Science

People have been told that asthma is an incurable condition, that they'll need to stay indoors and rely on a bronchodilator every few hours for life. But that's just not true. The way you breathe is deeply connected to asthma symptoms, a message that asthmatics rarely hear from anyone.

Author of "Breath" & Investigative Journalist on Respiratory Science

We get more energy from air than from food or drink. So, if we're absorbing that energy inefficiently, it's bound to catch up to us. A useful analogy is food: you can survive on a diet of 12 cookies a day, getting enough calories, but it's not nourishing, nor does it allow your body to operate efficiently.

Author of "Breath" & Investigative Journalist on Respiratory Science

Habituation is a very basic mechanism. It's something we find in every neuron and every system of our brain, including our fundamental abilities like perception. Essentially, we stop responding to and perceiving things that are not changing or are changing very gradually.

Neuroscientist known for research on optimism bias and decision-making

I think this goes into the history of psychology; for example, 100 years ago, we couldn't even measure what an emotion is. It's something in your head and in your brain, and we were always used to measuring behaviour, not people's psychological experiences. So just from that alone, it became less important because it wasn't observable behaviour, as if what people are thinking and feeling doesn't matter—which is obviously crazy; it does matter.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

My observation is if we make a parallel between biology and economics, the role of the economy is like the role of metabolism in an organism. Because what does the metabolism do? It takes in food, resources from the environment, and breaks them down and rearranges them to make other things that we need. Similarly, the economy takes in natural resources from the environment, combines them with labour to make goods and services that we use.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. The human brain is a great example. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain. You have to hook them together just right, of course, but the result is completely fundamentally different than what you started with.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

As we continue to push the boundaries of what is computationally possible, we are not just developing a new technology, but fundamentally expanding our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity

My initial motivation for studying quantum computing was a desire to understand the fundamental computational limits of the universe. Even in the absence of practical applications, I believed this pursuit was worthwhile as the most rigorous test of quantum mechanics to date. In fact, I often joke that disproving quantum computing sceptics is the primary application of a quantum computer, with everything else being a bonus.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity

A quantum computer is very similar to a classical computer, with one key difference: it takes full advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics. The heart of quantum mechanics is the concept of amplitudes. An amplitude is a new kind of number, related to but distinct from an ordinary probability. Amplitudes can be positive, negative, or even complex numbers.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity

The strangeness of reality was apparent long before the advent of quantum mechanics. The history of science is a sequence of revelations, each showing that the true nature of things is not what it seems to the casual observer. Quantum mechanics, however, takes this weirdness to a new level.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity

Einstein famously said time is what a clock measures, which was a half-joke but also the best answer he could give. A clock measures the 'distance' it travels through spacetime between events. That's fascinating, but it still doesn't tell you what time actually is.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

Quantum mechanics is a consistent mathematical structure, not that difficult to understand in itself, which nature has chosen. The confusing thing is that nature chose something that doesn't feel intuitive to us. It has a reputation for being mystifying mainly because of its history rather than what it really is as a theory.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

The paradox is that in the Milky Way galaxy, with something like 400 billion stars and trillions of planets, it's estimated there may be around 10 billion potentially Earth-like worlds. And the galaxy has been around for about 13 billion years. If a civilisation had developed ahead of us and become spacefaring, it's very hard to see why we haven't noticed any evidence of that.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

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. Or maybe it normally only takes a few hundred million years to go from life to intelligence, and we were just slow. We have a sample size of one.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

Whatever you think it is, it self-evidently exists, because the universe means something to each of us. But I would argue that whatever it is, it's an emergent property. So it exists here on Earth because there are complex biological systems. Without those complex biological systems, it doesn't exist. There is no meaning. We bring meaning to it.

Theoretical Physicist & TV Science Communicator

I think these are all cases where our brains lie to us. It's not because they're doing something insidious or that there's some advantage to messing up our sense of happiness—it's just the normal processes of our brains sometimes go awry, and we end up not appreciating what we have as much as we could.

Psychologist known for teaching popular "Science of Well-Being" course at Yale