Science

Consciousness is the most troubling because it's so hard to deny its existence. With all these other tricky, troubling phenomena, it's at least an option to say maybe it doesn't exist, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. But with consciousness, it seems hard to make sense of the idea that nobody's ever felt pain. Nobody's ever seen colour.

Philosopher specializing in consciousness and panpsychism

The problem is that you put cells in the same vat and ask them to grow and they're producing ammonia, you're going to have a nice glass of urine! We must solve all of that!!

Six years ago, I got a phone call in Boston, an investor asked me what I thought about cultured meat? ..my answer was that it's probably one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard in my life.! And the question is, why? It's supposed to be obvious! When you take muscle cells, fat cells, or stem cells (that can become both muscle and fat), those cells don't grow very well outside of the body – they stop.

I have a deep fascination with the natural world, the problems that living creatures need to solve and how natural selection evolution by natural selection has solved those problems. When it comes to flight... It's all about physics... how you solve the problems raised by physics.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

Birds are not born with an innate genetically determined knowledge of constellations. What they do has been brilliantly shown in an experiment by Stephen Emlen. Birds learn when they're young to look at this night sky and learn which bits of the sky don't rotate.

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

Flight is a very quick way to get from A to B. It's also a very good way to escape from predators who are stuck on the ground. The question to be asked is why doesn't everybody fly?

Evolutionary Biologist & Author of "The Selfish Gene

It is essential to think about it systematically and to include demographics as it's the study of people – who we are, where we are- people are the foundation of every society. There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's, destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.

Magical thinking is a bi-product of cognitive process that were useful in our evolutionary survival. We're so good at pattern matching that we see patterns everywhere, even when they don't exist. It's better to believe the movement in the dark is a tiger, rather than the wind blowing thru a bush. Its better to be wrong on that, than the other way around.

We are a product of evolution, and the mechanism of evolution is natural selection. Evolution is selecting for survival, and the qualities we have are evolved to help us survive as well as possible. Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.

Truth is a quality of reality. It has nothing to do with what I believe. Truth, when it comes to empirical issues, is an objective thing. Whether something is true or not is independent of whether I think it is true or not, and a lot of people confuse this. People say that we cannot trust science because once-upon-a-time scientists held it true that the earth was flat; that's not correct. It was never true that the earth was flat, even if people believed it.

The only way to innovate is to follow Aristotle's prescription. To create a future that is different to the past is to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made, not the one for which there is the most data. If companies want to innovate, they need to realise that data analytics is killing innovation yet is lauded and used increasingly.

Management theorist & former Dean of Rotman School of Business

We should be looking at our regrets not as meaningless, debilitating phenomena but as signals, information, and data. If we do that systematically? We can use this emotion as a transformative force for progress.

Author of "Drive" & Leading Work Culture Expert

I worry that we haven't checked our interstellar mailbox, and so we've missed the letter which contained the recipe for our salvation. Perhaps another civilisation sent us a message with the key to our own survival. Physical objects have a huge advantage over listening for signals – you can encode a lot more into a physical object.

Harvard astrophysicist who studies interstellar objects and extraterrestrial life

Our experience is very limited to the surface of this rock we call home. You cannot show-off in space, we must be humble. The only purpose for us to seek journeys into space is to learn about the unknown. That's a spiritual conquest. Leaving the solar system has no commercial benefits.

Harvard astrophysicist who studies interstellar objects and extraterrestrial life

The only way for you to discover something new is to acknowledge the ocean of ignorance in which you are just an island. Experts have a problem with that – they want to get prizes, and get recognised by their colleagues and peers as being very smart. So, when something new comes along... an anomaly... it often gets dismissed for the sake of reputation management.

Harvard astrophysicist who studies interstellar objects and extraterrestrial life

Science is a learning experience. We are interacting with nature, collecting evidence, and sometimes nature is more imaginative than we are. We ought to be humble when collective evidence, and not assume we know the answer in advance. Many of the realities we create are designed to flatter our ego... We prefer to attach ourselves to virtual realities that flatter us, and that's driven by ego.

Harvard astrophysicist who studies interstellar objects and extraterrestrial life