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Leonard Mlodinow

Leonard Mlodinow Books

Physicist

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“Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness.”

Brownian Motion
Book:The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
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“Yes, as distasteful as it is, it is beneficial to talk to people who disagree with us. So if you hate conspiracy theories and run into someone who believes that we faked the moonlanding and Einstein plagiarized relativity from his mailman, don't tell him, 'You life is a cruel joke' and walk away. Have tea with him. It can broaden your style of thinking, and it's cheaper than seeing a therapist.”

Different Opinion
Book:Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change
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“Perception requires imagination because the data people encounter in their lives are never complete and always equivocal. For example, most people consider that the greatest evidence of an event one can obtain is to see it with their own eyes, and in a court of law little is held in more esteem than eyewitness testimony. Yet if you asked to display for a court a video of the same quality as the unprocessed data catptured on the retina of a human eye, the judge might wonder what you were tryig to put over. For one thing, the view will have a blind spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Moreover, the only part of our field of vision with good resolution is a narrow area of about 1 degree of visual angle around the retina’s center, an area the width of our thumb as it looks when held at arm’s length. Outside that region, resolution drops off sharply. To compensate, we constantly move our eyes to bring the sharper region to bear on different portions of the scene we wish to observe. And so the pattern of raw data sent to the brain is a shaky, badly pixilated picture with a hole in it. Fortunately the brain processes the data, combining input from both eyes, filling in gaps on the assumption that the visual properties of neighboring locations are similar and interpolating. The result - at least until age, injury, disease, or an excess of mai tais takes its toll - is a happy human being suffering from the compelling illusion that his or her vision is sharp and clear. We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out “picture” is clear and accurate. But is it?”

RealityPerceptionDataEyes
Book:The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
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“Our inner weighing of evidence is not a careful mathematical calculation resulting in a probabilistic estimate of truth, but more like a whirlpool blending of the objective and the personal. The result is a set of beliefs - both conscious and unconscious - that guide us in interpreting all the events of our lives.”

BeliefResultsOur LivesEventsConsciousEvidenceCarefulGuidesObjectivesMathematicalUnconsciousCalculationsInterpretingWeighingConscious And UnconsciousWhirlpools
Book:War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet -- and Do Not
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“We also use our imagination and take shortcuts to fill gaps in patterns of nonvisual data. As with visual input, we draw conclusions and make judgments based on uncertain and incomplete information, and we conclude, when we are done analyzing the patterns, that out picture is clear and accurate. But is it?”

DoneUseImaginationClearInformationJudgmentDrawsPatternsConclusionDataVisualsGapsAccurateUncertainIncompleteInputShortcutsAnalyzingIncomplete Information
Author:Leonard Mlodinow
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“Science has revealed a universe that is vast, ancient, violent, strange, and beautiful, a universe of almost infinite variety and possibility one in which time can end in a black hole, and conscious beings can evolve from a soup of minerals.”

EndsBeautifulUniverseBlackPossibilityStrangeConsciousInfiniteAncientViolentHolesVarietyEvolveSoupMineralsBlack Hole
Book:War of the Worldviews: Where Science and Spirituality Meet -- and Do Not
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“When we are in the grasp of illusion - or, for that matter, whenever we have a new idea - instead of searching for ways to prove our ideas wrong, we usually attempt to prove them correct. Psychologists call this the confirmation bias, and it presents a major impediment of our ability to break free from the misinterpretation of randomness.”

WayIdeasMatterAbilityBreakProveMajorsIllusionBiasNew IdeasPsychologistConfirmationImpedimentsRandomnessMisinterpretation
Book:The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
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