science
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Resonant Thoughts: David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World” (2011)
“…in reality the future is unlike the past, the unseen very different from the seen. Science often predicts – and brings about – phenomena spectacularly different from anything that has been experienced before” (6). “Discovering a new explanation is inherently an act of creativity” (7). “We never know any data before interpreting it through theories. Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Richard W. Hamming’s “The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn” (1997)
“How are you to recognize ‘fundamentals’? One test is they have lasted a long time. Another test is from the fundamentals all the rest of the field can be derived by using the standard methods in the field” (9). “Creativity seems, among other things, to be ‘usefully’ putting together things which were not perceived to Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Philip Ball’s “Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does” (2016)
“Perhaps the most curious thing about natural patterns is that they come from a relatively limited palette, recurring at very different size scales and in systems that might seem to have nothing at all in common with one another” (12). “What is a pattern, anyway? We usually think of it as something that repeats again Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nadia Asparouhova’s “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading” (2025)
“Creative self-expression is the only way we will continue to make our mark as humans in times of uncertainty, and it doesn’t come from doing what you think will sell to other people “(21). “Antimemetics are a shadow city built on thoughts, knowledge, and practices that do not spread easily, despite their importance to our Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Alex Hutchinson’s “The Explorer’s Gene” (2025)
“It turns out that minimizing surprise is equivalent to minimizing entropy, which in turn is equivalent to minimizing another mathematical quantity (borrowed from physics) called free energy. In this way, the goal of minimizing surprise explains both perception and action. We act […] in order to ensure that our predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies” (58). “The Continue reading
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On Our Din And Roar: Thinking About Loud Sounds
I’ve been a wearer of earplugs for about fifteen years now. The reason? I work regularly in a loud orchestra pit and live in a loud city and ironically enough, I have never really liked loud sounds. (Which is perversely a big part of the reason I became a percussionist: either to become a victim Continue reading
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