Sublime

They appear to want some of the same things most of us want: recognition from their peers and communities and better lives for the people they care about. Being

The universes predicted by Boltzmann and Maxwell, and later refined by the thermodynamics of Helmholtz, Gibbs, and Einstein, were universes that evolved into homogeneous soups—soups in which there was no information and energy was no longer free (that is, there was no energy available to perform work).3

The German physicist Max Planck calculated the electric field in equilibrium in a hot box. To do this he used a trick: he imagined that the energy of the field is distributed in “quanta,” that is, in packets or lumps of energy. The procedure led to a result that perfectly reproduced what was measured (and therefore must be in some fashion correct)

Bernardo Huberman's research group at Hewlett-Packard developed a scheme that first asked each person to bet on what everyone else was going to say.`° This "common knowledge" was then discounted, since it was obviously being counted more than once.

Brain circuitry operates by the many-to-one principle of degeneracy: instances of a single emotion category, such as fear, are handled by different brain patterns at different times and in different people. Conversely, the same neurons can participate in creating different mental states (one-to-many).

“toy” models of economies—simple models that are so abstract they bear little resemblance to reality.

cleverest observer. Consider

The origins of MCMC go all the way back to the Manhattan Project, when physicists needed to estimate the probability that neutrons would collide with atoms and set off a chain reaction. But in more recent decades, it has sparked such a revolution that it’s often considered one of the most important algorithms of all time.