Science

The heart is a fascinating machine. It beats 3 billion times in a typical human lifetime, consumes so much energy, and does so much work that if you attached a heart to a typical swimming pool – the heart would empty the pool in about a week.

Cardiologist and author of "Intern" and "Heart: A History

Cooking is about precision, but it's also about understanding the science behind why ingredients behave the way they do. You can't innovate without understanding the fundamentals.

Chef & Owner of The Fat Duck, Revolutionary Molecular Gastronomy Pioneer

Anyone worth following in peak performance will tell you that 90% of human performance is mental. The understanding of that mental aspect of the game is brand-new – perhaps 10-20 years old.

Author & Researcher on Flow State & Human Peak Performance

At first, the 100 thousand million, million keys you would need to search might appear impossible, but Moore's law was increasing processing power and we quickly figured that if you could search a million keys per second on a chip, and you bought a million chips, you could search a million, million keys per second.

Co-inventor of Public-Key Cryptography & Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

MIT was one of the places where molecular biology was born, and I could participate in this enterprise with my own hands.

Nobel Prize Winner for Gene Targeting in Mice

It's a roll of the dice whenever one of these novel viruses emerges; sometimes they will be severe and contagious enough to cause a problem, and this one is.

The world lacks creative imagination when it comes to mother nature- we believe that we have the power to bend nature to our desires and forget that we're vulnerable. Nature is a combination of biology, physics and chemistry- they are collectively much stronger at bending the world than we are.

Leading infectious disease epidemiologist and pandemic preparedness expert

I approached fighting, and each contest, as an experiment. I would develop hypotheses on what strategies and techniques were winning, I would set-up experiments (or go into fights)- try them out- run tests- look at the results and try to be as unemotional as possible.

Boxing coach of Conor McGregor at Straight Blast Gym Dublin

Our capacity to reason is recursive, combinatorial – we can reason about our reason – we can argue, criticise and develop tools that enhance our reason thanks to language and communication. We have the power to build on our reason, to enhance it.

Cognitive Scientist & Psychologist Known for Research on Language and Human Nature

The theory describes only the way objects interact with one another, without indicating what happens between one interaction and the next one.

Theoretical physicist known for loop quantum gravity research and popular science writing

Quantum mechanics says our world is nebulous, fuzzy, a haze of possibilities until it somehow snaps to attention upon an appropriate interaction, observation or measurement. That's a very strange reality, and the fact that this theory is so demonstrably correct is radically important to our understanding.

Theoretical Physicist & Bestselling Author on String Theory & Cosmology

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.

Theoretical physicist, author, and BBC science communicator known for public engagement

The quantum universe is counter-intuitive, it's fuzzy, probabilistic, and suggests things that we would regard as fantastical and magical if we saw them on the everyday scale- yet it's the most powerful theory in science.

Theoretical physicist, author, and BBC science communicator known for public engagement

Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered. Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes.

Theoretical Physicist & Bestselling Author on String Theory & Cosmology

Here's the simple truth everyone should know: 'race' doesn't exist. In 1950, UNESCO held a commission with the world's top evolutionary biologists, ethnologists and cultural anthropologists examining the scientific evidence for this so-called concept of 'race'. Their conclusion was clear: race doesn't exist – there's no evidence to support it.

You have this very activist sociology rather than a dispassionate or objective sociology informing a broadly humanist framework of caring about flourishing versus suffering. When your sociology has decided that the point of studying society is to change it, you've got a problem.

Mathematician & Scholar of Critical Theory Criticism & Academic Discourse