From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Emotions are the brain's way of making us pay attention immediately to what is most important so that we can react as quickly as possible. In evolution, that meant 'survival' – the rustle in the bushes may be our next meal or may make us its next meal – something that we have to chase, or run away from – and in either case, we don't want to have to stop and think.
Most astronomers are surprised, but biologists look at the history of life on Earth. Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky.
What we see in the science is something very different. We often see that romantic partners basically see the best in each other. They're wearing rose-coloured glasses. And the primary thing that brings people together is what we would call attachment bonds or pair bonds: the idea that people are looking for somebody who they feel has their back, somebody who's going to celebrate their successes, and somebody who's going to be there for them.
Music is woven into the fabric of the universe. As far back as Pythagoras and Kepler, scientists were writing about the fact that music was intrinsic in the planets… part of the harmonic series in sound. Music is built into our neurology, our survival instincts and our communication.
I remember one day though, conversing with a primatologist and saying, 'oh, animals are just like us… we're not that special…' and he said, 'well, when did chimps build their own large hadron collider?' – I was gob smacked. That one comment made me realise how absurd it is to claim we aren't that different from other animals because, clearly, we're amazingly different.
We are literally right now living through one of the biggest revolutions in human history, certainly in medicine, and most people aren't even aware that it's about to happen.
A true pet's value lies entirely in its relationship with us, and vice versa. The first fossil evidence of that bond goes back around 30,000 to 40,000 years: dogs buried with humans, including one remarkable case of a dog that had survived two bouts of canine distemper, presumably because its human companion cared for it.
We are part of the continuum of evolution, and [we] are not the only beings on the Earth with personalities, minds, thoughts and feelings.
The discovery of new cosmic truths doesn't negate our prior understanding. For instance, despite Einstein's theory of relativity extending beyond the scope of Newton's laws, the latter will remain as valid a million years from now as they are today.
If we want to live and become 100 years old, we need to have parents and grandparents that have lived that long- that's it. There's not much we can do in terms of environmental influence, eating well, and living well – those things help of course but to get to great age, you need the genes.
Without quantum mechanics, we wouldn't have the modern world… we wouldn't have electronics… we wouldn't have understood the semi-conductor, the computer chip…. All of our modern technology relies on this mathematical description of the world of the very small.
Open-source evidence is essentially public information available to anyone and can be traced back to its original source. We've always maintained transparency in our methodologies and the step-by-step processes we employ.