Tag: Different Universe

Chapter 6 from A Different Universe by Robert Laughlin. “Men always want to tinker with the computer, she said, take it apart, add memory and peripherals, and so forth, while the women concentrate on more important things like sending out hundreds of email invitations to a wedding shower.” “Women just seem to intuitively understand better than…

Chapter 3 from A Different Universe by Robert Laughlin. “Despite the success of Newton’s laws and the engineering advances they made possible, many people still find the clockwork universe difficult to accept. It flies in the face of our commonsense understanding of the complexity of nature and our belief that the future is not completely predestined…

Chapter 2 from A Different Universe by Robert Laughlin. Biologists and physicists: … most biologists consider the physicists’ obsession with certainty and correctness to be exasperatingly childish and evidence of their limited mental capacities. Physicists, in contrast, consider tolerance of uncertainty to be an excuse for second-rate experimentation and a potential source of false claim.…

Chapter 1 from A Different Universe by Robert Laughlin. Science as a frontier: The idea of science as a great frontier is similarly timeless. While there are clearly many nonscientific sources of adventure left, science is the unique place where genuine wildness may still be found. Ultimate theory: My particular branch of science, theoretical physics,…

An interesting citation from Robert B. Laughlin, A Different Universe, Chapter 4, Water, Ice, and Vapor, p. 42. By the most important effect of phase organisation is to cause objects to exist. This point is subtle and easily overlooked, since we are accustomed to thinking about solidification in terms of packing of Newtonian spheres. Atoms…