies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics at Brown University; Author, The Jazz of Physics - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Gravitational Harmony of Quantum Fields](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-047 — Everything Is The Way It Is Because It Got That Way — P Z Myers > The first thing the book taught me wasn't an explanation, which was something of a relief; my classes were just full of explanations already. Bonner's book is about questions, good questions, some of which had answers and others are just hanging there ripely. For instance, how is biological form defined by genetics? It's the implicit question in the title, but the book just refined the questions that we need to answer in order to explain the problem! Or maybe that is an important explanation at a different level; science isn't the body of facts archived in our books and papers, it's the path we follow to acquire new knowledge. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biologist; Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, Morris - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Everything Is The Way It Is Because It Got That Way](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-048 — The Limits Of Intuition — Brian Eno > a) 'Deterministic' doesn't mean 'predictable', b) we aren't good at intuiting the interaction of simple rules with initial conditions (and the bigger point here is that the human brain may be intrinsically limited in its ability to intuit certain things—like quantum physics and probability, for example), and c) intuition is not a quasi-mystical voice from outside ourselves speaking through us, but a sort of quick-and-dirty processing of our prior experience (which is why dressmakers get it when the rest of us don't). That processing tool sometimes produces incredibly impressive results at astonishing speed, but it's worth reminding ourselves now and again that it can also be totally wrong. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Limits Of Intuition](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-049 — Why The Sun Still Shines — Bart Kosko > One of the deepest explanations has to be why the sun still shines—and thus why the sun has not long since burned out as do the fires of everyday life. That had to worry some of the sun gazers of old as they watched campfires and forest fires burn through their life cycles. It worried the nineteenth-century scientists who knew that gravity alone could not account for the likely long life of the sun. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Information Scientist and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Law, University of Southern California; Author, Noise, Fuzzy Thinking - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Why The Sun Still Shines](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-050 — "Information Is The Resolution Of Uncertainty" — Andrew Lih > One researcher, Claude Shannon, was working on the problem of anti-aircraft targeting and designing fire-control systems to work directly with radar. How could you determine the current, and future position of enemy aircraft's flight path, so you could properly time artillery fire to shoot it down? The radar information about plane position was a breakthrough, but "noisy" in that it provided an approximation of its location, but not precisely enough to be immediately useful. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Journalism, American University; Author, The Wikipedia Revolution - **Extract length:** 74 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** ["Information Is The Resolution Of Uncertainty"](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Information/Information Resolves Uncertainty Across Every Medium by Andrew Lih|Information Resolves Uncertainty Across Every Medium by Andrew Lih]] ### EDGE2012-051 — Fooled By Habits — Giulio Boccaletti > Musicians are not the only ones for whom the idea of retraining one's proprioception is important. For example, our posture and movement communicate plenty of information to those who see us. When wanting to "stand tall", we push our chests out, lift our chin and face. But we fail to notice that this results in a contraction of the neck muscles and therefore a significant shortening of the back, achieving exactly the opposite result. Actors know this well, and have a long tradition of studying the use of the body, recognizing and inhibiting such habits: you cannot control what to communicate through your posture and movement, if you are already busy communicating existing habits. This insight is, alas, true for most of us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Strategy Officer of The Nature Conservancy; Author, Water: A Biography - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Fooled By Habits](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-052 — Falling Into Place: Entropy, Galileo's Frames of Reference, and the Desperate Ingenuity Of Life — John Tooby > The hardest choice I had to make in my early scientific life was whether to give up the beautiful puzzles of quantum mechanics, nonlocality, and cosmology for something equally arresting: To work instead on reverse engineering the code that natural selection had built into the programs that made up our species' circuit architecture. In 1970, the surrounding cultural frenzy and geopolitics made first steps toward a nonideological and computational understanding of our evolved design, "human nature", seem urgent; the recent rise of computer science and cybernetics made it seem possible; the almost complete avoidance of and hostility to evolutionary biology by behavioral and social scientists had nearly neutered those fields, and so made it seem necessary. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Falling Into Place: Entropy, Galileo's Frames of Reference, and the Desperate Ingenuity Of Life](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-053 — Dirt Is Matter Out of Place — Christine Finn > I admire this explanation of cultural relativity, by the anthropologist Mary Douglas, for its clean lines and tidiness. I like its beautiful simplicity, the way it illuminates dark corners of misreading, how it limelights the counter-conventional. Poking about in the dirt is exciting, and irreverent. It is about talking what is out of bounds and making it relevant. Douglas's explanation of 'dirt' makes us question the very boundaries we are pushing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Dirt Is Matter Out of Place](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-054 — Everything Is The Way It Is Because It Got That Way — Paul Bloom > I think it's a perfect motto for my own field of developmental psychology. Every adult mind has two histories. There is evolution. Few would doubt that some of the most elegant and persuasive explanations in psychology appeal to the constructive process of natural selection. And there is development—how our minds unfold over time, the processes of maturation and learning. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Yale University; Author, Against Empathy - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Everything Is The Way It Is Because It Got That Way](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-055 — Demonstration That Cell Types Are Dynamical Attractors — Stuart A. Kauffman > I was entering biology at that time, with a background studying neural circuits and logic. It was clear to most biologists that some huge genetic network among the then thought 100,000 human genes somehow controlled cell differentiation in ontogeny. My question was an odd one: Did evolution have to struggle hard to evolve very specific genetic networks to support ontogeny, or, I hoped, were there huge classes, or "ensembles" of networks that as a total class, behaved with sufficient self-organized order to account for major features of ontogeny? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Demonstration That Cell Types Are Dynamical Attractors](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-056 — Germs Cause Disease — Gregory Cochran > In fact, germ theory has been so successful that it almost seems uninteresting. Once we understood the causes of cholera and pneumonia and syphilis, we got rid of them, at least in the wealthier countries. Now we're at the point where people resist the means of victory—vaccination for example—because they no longer remember the threat. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Consultant; Adaptive Optics and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah; Coauthor (with Henry Harpending), The 10,000 Year Explosion - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Germs Cause Disease](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-057 — The — Evgeny Morozov > Collingridge's basic insight was that we can successfully regulate a given technology when it's still young and unpopular and thus probably still hiding its unanticipated and undesireable consequences—or we can wait and see what those consequences are but then risk losing control over its regulation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor, Foreign Policy; Syndicated Columnist; Author, The Net Delusion - **Extract length:** 45 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-058 — Why Programs Have Bugs — Marti Hearst > Why can't we tame the writing of computer programs to emulate the successes of other areas of engineering? Perhaps the most lyrical thinker to address this question is Fred Brooks, author most famously of the "The Mythical Man-Month."(If one bears in mind that this unfortunately titled book was first published in 1975, it is a bit easier to ignore the sexist language that litters this otherwise fine work; the points Brooks made more than 35 years ago are almost all accurate today except the assumption that all programmers are "he".) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 90 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Why Programs Have Bugs](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-059 — Subverting Biology — Patrick Bateson* > Two years ago I reviewed the evidence on inbreeding in pedigree dogs. Inbreeding can result in reduced fertility both in litter size and sperm viability, devel­opmental disruption, lower birth rate, higher infant mortality, shorter life span, increased expression of inherited disorders and reduction of immune sys­tem function. The immune system is closely linked to the removal of cancer cells from a healthy body and, indeed, reduction of immune system function increased the risk of full-blown tumours. These well-documented cases in domestic dogs confirm what is known from many wild populations of other species. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that a variety of mechanisms render inbreeding less likely in the natural world. One such is the choice of unfamiliar individuals as sexual partners. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Ethology, Cambridge University; Co-author, Design for a Life (*Deceased) - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Subverting Biology](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-060 — Beautiful, Unreasonable Mathematics — Gregory Benford > Imagine a primate ancestor who saw the flight of a stone, thrown after fleeing prey, as a complicated matter, hard to predict. It could try a hunting strategy using stones or even spears, but with limited success, because complicated curves are hard to understand. A cousin who saw in the stone's flight a simple and graceful parabola would have a better chance of predicting where it would fall. The cousin would eat more often and presumably reproduce more as well. Neural wiring could reinforce this behavior by instilling a sense of genuine pleasure at the sight of an artful parabola. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Beautiful, Unreasonable Mathematics](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-061 — The Pigeonhole Principle — Jon Kleinberg > Now back to you and your ancestors. Let's start by building your family tree going back 40 generations: you, your parents, their parents, and so on, 40 steps back. Since each generation lasts at most 100 years, the last 40 generations of your family tree all take place within the past 4000 years. (In fact, they almost surely take place within just the past 1000 or 1200 years, but remember that we're trying to be uncontroversial.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Tisch University Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Pigeonhole Principle](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-062 — How Apparent Finality Can Emerge — Carlo Rovelli > To be sure, the idea has appeared before. Empedocles discusses the idea that the apparent finality in the living kingdom could be the result of selected randomness, and Aristotle himself in his "Physics" mentions a version of this idea for species ("seeds"). But the times where not yet ripe, and the suggestion was lost in the following religious ages. I think that the resistance against Darwin is not just the difficulty of seeing the power of a spectacularly beautiful explanation: it is the fear of realizing the extraordinary power that such an explanation has in shattering rests of old world views. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [How Apparent Finality Can Emerge](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-063 — Evolutionary Stable Strategies — S. Abbas Raza > My example of a deep, elegant, beautiful explanation in science is John Maynard Smith's concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS). Not only does this wonderfully straightforward idea explain a whole host of biological phenomena, but it also provides a useful heuristic tool to test the plausibility of various types of claims in evolutionary biology—allowing us, for example, to quickly dismiss group-selectionist misconceptions, such as the idea that altruistic acts by individuals can be explained by the benefits that accrue to the species as a whole. Indeed, the idea is so powerful that it explains things I didn't even realize needed explaining until I was given the explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Editor, 3QuarksDaily.com - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Evolutionary Stable Strategies](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10926) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-064 — "So Much From So Little? Now That Explains A Lot!" — Kai Krause > The earliest computing, in the first computer store in the world, Dick Heyser in Santa Monica, had me try something that I had read in SciAm by Martin Gardner: Conway's 'Game of Life'. The literal incarnation of the initial premise: Simplicity reduced to that YinYang: a cell is On or Off, black or white. But there is one more thing added here now: iteration. With just four rules each cell is said to live or die and in each cycle the pattern changes, iteratively. From dead dots on paper, and static pixels on phospor, it sprang to—life! Not only patterns, but blinkers, gliders, even glider guns, heck glider gun canons! Indeed, it is now seen as a true Turing-complete machine. Artificial Life. Needless to say: very deep. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** ["So Much From So Little? Now That Explains A Lot!"](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-065 — The Destructive Wrath of the General Purpose Computer — Jordan Pollack > Finally—and those in AI have held this thought for a long time—that which makes us uniquely human is also just computable. While the advent of true AI is still far off, as general purpose computers continue to shrink, and the biological interface is perfected, we will become one with our new god. Choose your new religion wisely—Transhumanist, Singulartarian, or the new file-sharing cult recognized in Sweden, Kopimism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Brandeis University - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Destructive Wrath of the General Purpose Computer](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-066 — An Unresolved (And, Therefore, Unbeautiful) Reaction To The Edge Question — Rebecca Newberger Goldstein > This year's Edge question sits uneasily on a deeper question: Where do we get the idea—a fantastic idea if you stop and think about it—that the beauty of an explanation has anything to do with the likelihood of its being true? What do beauty and truth have to do with each other? Is there any good explanation of why the central notion of aesthetics (fluffy) should be inserted into the central notion of science (rigorous)? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher, Novelist; Recipient, 2014 National Humanities Medal; Author, Plato at the Googleplex; 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [An Unresolved (And, Therefore, Unbeautiful) Reaction To The Edge Question](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-067 — The Dark Matter Of The Mind — Joel Gold > For most of human history we had no way to explain this paradox until Freud's discovery of the unconscious resolved it. Before Freud, we were restricted to our conscious awareness when looking for answers regarding what we knew and felt. All we had to explain incompatible thoughts, feelings and motivations was limited to what we could access in consciousness. We knew what we knew and we felt what we felt. Freud's elegant explanation postulated a conceptual space that is not manifest to us but where irrationality rules. This aspect of the mind is not subject to the constraints of rationality such as logical inference, cause and effect, and linear time. The unconscious explains why presumably rational people live irrational lives. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine; Coauthor (with Ian Gold), Suspicious Minds - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Dark Matter Of The Mind](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/The Unconscious Has the Greatest Psychic Gravity by Joel Gold|The Unconscious Has the Greatest Psychic Gravity by Joel Gold]] ### EDGE2012-068 — The Simpleton Ant and the Intelligent Ants — Robert Sapolsky > Ant colonies excel at generating trails that connect locations in the shortest possible way, accomplished with simple rules about when to lay down a pheromone trail and what to do when encountering someone else's trail—approximations of optimal solutions to the Traveling Salesman problem. This has useful applications. In "ant-based routing," simulations using virtual ants with similar rules can generate optimal ways of connecting the nodes in a network, something of great interest to telecommunications companies. It applies to the developing brain, which must wire up vast numbers of neurons with vaster numbers of connections without constructing millions of miles of connecting axons. And migrating fetal neurons generate an efficient solution with a different version of ant-based routine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Simpleton Ant and the Intelligent Ants](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-069 — Simplicity itself — Thomas Metzinger > Elegance is more than an aesthetic quality, or some ephemeral sort of uplifting feeling we experience in deeper forms of intuitive understanding. Elegance is formal beauty. And formal beauty as a philosophical principle is one of the most dangerous, subversive ideas humanity has discovered: it is the virtue of theoretical simplicity. Its destructive force is greater than Darwin's algorithm or that of any other single scientific explanation, because it shows us what the depth of an explanation is. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Theoretical Philosophy, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz; Adjunct Fellow, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Study; Author, The Ego Tunnel - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Simplicity itself](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-070 — Embodied Metaphors Unify Perception, Cognition and Action — Simone Schnall > British empiricists such as Locke and Berkeley long ago recognized that cognition is inherently perceptual. But following the cognitive revolution in the 1950ies psychology treated the computer as the most appropriate model to study the mind. Now we know that a brain does not work like a computer. Its job is not to store or process information; instead, its job is to drive and control the actions of the brain's large appendage, the body. A new revolution is taking shape, considered by some to bring an end to cognitivism, and giving way to a transformed kind of cognitive science, namely an embodied cognitive science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Cambridge Embodied Cognition and Emotion Laboratory; Reader in Experimental Social Psychology and Fellow of Jesus College, University of Cambridge - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Embodied Metaphors Unify Perception, Cognition and Action](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-071 — Parallel Universes — Frank Tipler > Like the Copernican Revolution, the Everettian Revolution will take decades before it is accepted by all educated people, and it will take even longer for the full implications of the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes to be worked out. The quantum computer, invented by the Everettian physicist David Deutsch, is one of the first results of parallel universe thinking. The idea of the quantum computer is simple: since the analogues of ourselves in the parallel universes are interested in computing the same thing at the same time, why not share the computation between the universes? Let one of us do part of the calculation, another do another part, and so on with the final result being shared between us all. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Parallel Universes](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-072 — The Double Helix — David Haig > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** George Putnam Professor of Biology, Harvard University; Author, From Darwin to Derrida - **Extract length:** 7 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [The Double Helix](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-073 — Plate Tectonics Elegantly Validates Continental Drift — Paul Saffo > Elegant explanations are the Kuhnian solvent that leaches the glue from old paradigms, making space for new theories to take hold. Plate tectonics became established beyond a doubt in the mid-1960s. Contradictions suddenly made sense, and ends so loose no one thought they were remotely connected came together. Continents were seen for the wanderers they were, the Himalaya were recognized as the result of a pushy Indian plate smashing into its Eurasian neighbor, and it became obvious that an ocean was being born in Africa's Great Rift Valley. Mysteries fell like dominoes before the predictive power of a beautiful theory and its elegant explanation. The skeptics were silenced and Wegner was posthumously vindicated. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Technology Forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Plate Tectonics Elegantly Validates Continental Drift](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-074 — "It Just Is?" — Bruce Parker > Perhaps because the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom is now considered transitional to more elaborate models based on quantum mechanics, or perhaps because it evolved over time from the work of many people (and wasn't a single beautiful proposed law), we have forgotten how much about the world can be explained by the concept of protons, neutrons, and electrons—probably more than any other theory ever proposed. With only three basic particles one could explain the properties of 118 atoms/elements and the properties of thousands upon thousands of compounds chemically combined from those elements. A rather amazing feat, and certainly making the Rutherford-Bohr model worthy of being considered a favorite deep, elegant, and beautiful explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Visiting Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology; Author, The Power of the Sea: Tsunamis, Storm Surges, and Our Quest to Predict Disasters - **Extract length:** 114 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** ["It Just Is?"](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-075 — Next Node Foment — Melanie Swan > Next node foment can also be seen in areas of current conflict in scientific theories, where two elegant high-order paradigms with explanative power are themselves in competition, uncomfortable coexistence, or broken symmetry fomenting towards a larger explanatory paradigm. Some examples include a grand unified theory to unify the general theory of relativity with electromagnetism, mathematical theories that include both power laws and randomness, and a behavioral theory of beyond-human level intelligence that includes both computronium and aesthetics (e.g.; does AI do art, solely compute, or is there no distinction at that level of cosmic navel-gazing?). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosophy and Economic Theory, the New School for Social Research - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Next Node Foment](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-076 — The Higgs Mechanism — Lisa Randall > The beauty of science—in the long run—is its lack of subjectivity. So answering the question "what is your favorite deep, beautiful, or elegant explanation" can be a little disturbing to a scientist, since the only objective words in the question are "what", "is", "or", and (in an ideal scientific world) "explanation." Beauty and elegance do play a part in science but are not the arbiters of truth. But I will admit that simplicity, which is often confused with elegance, can be a useful guide to maximizing explanatory power. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 88 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Higgs Mechanism](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-077 — Understanding Is Power — Richard Saul Wurman > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, TED Conference; EG Conference; TEDMED Conferences; Architect, Cartographer; Author, Information Architects - **Extract length:** 9 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Understanding Is Power](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-078 — Continuity — Laurence C. Smith > The cardinal assumption behind these laws and equations is that mass and energy are conserved (constant) within a closed system. In principle, the hybrid electric car only satisfies energy continuity if its consumption is tracked from start (the Sun) to finish (dissipation of heat into the atmosphere). This a bit cumbersome so it is usually treated as an open system. The metals used in the car's manufacture satisfy mass continuity only if tracked from their source (ores) to landfill. This is more feasible, and such "cradle-to-grave" resource accounting—a high priority for many environmentalists—is thus more compatible with natural laws than our current economic model, which tends to externalize (i.e., assume an open system) such resource flows. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Environmental Studies, Brown University; Author, Rivers of Power - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Continuity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-079 — Atomism: Reconciling Change with No-Change — Marcelo Gleiser > Fast forward to the present. Atoms are now very different entities: not indivisible, but made of yet smaller bits. Not uncountable, but with a total number of 94 naturally-occurring and a few others made artificially in labs. Notwithstanding the differences between ancient and modern atoms, the core notions that all objects are made of smaller bits and that the properties of composite objects can be understood studying the properties of these bits—the essence of reductionism— has served science extremely well. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy, Dartmouth College; Author, The Island of Knowledge - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Atomism: Reconciling Change with No-Change](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-080 — Cosmic Complexity — John C. Mather > One of the instabilities is that humans demand new weapons and new products of all sort, leading to serious investments in science and technology. So the natural/human world of competition and combat is structured to lead to advanced weaponry and cell phones. So here we are in 2012, with people writing essays and wondering whether their descendents will be artificial life forms travelling back into space. And, pondering what are the origins of those forces of nature that give rise to everything. Verlinde has argued that gravitation, the one force that has so far resisted our efforts at a quantum description, is not even a fundamental force, but is itself a statistical force, like osmosis. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Prize in Physics; Senior Astrophysicist, Observational Cosmology Laboratory, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center; Coauthor (with John Boslough), The Very First Light - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Cosmic Complexity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-081 — Watson and Crick Explain How DNA Carries Genetic Information — Gary Klein > In 1953, when James Watson pushed around some two-dimensional cut-outs and was startled to find that an adenine-thymine pair had an isomorphic shape to the guanine-cytosine pair, he solved eight mysteries simultaneously. In that instant he knew the structure of DNA: a helix. He knew how many strands: two. It was a double helix. He knew what carried the information: the nucleic acids in the gene, not the protein. He knew what maintained the attraction: hydrogen bonds. He knew the arrangement: The sugar-phosphate backbone was on the outside and the nucleic acids were in the inside. He knew how the strands match: through the base pairs. He knew the arrangement: the two identical chains ran in opposite directions. And he knew how genes replicated: through a zipper-like process. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC; Author, Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Watson and Crick Explain How DNA Carries Genetic Information](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-082 — The True Rotational Symmetry of Space — Seth Lloyd > The following deep, elegant, and beautiful explanation of the true rotational symmetry of space comes from the late Sidney Coleman, as presented to his graduate physics class at Harvard. This explanation takes the form of a physical act that you will perform yourself. Although elegant, this explanation is verbally awkward to explain, and physically awkward to perform. It may need to be practised a few times. So limber up and get ready: you are about to experience in a deep and personal way the true rotational symmetry of space! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 89 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The True Rotational Symmetry of Space](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-083 — Trusting Trust — Ernst Pöppel > I don't understand Why I can trust my body In day and in night. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Research Group Systems, Neuroscience and Cognitive Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany; Guest Professor, Peking University, China - **Extract length:** 14 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Trusting Trust](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-084 — My Favorite Explanation: Why Curry, Wine And Coffee Cure Most Ails — P. Murali Doraiswamy > I would like to suggest two conditions that might render an explanation unusually beautiful: 1) a ring of truth, 2) confirmation biases. We all favor explanations and test them in a manner that confirms our own beliefs (confirmation bias). A small amount of factual data can be magnified into a beautiful fully proven explanation in one's mind if the right circumstance exist—thus, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This may occur less often in one's own specialized fields, but we are all vulnerable in fields in which we are less expert in. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychiatry, Translational Neuroscience Division, Duke University Health System - **Extract length:** 94 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [My Favorite Explanation: Why Curry, Wine And Coffee Cure Most Ails](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-085 — The Power Of One, Two, Three — Charles Seife > One day, back in the late 1990s, when I was a correspondent for New Scientist magazine, I got an e-mail from a flack waxing rhapsodic about an extraordinary piece of software. It was a revolutionary data-compression program so efficient that it would squash every digital file by 95% or more without losing a single bit of data. Wouldn't my magazine jump at the chance to tell the world about the computer program that will make their hard drives hold 20 times more information than every before. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Power Of One, Two, Three](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-086 — Furry Rubber Bands — Neil Gershenfeld > I understood Berry's phase for spinors by trying to rotate my hand while holding up a glass; I mastered NMR spin echoes by swinging my arms while I revolved; the alignment of semiconductor Fermi levels at a junction made sense when explained as filling buckets with water. Like furry rubber bands and electric fields, these relationships represent analogies between governing equations. Unlike words, they can be exact, providing explanations that connect unfamiliar formalism with familiar experience. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 76 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Furry Rubber Bands](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-087 — How Psychotherapy Can Be Placed On A Scientific Basis: 5 Easy Lessons — Eric R. Kandel > In the course of his work on depression Beck focused on suicide and provided for the first time a rational basis for the classification and assessment of suicidal behaviors that made it possible to identify high-risk individuals. His prospective study of 9,000 patients led to the formulation of an algorithm for predicting future suicide that has proven to have high predictive power. Of particular importance was his identification of clinical and psychological variables such as hopelessness and helplessness to predict future suicides. These proved to be better predictors of suicide than clinical depression per se. Beck's work on suicide, and that of others such as John Mann at Columbia, demonstrated that a short-term cognitive intervention can significantly reduce subsequent suicide attempts when compared to a control group. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Recipient, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2002; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University; Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [How Psychotherapy Can Be Placed On A Scientific Basis: 5 Easy Lessons](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-088 — The Beautiful Law of Unintended Consequences — Robert Kurzban > There is something oddly beautiful about the tendrils of causality in complex systems, holding the same appeal that we find in the deliberate inelegance of Rube-Goldberg machines. And none of this is to say that the inevitable possibilities of being surprised by our interventions means that we must give in to pessimism. Rather, it is a reminder to have caution and humility. As we gradually increase our understanding of large, complicated systems, we will develop new ways to glimpse the unintended consequences of our actions. We already have some guiderails—people will substitute for banned or taxed products; removing one species in an ecology typically penalizes populations that prey on them and aids species that compete with them, and so on—so while there will probably be always unintended consequences, these consequences won’t always be completely unanticipated. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UPenn; Director, Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology (PLEEP); Author, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Beautiful Law of Unintended Consequences](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-089 — The Wizard of I — Gerald Smallberg > Neurophysiologists are finding, as they pull ever so slightly at the veil, which shrouds the "Wizard of I," that this indispensable attentive and observant self monitor called consciousness, is dependent upon a trick in overseeing our perceptions. Our subjective sense of time does not correspond to reality. Cortical evoked potentials, electrical recordings, of the normal brain during routine activity have been shown to precede by almost a third of a second the awareness of an actual willed movement or a response to sensory stimulation. The cortical evoked potentials indicate that the brain is initiating or reacting to what is happening far sooner than the instantaneous perception we experience. On a physiological scale, this represents a huge discrepancy that our mind corrects by falsifying the actual time an action or event occurs, thus enabling our conscious experience to conform to what we perceive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Practicing Neurologist, New York City; Playwright, Off-Off Broadway Productions, Charter Members; The Gold Ring - **Extract length:** 142 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Wizard of I](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-090 — Developmental Timing Explains The Woes Of Adolescence — Alison Gopnik > The second system is a control system that can channel and harness all that seething energy. The prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide and control other parts of the brain. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making. This control system depends much more on learning than the motivational system. You get to make better decisions by making not so good decisions and then correcting them. You get to be a good planner by making plans, implementing them and seeing the results again and again. Expertise comes with experience. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Developmental Timing Explains The Woes Of Adolescence](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-091 — Kepler's Use Of The Platonic Solids To Explain The Relative Distance Of Planets From The Sun — Gino Segre > I have been thinking about this because, together with many of my fellow theoretical physicists, I have spent a good part of my career searching for an explanation of the masses of the so-called elementary particles. But perhaps the reason it has eluded us is a proposal that is increasingly gaining credence, namely that our own visible Universe is only a random example of an essentially infinite number of Universes, all of which contain quarks and leptons with masses taking different values. It just happens that in at least one of those Universes, the values allow for there being at least one star and one planet where creatures that worry about such problems have come to life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Kepler's Use Of The Platonic Solids To Explain The Relative Distance Of Planets From The Sun](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-092 — The Elementary Particles of Memory — Todd C. Sacktor > Underlying this complexity, however, is a simple and deep organization to the changes in synaptic strength that keep these populations of neurons together to sustain long-term memories— a handful of physiological processes maintained by a few essential molecules. The first of these physiological processes, called long-term potentiation (LTP), was discovered in 1966 by Terje Lømo, who worked with Tim Bliss to produce the first systematic study of LTP in 1973. LTP is a persistent strengthening of synaptic connections triggered by a brief episode of high-frequency activity of those connections. The second physiological mechanism to store long-term information was discovered by Gary Lynch and Tom Dunwiddie in 1978, and is the inverse of LTP, long-term depression (LTD), a persistent weakening of synapses that is triggered by a different pattern of activity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Physiology, Pharmacology, and Neurology, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Elementary Particles of Memory](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-093 — Quasi-elegance — Paul J. Steinhardt > My first exposure to true elegance in science was through a short semi-popular book entitled SYMMETRY written by the renowned mathematician Hermann Weyl. I discovered the book in the fourth grade and have returned to reread passages every few years. The book begins with the intuitive aesthetic notion of symmetry for the general reader, drawing interesting examples from art, architecture, biological forms, and ornamental design. By the fourth and final chapter, though, Weyl turns from vagary to precise science as he introduces elements of group theory, the mathematics that transforms symmetry into a powerful tool. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 95 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Quasi-elegance](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-094 — Nature is More Clever Than We Are — Terrence J. Sejnowski > TD learning solves the problem of finding the shortest path to a goal. It is an "online" algorithm because it learns by exploring and discovers the value of intermediate decisions in reaching the goal. It does this by creating an internal value function, which can be used to predict the consequences of actions. Dopamine neurons evaluate the current state of the entire cortex and inform the brain about the best course of action from the current state. In many cases the best course of action is a guess, but because guesses can be improved, over time TD learning creates a value function of oracular powers. Dopamine may be the source of the "gut feeling" you sometime experience, the stuff that intuition is made from. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Nature is More Clever Than We Are](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-095 — Metarepresentations Explain Human Uniqueness — Hugo Mercier > Humans alone fluently understand the mental states of others. Humans alone rely on an open-ended system of communication. Humans alone ponder the reasons for their beliefs. For each of these feats, and for others too, humans rely on their most special gift: the ability to represent representations—the ability to form metarepresentations. Hidden behind such mundane thoughts as "Mary believes that Paul believes that it's going to rain" is the explanation of human uniqueness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, French National Center for Scientific Research; Author, Not Born Yesterday - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Metarepresentations Explain Human Uniqueness](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-096 — The Discontinuity of Science and Culture — Gerald Holton > From time to time, large sections of humanity find themselves, at short notice, in a different universe. Science, culture and society have undergone a tectonic shift, for better or worse—the rise of a powerful religious or political leader, the Declaration of Independence, the end of slavery—or, on the other hand, the fall of Rome, the Great Plague, the World Wars. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Author, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Discontinuity of Science and Culture](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-097 — Larger Groups Produce Fewer Responses — Adam Alter > The most elegant explanation in social psychology convinced me to pursue a Ph.D. in the field. Every few years, a prominent tragedy attracts plenty of media attention because no one does anything to help. Just before sunrise on an April morning in 2010, a man lay dying on a sidewalk in Queens. The man, a homeless Guatemalan named Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax, had intervened to help a woman whose male companion began shouting and shaking her violently. When Tale-Yax intervened, the man stabbed him several times in the torso. For ninety minutes, Tale-Yax lay in a growing pool of his own blood as dozens of passers-by ignored him or stared briefly before continuing on their way. By the time firefighters arrived to help, the sun had risen and Tale-Yax had died. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Assistant Professor of Marketing, Stern School of Business, NYU; Author, Irresistible - **Extract length:** 130 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Larger Groups Produce Fewer Responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-098 — Moore's Law — Rodney A. Brooks > Moore's Law originated in a four page 1965 magazine article written by Gordon Moore, then at Fairchild Semiconductor and later one of the founders of Intel. In it he predicted that the number of components on a single integrated circuit would rise from the then current number of roughly two to the sixth power, to roughly two to the sixteenth power in the following ten years, i.e., the number of components would double every year. He based this on four empirical data points and one null data point, fitting a straight line on a graph plotting the log of the number of components on a single chip against a linear scale of calendar years. Intel later amended Moore's Law to say that the "number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 134 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Moore's Law](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-099 — The Epidemic of Obesity, Diabetes and "Metabolic Syndrome:" Cell Energy Adaptations in a Toxic World? — Beatrice Golomb > Suppose the correct explanation were the complete opposite to the accepted one? Could the features of MetSyn be the adaptive response to inadequate energy? After all, fat depots, glucose, and triglycerides are each accessory energy sources (oxygen is primary), blood pressure is needed to deliver these to tissues, especially when underperfused. Cell energy, central to cell and organism survival, is needed—continuously (we live only minutes without oxygen). The stretch is not so great: populations in which prior generations were energy starved have increased obesity/MetSyn now ("thrifty gene" thesis); and low energy supplyin utero is understood to foster MetSyn in adulthood. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Medicine at UCSD - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Epidemic of Obesity, Diabetes and "Metabolic Syndrome:" Cell Energy Adaptations in a Toxic World?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-100 — Simplicity — Frank Wilczek > Description length is actually a measure of complexity, but for our purposes that's just as good, since we can define simplicity as the opposite—or, numerically, the negative—of complexity. To ask a computer how complex something is, we have to present that "something" in a form the computer can deal with, that is as a data file, i.e. a string of 0s and 1s. That's hardly a crippling constraint: We know that data files can represent movies, for example, so we can ask how about the simplicity of anything we can present in a movie; since our movie might be a movie recording scientific observations or experiments, we can ask about the simplicity of a scientific explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, MIT; Recipient, 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics; Author, Fundamentals - **Extract length:** 116 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Simplicity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-101 — The Oklo Pyramid — Karl Sabbagh > New explanations in science are needed when an observation isn't explicable by current theory. The power of the scientific method lies in the extraordinary richness of understanding that can emerge from an attempt to devise a new explanation. It is like an inverted pyramid, with the first observation—often just a slight departure from the norm—as the point and then ever widening layers of inference, each dependent on a lower layer, until the whole pyramid supplies a satisfying and conclusive explanatory whole. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Oklo Pyramid](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-102 — Time Perspective Theory — Philip Zimbardo > To complicate matters, there are sub domains of each of these primary time zones. Some past-oriented people tend to focus on negatives in their earlier experiences, regret, failure, abuse, trauma, while others are primarily past positive, focusing instead on the good old days, nostalgia, gratitude, and successes. There are two ways to be present-oriented, to live in present- hedonistic domain of seeking pleasure and novelty, and sensation seeking versus being present- fatalistic, living in a default present by believing nothing one does can make any changes in one’s future life. Future-oriented people are goal setters, plan strategies, tend to be successful, but another future focus is on the transcendental future—life begins after the death of the mortal body. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University; Author, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Time Perspective Theory](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-103 — The Universal Algorithm For Human Decisions — Stanislas Dehaene > As with any elegant scientific law, many complexities are waiting to be discovered. There is probably not just one accumulator, but many, as the brain accumulates evidence at each of several successive levels of processing. Indeed, the human brain increasingly fits the bill for a superb Bayesian machine that makes massively parallel inferences and micro-decisions at every stage. Many of us think that our sense of confidence, stability and even conscious awareness may result from such higher-order cerebral "decisions" and will ultimately fall prey to the same mathematical model. Valuation is also a key ingredient that I skipped, although it demonstrably plays a crucial role in weighing our decisions. Finally, the system is ripe with a prioris, biases and time pressures and other top evaluations that draw it away from strict mathematical optimality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Universal Algorithm For Human Decisions](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-104 — Metaphors are in the mind — Benjamin K. Bergen > To me, the most exciting explanations start by being elegant—they reduce something complex to something simple. But they don't stop there. They're also powerful, in that they extend to phenomena other than the ones that they were originally proposed to account for. And they'reuseful—they inspirenew research to flesh out their fundamental principles and test their predictions. And my latent anti-authoritarian streak leads me to also prefer explanations that question received wisdom. To find all four of these features together is the vanishingly rare scientific equivalent of a ninth inning, two-out, two-strike grand slam that wins the World Series. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor, Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego; Author, What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Metaphors are in the mind](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-105 — Why We Feel Pressed for Time — Elizabeth Dunn > I thought I knew the answer. The pace of life is increasing; people are working more and relaxing less than they did 50 years ago. At least that’s the impression I got from the popular media. But as a social psychologist, I wanted to see the data. As it turns out, there is very little evidence that people are now working more and relaxing less than they did in earlier decades. In fact, some of the best studies suggest just the opposite. So, why do people report feeling so pressed for time? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social Psychologist, University of British Columbia; Co-author, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Why We Feel Pressed for Time](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-106 — Group Polarization — David G. Myers > Fast forward to today. Self-segregation with kindred spirits is now rife. With increased mobility, conservative communities attract conservatives and progressive communities attract progressives. As Bill Bishop has documented, the percentage of landslide counties—those voting 60 percent or more for one presidential candidate—nearly doubled between 1976 and 2008. And when neighborhoods become political echo chambers, the consequence is increased polarization, as David Schkade and colleagues demonstrated by assembling small groups of Coloradoans in liberal Boulder and conservative Colorado Springs. The community discussions of climate change, affirmative action, and same-sex unions further diverged Boulder folks leftward and Colorado Springs folks rightward. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Group Polarization](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-107 — Darwin's Explanation of the Origin of Coral Reefs — Christopher Sykes > By the 1830's, the geologist Charles Lyell had decided that atolls must be coral reefs growing on the crater rims of sunken extinct volcanoes. Darwin didn't agree, and it's wonderful to know that Lyell was thrilled when Darwin came back from the Beagle voyage and told him the real answer: the coral organisms thrive in shallow water but the ocean floor is slowly sinking; the polyps die but new ones are growing on top of them, and over an immense amount of time countless billions of tiny calcareous skeletons accumulate to make up a vast structure reaching from the darkness of the ocean bed to the sunlit surface so far above. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** TV documentary producer - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Darwin's Explanation of the Origin of Coral Reefs](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-108 — How the Leopard Got His Spots — Samuel Arbesman > Mathematical biologists have been exploring the properties of reaction-diffusion equations ever since Turing's paper. They've found that varying the parameters can generate the animal patterns we see. Some mathematicians have even examined the ways in which the size and shape of the surface can dictate the patterns that we see. As the size parameter is modified, we can easily go from such patterns as giraffe-like to those seen on Holstein cows. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Complexity Scientist; Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital; Author, Overcomplicated - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [How the Leopard Got His Spots](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-109 — Deep Time — Alun Anderson > His thinking about time created fertile ground for other grand theories. With huge spans of time available, then imperceptibly slow processes could shape the natural world. After Hutton came modern geology, then the theory of evolution to explain how new species slowly arose, and eventually a theory of the gradual movement of the continents themselves. All are grounded in deep time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Deep Time](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-110 — Seeing Is Believing: From Placebos To Movies In Our Brain — Eric Topol > The decoding of the placebo effect seems to be just a nascent step along the way to the more ambitious quest of mind reading. This past summer a group at UC Berkeley was able to show, via reconstructing brain imaging activation maps, a reasonable facsimile of short YouTube movies that were shown to individuals. In fact, it is pretty awe-inspiring and downright scary to see the resemblance of the frame-by-frame comparison of the movie shown and what was reconstructed from the brain imaging. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Translational Science Institute; Author, The Patient Will See You Now - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Seeing Is Believing: From Placebos To Movies In Our Brain](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-111 — The Importance Of Context — Luca De Biase > In entertainment, in a novel or in a movie, the context is the world of meanings that is created by storytellers. Questions appear as surprising twists in the context description. And, mastering the whole thing, the storyteller lets the reader enjoy an entertaining experience by explaining everything at the end. In science, in the news, in a company, the context is in a world of meanings that is already present to the mind of the reader, the storyteller doesn't master the whole thing, everybody feels to be part of the story, and the correct approach is to explain everything as soon as possible, and then to share all the specific findings to help everybody evaluate the quality of the explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Editor, Nova 24, of Il Sole 24 Ore - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Importance Of Context](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-112 — Out of the Mouths of Babes, or, Why is the Sky Blue? — Nicholas A. Christakis > The explanation for why the sky is blue involves so much of the natural sciences: the colors within the visual spectrum, the wave nature of light, the angle at which sunlight hits the atmosphere, the mathematics of scattering, the size of nitrogen and oxygen molecules, and even the way human eyes perceive color. It's most of science in a question that a young child can ask. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, Yale University; Co-author, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Out of the Mouths of Babes, or, Why is the Sky Blue?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-113 — Denumerable Infinities Are The Same Size; No Mind Emerges Through Sorting — David Gelernter > Sorting is the sort of thing digital computers do. Now imagine sorting a bigger & bigger & bigger deck; can you see consciousness emerging at some point, when you sort a large enough batch? Nope. (And the inevitable answer to the inevitable first objection: but neurons only do simple signal transmission; can you imagine consciousness emerging out of that? An irrelevant question. The fact that lots of neurons make a mind has no bearing on the question of whether lots of anything else make a mind. I can't imagine being a neuron, but I can imagine executing machine instructions. No mind emerges no matter how many of those instructions I carry out.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled our Culture (and ushered in the Obamacrats) - **Extract length:** 112 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Denumerable Infinities Are The Same Size; No Mind Emerges Through Sorting](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Consciousness/Software Alone Cannot Make a Mind by David Gelernter|Software Alone Cannot Make a Mind by David Gelernter]] ### EDGE2012-114 — Why Do Movies Move? — Alvy Ray Smith > Hoary old "persistence of vision" can't be the explanation. It's real, but it only explains why you don't see the emptiness between the frames. If an actor or an animated character moves between frames then—by persistence of vision—you should see him in both positions: two Humphrey Bogarts, two Buzz Lightyears. In fact, your retinas do see both, one fading out as the other comes in—each frame is projected long enough to ensure this. It's what your brain does with the retinas' information that determines whether you perceive two Bogarts in two different positions or one Bogart moving. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-founder, Pixar; Digital Imagery Pioneer & Visionary - **Extract length:** 97 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why Do Movies Move?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-115 — The Principle of Inertia — Lee Smolin > My favorite explanation in science is the principle of inertia. It explains why the earth moves in spite of the fact that we don't feel any motion, which was perhaps the most counterintuitive revolutionary step taken in all of science. It was first proposed by Galileo and Descartes and has been the core of all the successful explanations in physics in the centuries since. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Principle of Inertia](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-116 — Mother Nature's Laws — Stuart Pimm > What inspired Darwin and Wallace were encounters with places rich in birds and mammals found nowhere else—the Galapagos and the islands in southeast Asia. There are no such places in Europe. Darwin spent most of HMS Beagle's voyage too far south in South America, while Wallace's first trip was to the Amazon. The Amazon is very rich in species, but it is a striking example of the law that such places rarely have many species with small ranges. (I suspect this cost Wallace dearly because his sponsors wanted novelty. He found that on his next trip, to the East.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology, Duke University; Author, The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Mother Nature's Laws](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-117 — How To Have a Good Idea — Marcel Kinsbourne > Having a good idea is far from rare in the evolution of non-human species. Indeed, many if not most species need to have an idea or trick that works well enough for them to continue to exist. Admittedly, they may not be able to extrapolate its principle from the context in which it emerged, and generalize it as (some) people can, courtesy of their prefrontal cortex. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist, The New School; Co-author, Children's Learning and Attention Problems - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [How To Have a Good Idea](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-118 — We Are What We Do — Timothy D. Wilson > Self-perception theory is an elegant in its simplicity. But it is also quite deep, with important implications for the nature of the human mind. Two other powerful ideas follow from it. The first is that we are strangers to ourselves. After all, if we knew our own minds, why would we need to guess what our preferences are from our behavior? If our minds were an open book, we would know exactly how honest we are and how much we like lattes. Instead, we often need to look to our behavior to figure out who we are. Self-perception theory thus anticipated the revolution in psychology in the study of human consciousness, a revolution that revealed the limits of introspection. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia; Co-author, Social Psychology; Author, Strangers to Ourselves; Redirect - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [We Are What We Do](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-119 — Occam's Razor — Katinka Matson > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist, Literary Agent; Co-Founder, Edge.org; President, Brockman, Inc.; Author: Short Lives - **Extract length:** 2 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Occam's Razor](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-120 — Ptolemy's Universe — James J. O'Donnell > We should admire Ptolemy for many reasons, but chief among them is this: he did his job seriously and responsibly with the tools he had. Given what he knew, his system was brilliantly conceived, mathematically sound, and a huge advance over what had gone before. His observations were patient and careful and as complete as could be, his mathematical calculations correct. More, his mathematical system was a complicated as it needed to be and at the same time as simple as it could be, given what he had to work with. He was, in short, a real scientist. He set the standard. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Ptolemy's Universe](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-121 — General Relativity — Roger Highfield > One ugly fact remains, however: subjectivity. Why is it that mathematics provides the most beautiful depictions of nature that we have? We all assume this is true but we don't know for sure. It seems that the greatest engine of cultural change—the scientific world-view—rests on a foundation that, in some respects, is ultimately religious. Today it has become a cliché to say that, as Dirac put it in a Scientific American article in 1963: "God is a mathematician of a very high order." God's alleged aestheticism is an illusion, however. I put my faith in mathematical physicists. They are on the right path to a profound and objective truth, the beautiful details of which have yet to be revealed in full. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group; Co-author (with Martin Nowak), SuperCooperators - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [General Relativity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-122 — We — Thomas A. Bass > Orwell and Huxley recognized the same historical amnesia, illiteracy, and debasement of language. They identified similar hierarchies of social control and propaganda regimes, enforced by surveillance. But one world was ruled by fear, the other by love—or at least the simulated desire that today passes for love. As we delight in our screens and the happy images that bathe us in their networked glow, our pleasures present one of today's greatest perils. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of English and Journalism, State University of New York, Albany; Author of The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved US - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [We](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-123 — True or False: Beauty Is Truth — Judith Rich Harris > Some years ago, the psychologist B. F. Skinner proposed an elegant explanation of "the behavior of organisms," based on the idea that rewarding a response—he called it reinforcement—increases the probability that the same response will occur again in the future. The theory failed, not because it was false (reinforcement generally does increase the probability of a response) but because it was too simple. It ignored innate components of behavior. It couldn't even handle all learned behavior. Much behavior is acquired or shaped through experience, but not necessarily by means of reinforcement. Organisms learn different things in different ways. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [True or False: Beauty Is Truth](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-124 — Gravity Is Curvature Of Spacetime … Or Is It? — Steve Giddings > We do not yet know the full shape of the quantum theory providing a complete accounting for gravity. We do have many clues, from studying the early quantum phase of cosmology, and ultrahigh energy collisions that produce black holes and their subsequent disintegrations into more elementary particles. We have hints that the theory draws on powerful principles of quantum information theory. And, we expect that in the end it has a simple beauty, mirroring the explanation of gravity-as-curvature, from an even more profound depth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Gravity Is Curvature Of Spacetime … Or Is It?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-125 — My Most Flavorful Explanation. Would You Like Blue Cheese With It? — Albert-lászló Barabási > As we search for evidence to support (or refute) any 'laws' that may govern our culinary experiences, we must bear in mind that food sensation is affected by many factors, from color to texture, from temperature to even sound. Yet palatability is largely determined by flavor, representing a group of sensations including odors, tastes, freshness and pungency. This is mainly chemistry, however. Odors are molecules that bind olfactory receptors, tastes are chemicals that stimulate taste buds, freshness or pungency are driven by chemical irritants in our mouth and throat. Therefore, if we want to understand why we prize some ingredient combinations and loathe others, we have to look at the chemical profile of our recipes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Complex Network Scientist; Distinguished Professor and Director of Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research; Author, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do - **Extract length:** 115 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [My Most Flavorful Explanation. Would You Like Blue Cheese With It?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-126 — Imposing Randomness — Michael I. Norton > Take a question that appears anew in the media each year: Is red wine good or bad for us? We learn a great deal about how red wine "works" by asking people about their consumption and health and looking for correlations between the two. To estimate the specific impact of red wine on health, though, we need to ask people a lot of questions—about everything they consume (food, prescription medication, more unsavory forms of medication), their habits (exercise, sleep, sexual activity), their past (their health history, their parents' and grandparents' health histories), and on and on – and then try to control for these factors to isolate the impact of wine on health. Think of the length of the survey… - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration, Director of Research, Harvard Business School; Co-author (with Elizabeth Dunn), Happy Money - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Imposing Randomness](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-127 — Natural Selection Is Simple, But The Systems It Shapes Are Unimaginably Complex — Randolph Nesse > Natural selection shapes systems whose complexity is indescribable in terms satisfying to human minds. Some may feel this is nihilistic. It does discourage hopes for finding simple specific descriptions for all biological systems. However, recognizing a quest as hopeless is often the key to progress. As Haldane put it, "We are thus brought face-to-face with the conclusion which to the biologist is just as significant and fundamental, just as true to the facts observed, as the conclusion of mass persists is to the physicists… the structure of a living organism has no real resemblance in its behavior to that of a machine… In the living organisms…the "structure" is only the appearance given by what seems at first to be a constant flow of specific material, beginning and ending in the environment." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings - **Extract length:** 131 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Natural Selection Is Simple, But The Systems It Shapes Are Unimaginably Complex](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-128 — Personality Differences: The Importance of Chance — Samuel Barondes > In the golden age of Greek philosophy Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor, posed a question for which he is still remembered: "Why has it come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime, and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character [personality]?" The question is especially noteworthy because it bears on our sense of who each of us is, and we now know enough to offer an answer: each personality reflects the activities of brain circuits that gradually develop under the combined direction of the person's unique set of genes and experiences. What makes the implications of this answer so profound is that they lead to the inescapable conclusion that personality differences are greatly influenced by chance events. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF; Author, Making Sense of People - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Personality Differences: The Importance of Chance](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-129 — Cagepatterns — Hans Ulrich Obrist > Richter‘s concise title "Cage" can be unfolded into an extensive interpretation of these abstract paintings (and of other works)—but, one can say, the short form already contains everything. The title, like an explanation of a phenomenon, unlocks the works, describing their relation to one of the most important cultural figures of the twentieth century, John Cage, who shares with Richter the great themes of chance and uncertainty. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, Serpentine Gallery, London; Editor: A Brief History of Curating; Formulas for Now; Co-author (with Rem Koolhas), Project Japan: Metabolism Talks - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Cagepatterns](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-130 — Sex At Your Fingertips — Simon Baron-Cohen > My favourite is foetal testosterone, since a few more drops of this special molecule seems to have 'masculinizing' effects on the development of the brain and the mind. The credit for this simple idea must go to Charles Phoenix and colleagues in 1959 (University of Kansas), an idea picked up again by Norman Geschwind in 1985 (Harvard). This is not the only masculinizing mechanism (another is the X chromosome) but it is one that has been elegantly dissected. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge; Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge; Author, The Pattern Seekers - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Sex At Your Fingertips](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-131 — Redundancy Reduction and Pattern Recognition — Richard Dawkins > What sensory adaptation achieves in the temporal domain, the well-established phenomenon of lateral inhibition does in the spatial domain. If a scene in the world falls on a pixellated screen, such as the back of a digital camera or the retina of an eye, most pixels see the same as their immediate neighbours. The exceptions are those pixels which lie on edges, boundaries. If every retinal cell faithfully reported its light value to the brain, the brain would be bombarded with a massively redundant message. Huge economies can be achieved if most of the impulses reaching the brain come from pixel cells lying along edges in the scene. The brain then assumes uniformity in the spaces between edges. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Redundancy Reduction and Pattern Recognition](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-132 — Transitional Objects — Sherry Turkle > When in the late 1970s, I began to study the computer's special evocative power, my time with George Goethals and the small circle of Harvard graduate students immersed in Winnicott came back to me. Computers served as transitional objects. They bring us back to the feelings of being "at one" with the world. Musicians often hear the music in their minds before they play it, experiencing the music from within and without. The computer similarly can be experienced as an object on the border between self and not-self. Just as musical instruments can be extensions of the mind's construction of sound, computers can be extensions of the mind's construction of thought. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Transitional Objects](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-133 — Why Things Happen — Peter Atkins > Is it then too fanciful to imagine intellectual creativity, or just plain inconsequential reverie, as being driven likewise? At some kind of notional rest, the brain is a hive of electric and synaptic activity. The metabolic processes driven by the digestion of food can result in the ordering, not now of brick into cathedral, not now of amino acid into protein, but now current into concept, work of artistic expression, foolhardy decision, and scientific understanding. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, University of Oxford; Author, What is Chemistry? - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Why Things Happen](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-134 — Unconscious Inferences — Gerd Gigerenzer > This childhood experience taught Helmholtz that information available from the retina and other sensory organs is not sufficient to reconstruct the world. Size, distance, and other properties need to be inferred from uncertain cues, which in turn have to be learned by experience. Based on this experience, the brain draws unconscious inferences about what a sensation means. In other words, perception is a kind of bet about what's really out there. But how exactly does this inference work? Helmholtz drew an analogy with probabilistic syllogisms. The major premise is a collection of experiences that are long out of consciousness; the minor premise is the present sensory impression. Consider the "dots illusion" based on V. S.Ramachandran and colleagues. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Author, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World - **Extract length:** 117 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Unconscious Inferences](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-135 — Elegant = Complex — George Church > The question is not "What is our favorite elegant explanation?", but "What should it be?" We are capable of changing not only our mind, but changing the whole fabric of human nature. As we engineer, we recurse—successively approximating ourselves as an increasingly survivable force of nature. If so, what will we ultimately admire? Our evolutionary baggage served our ancestors well, but could kill our descendants. Faced with modern foods, our frugal metabolisms feed a diabetes epidemic. Our love of "greedy algorithms" leads to exhausted resources. Our too easy switching from rationality to blind-faith or fear-based decision making can be manipulated politically to drive conspicuous consumption. (Think Easter Island 163 km2 of devastation scaled to Earth Island at 510 million km2). "Humans" someday may be born with bug-fixes for dozens of current cognitive biases as well as intuitive understanding and motivation to manipulate quantum weirdnesses, dimensions beyond three, super rare events, global economics, etc. Agricultural and cultural monocultures are evolutionarily bankrupt. Evolution was only briefly focused on surviving in a sterile world of harsh physics, but ever since has focused on life competing with itself. Elegant explanations are those that predict the future farther and better. Our explanations will help us dodge asteroids, solar red giant flares, and even close-encounters with the Andromeda galaxy. But most of all, we will diversify to deal with our own ever-increasing complexity. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Harvard University; Director, Personal Genome Project; Co-author (with Ed Regis), Regenesis - **Extract length:** 227 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Elegant = Complex](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-136 — The Iterated Learning Explanation of Structured Language (Language As An Adaptive System: Humans As Hosts) — Andy Clark > The core idea is that language is itself a kind of adaptive system that alters its forms and structures so as to become increasingly easily learnable by the host agents (us). This general idea first appears (as far as I am aware) in Terry Deacon's 1997 book, The Symnolic Species. It has been pursued in depth by computationally-minded linguists such as Simon Kirby, Morten Christiansen and others. Much of that work involved computer simulations, but in 2008 Kirby et al published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences augmenting those proofs in principle with a laboratory demonstration using human subjects. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Iterated Learning Explanation of Structured Language (Language As An Adaptive System: Humans As Hosts)](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-137 — The Mysterious Coherence Between Fundamental Physics and Mathematics — Peter Woit > One of the most mysterious basic aspects of quantum mechanics is that observable quantities correspond precisely to such self-adjoint operators, so these infinitesimal generators are observables. Energy is the operator that infinitesimally generates time translations (this is one way of stating Schrodinger's equation), momentum operators generate spatial translations, angular momentum operators generate rotations, and the charge operator generates phase transformations on the states. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematical Physicist, Columbia University; Author, Not Even Wrong - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [The Mysterious Coherence Between Fundamental Physics and Mathematics](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-138 — The Beauty In A Sunrise — Philip Campbell > Ah, but what is the explanation of beauty? Brain scientists grapple with nuclear-magnetic resonance images—a recent meta-analysis indicated that all of our aesthetic judgements seem to include the use of neural circuits in the right anterior insula, an area of the cerebral cortex typically associated with visceral perception. Perhaps our sense of beauty is a by-product of the evolutionary maintenance of the senses of belonging and of disgust. For what it's worth, as exoplanets pour out of our telescopes, I believe that we will encounter astrochemical evidence for some form of extraterrestrial organism well before we achieve a deep, elegant or beautiful explanation of human aesthetics. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-in-Chief of Nature since 1995; Beginning summer 2018, he will become Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s portfolio of journals, books and magazines - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Beauty In A Sunrise](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-139 — The Turing Machine — Gloria Origgi > In 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing conceived the simplest and most elegant possible computer ever: A device, as he described it, "with an infinite memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher and Researcher, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Author, Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [The Turing Machine](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-140 — A Beautiful Explanation For Why The Human Mind May Seem To Have An Elegant Explanation Even If It Doesn't — Nicholas Humphrey > A tease? I'm not of course suggesting that Nature was deliberately stringing Crick along. As Einstein said, God is subtle but he is not malicious. In this case the failure of the most elegant explanation to be the true one is presumably just a matter of bad luck. And, assuming this doesn't happen often, perhaps in general we can still expect truth and beauty to go together (as no doubt many of the other answers to this Edge Question will prove). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [A Beautiful Explanation For Why The Human Mind May Seem To Have An Elegant Explanation Even If It Doesn't](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-141 — We Are Stardust — Kevin Kelly > Where did we come from? I find the explanation that we were made in stars to be deep, elegant, and beautiful. This explanation says that every atom in each of our bodies was built up out of smaller particles produced in the furnaces of long-gone stars. We are the byproducts of nuclear fusion. The intense pressures and temperatures of these giant stoves thickened collapsing clouds of tiny elemental bits into heavier bits, which once fused, were blown out into space as the furnace died. The heaviest atoms in our bones may have required more than one cycle in the star furnaces to fatten up. Uncountable numbers of built-up atoms congealed into a planet, and a strange disequilibrium called life swept up a subset of those atoms into our mortal shells. We are all collected stardust. And by a most elegant and remarkable transformation, our starstuff is capable of looking into the night sky to perceive other stars shining. They seem remote and distant, but we are really very close to them no matter how many lightyears away. All that we see of each other was born in a star. How beautiful is that? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 193 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [We Are Stardust](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-142 — Selection and Perception — Donald D. Hoffman > A certain jewel beetle in the Australian desert has wing casings that are dimpled, glossy and brown. The males fly around searching for eligible females, a strategy that has served the species well for thousands of years. That is, until H. sapiens started dumping empty beer bottles in the desert that are bumpy, glossy, and just the right shade of brown. Gwynne and Rentz discovered that male beetles find the bottles far more attractive than real females, and swarm the bottles attempting to mate. Their visual systems evolved a satisficing solution for finding females which fell far short of guaranteeing a genuine find but which, in a world before beer bottles, was useful enough to let them survive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Selection and Perception](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-143 — The Next Level of Fundamental Matter? — Haim Harari > All of matter consists of six types of quarks and six types of leptons, with seemingly random unexplained mass values, spanning more than ten orders of magnitude. No one knows why, within these twelve building blocks, the same pattern repeats itself three times. Some of these objects may also convert into each other, under certain circumstances, by unexplained rates, called "mixing angles". The twenty odd values of these rates and masses seem to be arbitrarily chosen by someone (Nature or God). This is what the standard model of particle physics tells us. Is this elegant? It does not seem so. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Next Level of Fundamental Matter?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-144 — Explaining How Two Systems Of The World Can Both Be True — Freeman Dyson > The situation that I am trying to explain is the existence side by side of two apparently incompatible pictures of the universe. One is the classical picture of our world as a collection of things and facts that we can see and feel, dominated by universal gravitation. The other is the quantum picture of atoms and radiation that behave in an unpredictable fashion, dominated by probabilities and uncertainties. Both pictures appear to be true, but the relationship between them is a mystery. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Explaining How Two Systems Of The World Can Both Be True](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-145 — Einstein Explains Why Gravity Is Universal — Sean Carroll > Einstein, in his genius, realized the profound implication of this situation: if gravity affects everything equally, it's not right to think of gravity as a "force" at all. Rather, gravity is a feature of spacetime itself, through which all objects move. In particular, gravity is the curvature of spacetime. The space and time through which we move are not fixed and absolute, as Newton would have had it; they bend and stretch due to the influence of matter and energy. In response, objects are pushed in different directions by spacetime's curvature, a phenomenon we call "gravity." Using a combination of intimidating mathematics and unparalleled physical intuition, Einstein was able to explain a puzzle that had been unsolved since Galileo's time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist, Caltech; Author, Something Deeply Hidden - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Einstein Explains Why Gravity Is Universal](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-146 — The Origin of Money — Dylan Evans > In these troubled times, when central banks are expanding the stock of high-powered money through massive quantitative easing, Menger's theory is more relevant than ever. It alerts us to the possibility that the response to the current crisis in the eurozone need not be ever more centralization, but could instead consist of a move in the opposite direction, towards a regime in which any bank is free to issue its own banknotes, and market forces—not central banks—control the money supply. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO of Projection Point; Author, The Utopia Experiment - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Origin of Money](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-147 — Implications of Ivan Pavlov's Great Discovery — Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. Rosenberg > Classical conditioning also can result from an implanted defibrillator, or "pacemaker." When the heart beats too quickly, this device shocks it and thereby causes it to revert to beating at a normal rate. Until the shock level is properly calibrated, the shock can be very uncomfortable and can function as a UCS that produces fear as a UCR. Because the shock does not occur in a consistent environment, the person associates random aspects of the environment with it—which then function as CSs. And when any of those aspects of the environment are subsequently present, the person can experience severe anxiety, awaiting the possible shock and resulting reaction. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute | Clinical Psychologist; Author, What's the Matter with Batman - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Implications of Ivan Pavlov's Great Discovery](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-148 — Free Fall — Derek Lowe > Watching the Apollo program unfold on television, I kept hearing about "zero gee", a term that still makes people think (wrongly) that someone in orbit has somehow escaped Earth's gravity. But explain it this way: imagine throwing a rock across a field. You can picture the big arc it makes as it goes off into the distance—gravity's rainbow, in the phrase. To throw it farther, you have to throw it higher, and harder, making a bigger arc that takes it out more into the distance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chemistry Blogger, Pipeline; Medicinal Chemist, Preclinical Drug Discovery - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Free Fall](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-149 — Impossible Inexactness — Satyajit Das > Inexactness and quantum mechanics challenge faith as well as concepts of truth and order. They imply a probabilistic world of matter, where we cannot know anything with certainty but only as a possibility. It removes the Newtonian elements of space and time from any underlying reality. In the quantum world, mechanics are understood as a probability without any causal explanation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former Financier; Author, Age of Stagnation - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Impossible Inexactness](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-150 — "Power Tends To Corrupt, And Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely." — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi > I find that the sentence offers the basis for explaining how a failed painter like Adolph Hitler and a failed seminarian like Joseph Stalin could end up with the blood of millions on their hands; or how the Chinese emperors, the Roman popes, or the French aristocracy failed to resist the allure of power. When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University; Author, Flow - **Extract length:** 77 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** ["Power Tends To Corrupt, And Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely."](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-151 — Keys to Behavior: Tinbergen's Four Questions — Irene Pepperberg > Why do we—and all other creatures—behave as we do? No answers really exist. I chose the ethologist and ornithologist NikolaasTinbergen's questions for exactly that reason, because sometimes there is no one deep, elegant, and beautiful explanation. Much like a teacher of fishing rather than a giver of fish, Tinbergen did not try to provide any one global explanation, but instead gave us a scaffolding upon which to build our own answers to each individual behavioral pattern we observe, a scaffolding that can be used not only for the ethological paradigms for which he was famous, but all forms of behavior in any domain. Succinctly, Tinbergen asked: - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Keys to Behavior: Tinbergen's Four Questions](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-152 — The Importance of Individual Human Beings — Howard Gardner > In a planet occupied now by seven billion inhabitants, I am amazed by the difference that one human being can make. Think of classical music without Mozart or Stravinsky; of painting without Caravaggio, Picasso or Pollock; of drama without Shakespeare or Beckett. Think of the incredible contributions of Michelangelo or Leonardo, or, in recent times, the outpouring of deep feeling at the death of Steve Jobs (or, for that matter, Michael Jackson or Princess Diana). Think of human values in the absence of Moses or Christ. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 86 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [The Importance of Individual Human Beings](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-153 — The 19th Century Explanation of the Remarkable Connection Between Electricity And Magnetism — Lawrence M. Krauss > No explanation I know of in all of recent scientific history is as beautiful or deep, or ultimately as elegant, as the 19th century explanation of the remarkable connection between two familiar, but seemingly distinct forces in nature, electricity and magnetism. It represents to me all that is the best about science: surprising empirical discoveries combined with a convoluted path to a remarkably simple and elegant mathematical framework, which then explained far more than was ever bargained for, and in the process produced the very technology that now powers modern civilization. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Foundation Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Department, ASU; Author, The Greatest Story Ever Told . . . So Far - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The 19th Century Explanation of the Remarkable Connection Between Electricity And Magnetism](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-154 — Reminding, Abstraction and Reasoning Form Experience — Roger Schank > Thirty years ago, I was having lunch with my colleague Bob Abelson on the lawn at Yale. I complained to him that my wife couldn't ever cook steak rare the way I liked it. I didn't see what was so hard about making steak rare. He responded that 30 years earlier in England he had asked the barber to cut his hair short, which was the style in the U.S. at the time, and the barber wouldn't cut it as short as he wanted it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Reminding, Abstraction and Reasoning Form Experience](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-155 — Life — Juan Enriquez > As we invent and expand worlds of 1s and 0s the primary criteria for success and viral replication is whether we can breathe life into their virtual realities. Be this a direct reflection of daily life, a la Facebook, multi player massive worlds, or a replicating, self reinforcing network reproductive logic. The digital world accelerates expansion, survival, virtual life through mutant hyper growth. It becomes a fast forward caricature of what we have strived to build throughout centuries of breeding and agricultural practices, of building layer upon layer of civilizations in great cities. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing Director, Excel Venture Management; Co-author (with Steve Gullans), Evolving Ourselves - **Extract length:** 93 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Life](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Promoted — [[reminders/Digital Life/Digital Worlds Accelerate the Evolution of Virtual Life by Juan Enriquez|Digital Worlds Accelerate the Evolution of Virtual Life by Juan Enriquez]] ### EDGE2012-156 — Physical Reality Could Be Hugely More Extensive Than the Patch of Space and Time Traditionally Called 'The Universe' — Martin Rees > Our cosmic environment could be richly textured, but on scales so vast that our purview is restricted to a tiny fragment; we're not aware of the 'big picture', any more than a plankton whose 'universe' was a liter of water would be aware of the world's topography and biosphere. It is obviously sensible for cosmologists to start off by exploring the simplest models. But there is no more reason to expect simplicity on the grandest scale than in the terrestrial environment—where intricate complexity prevails. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Physical Reality Could Be Hugely More Extensive Than the Patch of Space and Time Traditionally Called 'The Universe'](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-157 — The Production of Antibodies — Tor Nørretranders > The summer evening walk home from work gave Jerne an idea that he immediately saw as "fabulous": The body holds a collection of building blocks for antibodies. Whenever something new enters the body, the building blocks are shuffled into a vast array of antibodies. Each will be produced in one copy. One of them will bind particularly well to the shape of the invader. When the "re-cognition" has taken place, that particular antibody will be mass-produced by the immune system. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Production of Antibodies](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-158 — Go Small — Jeremy Bernstein > When confronted with a question like this the tempatation is to "go big" and respond with something,say, from Einstein's theory of relativity. Instead I will go small. When Planck introduced his quantum of action h at the turn of the 20th century he realized that this allowed for a new set of natural units. For example the Planck time is the square root of Planck's constant times the garvitational constant divided by the fifth power of the speed of light. It is the smallest unit of time anyone talks about but is it a "time?" The problem is that these constants are just that. They are the same to a resting observer as to a moving one. But the time is not. I posed this as a"divinette" to my "coven" and Freeman Dyson came up with a beautiful answer. He tried to construct a clock that would measure it. Using the quantum uncertainties he showed that it would be consumed by a black hole of its ownmaking. No measurement is possible. The Planck time ain't a time or it may be beyond time. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, Stevens Institute of Technology; Former Staff Writer, The New Yorker - **Extract length:** 183 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Go Small](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-159 — Duchamp's "Fountain" — James Croak > Duchamp was from a family of artists and mastered painterly cubism prior to breaking with art tradition by designating common objects as art objects. In doing so he exchanged visual space for mental space, a swap of form and color for context and stratified meaning, making him the father of both Pop Art and Conceptual Art, the dominant forms of art today. His Readymades are technically a nominalism, a stock prop of skepticism imported or deported from letters back and forth since the 11th century. Nominalists believe in no eternal verities or universals, just names that imagine there are and no special objects, just ones gathered by words and privileged according to the metaphysics of the time. Hence the demystifying brilliance of the Readymades. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist - **Extract length:** 124 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Duchamp's "Fountain"](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-160 — The Anthropic Principle — Arnold Trehub > Why does the universe appear to us as it does? Why are the observations and measurements of the physical properties of our world compatible with our own existence in space-time? The anthropic principle explains this as a natural consequence of the fact that only in a universe that includes our kind of world could we live to observe, measure, and formulate theories about the universe we live in. But like any good explanation, it highlights other serious questions that are implicit in its own answer. Notice that the anthropic explanation hinges on the fundamental concept of our living existence in space-time. So how are we able to even begin to think about our existence in space-time to pose the anthropic principle? Here I must stop before I violate the stricture of discussing one's own explanation in response to this Edge question. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 141 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Anthropic Principle](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-161 — Beauty and Tragedy In the Mathematics of Music — Jamshed Bharucha > Today, several tuning systems achieve this end. In equal tempered tuning (used in some electronic synthesizers), the octave is divided into twelve equal semitones on a logarithmic scale. In this system, each successive semitone is 21/12 times the frequency of the previous one. Thus a fifth is 27/12 or 1.498 instead of 3/2 or 1.5; the perfect fourth is 25/12 or 1.3348 instead of 4/3 or 1.3333; the major third is 24/12 or 1.2599 instead of 5/4 or 1.25; and the minor third is 23/12 or 1.1892 instead of 6/5 or 1.2. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; President Emeritus, Cooper Union - **Extract length:** 92 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Beauty and Tragedy In the Mathematics of Music](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-162 — "There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamed of in your philosophy." — Alan Alda > Like all explanations, of course, it has its limits. Hamlet says it to Horatio as a way of urging him to accept the possibility of ghosts. It could just as well be used to prompt belief in UFOs, astrology, and even god—as if to say that that something is proved to exist by the very fact that you can't disprove it exists. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Actor; Writer; Director; Host, PBS program Brains on Trial; Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - **Extract length:** 62 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** ["There are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamed of in your philosophy."](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-163 — Inverse Power Laws — Rudy Rucker > Inverse power laws aren't limited to societies—they also dominate the statistics of the natural world. The tenth smallest lake is likely to be a tenth as large as the biggest one, the hundredth largest tree in a forest may be a hundredth as big as the largest tree, the thousandth largest stone on a beach is a thousandth the size of the largest one. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Inverse Power Laws](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-164 — The Parts & The Whole — Armand Marie Leroi > In 1972 George Price extended his general variation-selection equation to allow for multi-level selection. This form of the equation has been very useful to evolutionary biologists for it has allowed them to see, for example, the relationship between kin and group selection clearly and so put to rest endless controversies stemming from incompatible mathematical formulations. It hasn't yet been applied to cultural evolution, though it surely will. But I think that the extended Price equation is much more important than even that. I think it slices one of the Gordian knots that scientists and philosophers of science have wrestled with forever. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Imperial College; Author, The Lagoon - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Parts & The Whole](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-165 — Why the Greeks Painted Red People On Black Pots — Timothy Taylor > An explanation of something that seems not to need explaining is good. If it leads to further explanations of things that didn't seem to need explaining, that is better. If it makes a massive stink, as academic vested interests attempt to preserve the status quo in the face of far reaching implications, it is one of the best. I have chosen Michael Vickers' simple and immensely influential explanation of why the ancient Greeks painted little red figures on their pots. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 80 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Why the Greeks Painted Red People On Black Pots](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-166 — A Matter of Poetics — Richard Foreman > 1) I hardly remember the details (being no scientist, of course) but I remember reading about Dirac's theory of the sea of negative energy out of which is popped—by a hole, an absence, the positron which built the world we know. I hope I have this right and haven't made a fool of myself by misrepresenting this—but in a sense it wouldn't matter. Because this image—fueled by this "explanation"—energized my exploration into a new kind of theater in which (evoking a kind of negative theology) I tried—and still try—to pull an audience into the void, rather than feeding it what it already feels about the "real" world and wants confirmed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Playwright & Director; Founder, The Ontological-Hysteric Theater - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [A Matter of Poetics](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-167 — Tit For Tat — Jennifer Jacquet > Milinski's evidence, published in 1987 in the journal Nature, was the first to demonstrate that cooperation based on reciprocity definitely evolved among egoists, albeit small ones. A large body of research now shows that many biological systems, especially human societies, are organized around various cooperative strategies; the scientific methods continue to become more and more sophisticated, but the original experiments and Tit For Tat strategy are beautifully simple. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, NYU; Author, Is Shame Necessary? - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Tit For Tat](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-168 — The Principle of Empiricism, or See For Yourself — Michael Shermer > By looking for themselves Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others launched the Scientific Revolution, which in the Enlightenment led scholars to apply the principle of empiricism to the social as well as the natural world. The great political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, fancied himself as the Galileo and William Harvey of society: "Galileus…was the first that opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion. … The science of man's body, the most profitable part of natural science, was first discovered with admirable sagacity by our countryman, Doctor Harvey. Natural philosophy is therefore but young; but civil philosophy is yet much younger, as being no older…than my own de Cive." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 119 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Principle of Empiricism, or See For Yourself](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-169 — Boltzmann's Explanation Of The Second Law Of Thermodynamics — Leonard Susskind > The guiding star for me, as a physicist, has always been Boltzmann's explanation of second law of thermodynamics: the law that says that entropy never decreases. To the physicists of the late 19th century this was a very serious paradox. Nature is full of irreversible phenomena: things that easily happen but could not possibly happen in reverse order. However, the fundamental laws of physics are completely reversible: any solution of Newton's equations can be run backward and it is still a solution. So if entropy can increase, the laws of physics say it must be able to decrease. But experience says otherwise. For example, if you watch a movie of a nuclear explosion in reverse, you know very well that it's fake. As a rule, things go one way and not the other. Entropy increases. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics, Stanford; Author, The Theoretical Minimum series - **Extract length:** 135 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Boltzmann's Explanation Of The Second Law Of Thermodynamics](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-170 — Why is the Sky Dark at Night? — Clifford Pickover > Another factor to consider is that the expansion of the universe also acts to darken the night sky because starlight expands into an ever vaster space. Also, the Doppler Effect causes a redshift in the wavelengths of light emitted from the rapidly receding stars. This effect, named after Austrian physicist Christian Doppler, refers to the change in frequency of a wave for an observer as the source of the wave moves. For example, if a car is moving while its horn is sounding, the frequency of the sound you hear is higher (compared to the actual emitted frequency) as the car approaches you and is lower as it moves away. Although we often think of the Doppler Effect with respect to sound, it applies to all waves, including light. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Why is the Sky Dark at Night?](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-171 — The Gaia Hypothesis — Scott Sampson > For my money, the deepest, most beautiful scientific explanation is the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that Earth's physical and biological processes are inextricably interwoven to form a self-regulating system. This notion—the 1965 brainchild of chemist James Lovelock, further co-developed with microbiologist Lynn Margulis—proposes that air (atmosphere), water (hydrosphere), earth (geosphere or pedosphere) and life (biosphere) interact to form a single evolving system capable of maintaining environmental conditions consistent with life. Lovelock initially put forth the Gaia hypothesis to explain how life on Earth has persisted for 4 billion years despite a 30% increase in the Sun's intensity over that same interval. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President & CEO, Science World British Columbia; Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; Author, How To Raise A Wild Child - **Extract length:** 101 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Gaia Hypothesis](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-172 — Alfvén's Cosmos — George Dyson > Hannes Alfvén (1908–1995), who pioneered the field of magnetohydrodynamics, against initial skepticism, to give us a universe permeated by what are now called "Alfvén waves," never relinquished his own skepticism concerning the Big Bang. "They fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism," he argued in 1984, advocating, instead, for a hierarchical cosmology, whose mathematical characterization he credited to Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe (1868—1933) and Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier (1861–1932). Hierarchical does not mean isotropic, and observed anisotropy does not rule it out. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Alfvén's Cosmos](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-173 — The Mechanism of Mediocrity — Nicholas G. Carr > The Peter Principle was a hook with many barbs. It didn't just expose the dunderhead in the corner office. It took the centerpiece of the American dream—the desire to climb the ladder of success—and revealed it to be a recipe for mass mediocrity. Enterprise was an elaborate ruse, a vector through which the incompetent made their affliction universal. But there was more. The principle had, as a New York Times reviewer put it, "cosmic implications." It wasn't long before scientists developed the "Generalized Peter Principle," which went thus: "In evolution, systems tend to develop up to the limit of their adaptive competence." Everything progresses to the point at which it founders. The shape of existence is the shape of failure. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Utopia is Creepy - **Extract length:** 120 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Mechanism of Mediocrity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-174 — The Precession of the Simulacra — Douglas Rushkoff > The computer algorithm trading credit default swaps—as well as the programmers trying to follow that algorithms actions in order to devise competing algorithms—this level of interaction is real. And, financially speaking, it has more influence over who gets to live in your house than almost any other factor. A credit default swap crisis can bankrupt a nation as big as the United States—without changing anything about the real land it refers to. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 72 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [The Precession of the Simulacra](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-175 — The Seen and the Unseen — Ed Regis > The simple yet profound explanation of why people get themselves into serious epistemological trouble and propose idiotic policies and harebrained ideas is that they ignore the Law of Unintended Consequences. Often enough, when considering a given idea, proposal, option, or policy, people will focus only its beneficial consequences and ignore the negative or damaging ones, which may be further off in time and harder to foresee. But practically every human action entails a substantial network of consequences, and so a rational assessment of any proposal ought to take into account all of its effects, the obvious and the non-obvious, the intended and the unintended, not just those that immediately leap to the eye. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science writer; Author, Monsters - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Seen and the Unseen](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-176 — The Faurie-Raymond Hypothesis — Jonathan Gottschall > What makes a scientific explanation beautiful? General factors like parsimony play a role, but as with any aesthetic question, quirks of personal taste bulks large. Why do I find the Faurie-Raymond Hypothesis attractive? Partly because it was an almost recklessly creative idea, and yet the data seemed to fit. But mainly because the undoubtable truth of it was pounded into my brain by a young soldier sometime last year. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Research Fellow, English Department, Washington & Jefferson College; Author, The Storytelling Animal - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [The Faurie-Raymond Hypothesis](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-177 — Beautiful, Elegant, And … Absolutely Wrong — Nigel Goldenfeld > Beautiful, elegant, and absolutely wrong: key-and-lock mechanisms have been important in understanding snapshots of biological structure, but they are misleading clues in the search to understand the dynamical processes of evolution that have led to the phenomenon of life. Far richer than Gamow and Crick conceived, the genetic code is now thought to have been shaped rapidly over evolutionary time through the cooperative dynamics of early organisms, thus ensuring a code that is remarkably robust to errors in translation and mutations of the genome sequence. Only with such a code could such complex organisms as you and me evolve. And that is the real secret of life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Beautiful, Elegant, And … Absolutely Wrong](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-178 — Evolution By Means of Natural Selection — Susan Blackmore > In that context being successful is fleeting, and now the three-step algorithm can turn tautology into deep and elegant explanation. Copy the survivors many times with slight variations and let them loose in this ever-shifting world, and only those suited to the new conditions will carry on. The world fills with creatures, ideas, institutions, languages, stories, software and machines that have all been designed by the stress of this competition. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Evolution By Means of Natural Selection](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-179 — Fact, Fiction, and Our Probabilistic World — Victoria Stodden > Tolstoy was skeptical of our understanding of chance. He gave an example of a flock of sheep where one had been chosen for slaughter. This one sheep was given extra food separately from the others and Tolstoy imagined that the flock, with no knowledge of what was coming, must find the continually fattening sheep extraordinary—something he thought the sheep would assign to "chance" due to their limited viewpoint. Tolstoy's solution was for the sheep to stop thinking that things happen only for "the attainment of their sheep aims" and realize that there are hidden aims that explain everything perfectly well, and so there is no need to resort to the concept of chance. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Associate Professor of Information Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Fact, Fiction, and Our Probabilistic World](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-180 — The Origins of Biological Electricity — Jared Diamond > Electricity involves the movement of charged particles. In our light bulbs and electric grids, those charged particles are negatively charged electrons: what are they in biological systems? Already over a century ago, the German physiologist Bernstein speculated that the charged particles whose motion was responsible for biological electricity were not electrons but were positively charged ions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles; Author, Upheaval - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [The Origins of Biological Electricity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-181 — Evolution By Natural Selection — Keith Devlin > My Edge answer this year has to be evolution by natural selection. Not only does it explain how we all got here and how we are and behave as we do, it can even explain (at least to my fairly critical satisfaction) why many people refuse to accept it and why even more people believe in an all-powerful Deity. But since other Edge respondents are likely to have natural selection as their favorite deep, elegant, and beautiful explanation (it has all three attributes, in addition to wide ranging explanatory power), I'll have to hone in on one particular instance: the explanation of how humans acquired language—by which I mean grammatical structure. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Evolution By Natural Selection](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-182 — The Overdue Demise Of Monogamy — Aubrey de Grey > There are many persuasive arguments from evolutionary biology explaining why various species, notably Homo sapiens, have adopted a lifestyle in which males and females pair up long-term. But my topic here is not one of those explanations. Instead, it is the explanation for why we are close (or so I claim!)—far closer than most people, even most readers of Edge, yet appreciate—to the greatest societal, as opposed to technological, advance in the history of civilisation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation; Author, Ending Aging - **Extract length:** 75 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Overdue Demise Of Monogamy](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-183 — The Power of Absurdity — Scott Atran > Sacred and religious ideas are culturally universal, yet content varies markedly across cultures. [Religious conceptions and sacred, or transcendental, values often go together but aren't quite the same: sacred values—like dignity or honor, love of country or racial purity, devotion to jihad or humanity, or even sometimes to science—share with core religious values immunity to cost-benefit considerations and appear to drive actions independently, or all out of proportion, to likely prospects of success]. Sacred values mark the moral boundaries of societies and determine which material transactions are permissible. Material transgressions of the sacred are taboo: we consider people who sell their children or sell out our country to be sociopaths; other societies consider adultery or disregard of the poor equally immoral, but not necessarily selling children or women or denying freedom of expression. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Emeritus Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris; Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford; Author, Talking to the Enemy - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Power of Absurdity](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-184 — Why Some Sea Turtles Migrate — Daniel C. Dennett > What is delicious about this example is that it vividly illustrates several important evolutionary themes: the staggering power over millions of years of change so gradual it is essentially unnoticeable, the cluelessness of much animal behavior, even when it is adaptive, and of course the eye-opening perspective that evolution by natural selection can offer to the imagination of the curious naturalist. It also demonstrates either the way evolutionary hypotheses can be roundly refuted by discoverable facts (if it is refuted) or the way those hypotheses can be supported by further evidence (if in fact it is so supported). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Why Some Sea Turtles Migrate](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-185 — Observers Observing — Robert Provine > My passion for observation is aesthetic as well as scientific. My most memorable observations are of the night sky. For others, they may be the discovery of a T-rex fossil, or the sound of bird song on a perfect spring day. To see better and deeper, I build telescopes, large and small. I like my photons fresh, not collected by CCD or analyzed by computer. I want to encounter the cosmos head-on, letting it wash over my retina. My profession of neuroscience provides its own observational adventures, including the unique opportunity to close the circle by investigating the neurological mechanism through which the observer observes and comes to knows the cosmos. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 111 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Observers Observing](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-186 — Dan Sperber's Explanation of Culture — Clay Shirky > Something happens to keep one group of people behaving in a certain set of ways. In the early 1970s, both E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins noticed that the flow of ideas in a culture exhibited similar patterns to the flow of genes in a species—high flow within the group, but sharply reduced flow between groups. Dawkins' response was to assume a hypothetical unit of culture called the meme, though he also made its problems clear—with genetic material, perfect replication is the norm, and mutations rare. With culture, it is the opposite—events are misremembered and then misdescribed, quotes are mangled, even jokes (pure meme) vary from telling to telling. The gene/meme comparison remained, for a generation, an evocative idea of not much analytic utility. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social & Technology Network Topology Researcher; Adjunct Professor, NYU Graduate School of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP); Author, Cognitive Surplus - **Extract length:** 123 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Dan Sperber's Explanation of Culture](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-187 — Hormesis Is Redundancy — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > Alas, our institutional risk management methods are vastly different. Current practice is to look in the past for worst-case scenario, called "stress test" and adjust accordingly, never imagining that, just as the past experienced a large deviation that did not have a predecessor, that such deviation might be insufficient. For instance, current systems take the worst historical recession, the worst war, the worst historical move in interest rates, the worst point in unemployment, etc., as an anchor for the worst future outcome. Many of us have been frustrated—very frustrated—by the method of stress testing in which people never go beyond what has happened before and even had to face the usual expression of naive empiricism, "do you have evidence?" when suggesting that we need to consider worse. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 127 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Hormesis Is Redundancy](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-188 — The Idea of "Emergence" or "Emergent Properties" — David Christian > Then, over 13.7 billion years, all these things have appeared, one by one. Each had qualities that had never been seen before. This is 'creativity' in its most basic and mysterious form. Galaxies and Stars were the first large, complex objects. And they had strange new properties. Stars fused Hydrogen atoms into Helium atoms, creating vast amounts of energy and forming hot spots dotted through the Universe. In their death throes, the largest stars created all the elements of the Periodic Table, while the energy they pumped into the cold space around them helped assemble these elements into utterly new forms of matter with entirely new properties. Now it was possible to form planets, bacteria dinosaurs and us! - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Big History Institute and Distinguished Professor in History, Macquarie University, Sydney; Author, Origin Story - **Extract length:** 118 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [The Idea of "Emergence" or "Emergent Properties"](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-189 — The Elegant Robert Zajonc — Richard Nisbett > 2) The earlier in the sibship a person is born the higher the IQ on average. This had long been known but Zajonc offered the most plausible explanation to date. The firstborn comes into a world where the average IQ is 100 (mother) + 100 (father) + 0 (self)/3 = 83.33. The second child is born into a family with a lower average IQ because the average 100 IQ of each parent is diluted not only with the second child’s own zero IQ but with the first child’s IQ, which, unless that child is adult, is less than 100 on average. The larger the number of children the worse the average intelligence of the environment in which intellectual development takes place. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 121 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [The Elegant Robert Zajonc](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-190 — A Sphere — Shing-Tung Yau > Most scientific facts are based on things that we cannot see with the naked eye or hear by our ears or feel by our hands. Many of them are described and guided by mathematical theory. In the end, it becomes difficult to distinguish a mathematical object from objects in nature. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician, Harvard; Co-author, The Shape of Inner Space - **Extract length:** 50 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [A Sphere](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-191 — Evolutionary Genetics Explains The Conflicts of Human Social Life — Steven Pinker > Natural selection favors the allocation of resources not just from parents to offspring but among genetic kin such as siblings and cousins. Just as a gene that encourages a parent to invest in offspring will be favoring a copy of itself that sits inside those offspring, so a gene that encourage an organism to invest in a brother or cousin will, some proportion of the time, be helping a copy of itself, and will be selected in proportion to the benefits conferred, the costs incurred, and the degree of genetic relatedness. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Evolutionary Genetics Explains The Conflicts of Human Social Life](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2012-192 — Sleep Is the Interest We Have to Pay on the Capital Which is Called In at Death — Emanuel Derman > So wrote Arthur Schopenhauer, comparing life to finance in a universe that must keep its books balanced. At birth you receive a loan, consciousness and light borrowed from the void, leaving a hole in the emptiness. The hole will grow bigger each day. Nightly, by yielding temporarily to the darkness of sleep, you restore some of the emptiness and keep the hole from growing limitlessly. In the end you must pay back the principal, complete the void, and return the life originally lent you. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Financial Engineering, Columbia University; Author, Models.Behaving.Badly - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Sleep Is the Interest We Have to Pay on the Capital Which is Called In at Death](https://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted