Origin by Brown
Ref: Dan Brown (2017). Origin. Doubleday Books.
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Summary
Dan Brown answers the universal mysteries: Where do we come from? Where are we going? Human creation and human destiny.
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Entropy
Dissipative structures: collections of molecules that have arranged themselves in structures that help a system disperse its energy more efficiently.
Tornadoes and cyclones are nature’s way of dispelling a concentrated area of high pressure by converting it into a rotational force that eventually exhausted itself. The same holds true for rippled riverbeds, which intercept the energy of fast-moving currents and dissipates it. Snowflakes disperse the sun’s energy by forming multifaceted structures that reflected light chaotically outward in all directions.
Matter self-organizes in an effort to better disperse energy. Nature—in an effort to promote disorder—creates little pockets of order.
If blazing sunlight hit a patch of fertile dirt, the physical laws of the earth would create a plant to help dissipate that energy. If deep-ocean sulfur vents created areas of boiling water, life would materialize in those locations and disseminate the energy.
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Misc Quotes
Game Theory: A field of mathematics that studies patterns in order to make predictions about the future.
To permit ignorance is to empower it. To do nothing as our leaders proclaim absurdities is a crime of complacency. As is letting our schools and churches teach outright untruths to our children.
Religion, because thinking is hard.
Not until we purge our species of superstitious thinking can we embrace all that our minds have to offer.
Since the beginning of time, world religions have been humanity’s most important organizing principle, a road map for civilized society, and our original source of ethics and morality.
How can it be that the modern human mind is capable of precise logical analysis, and yet simultaneously permits us to accept religious beliefs that should crumble beneath even the slightest rational scrutiny?
Monogamy; an affront to evolution.
The challenge with synthetic intelligence is not the rapid access to data, which is really quite simple, but rather the ability to discern how the data are interconnected and entangled.
Lunatics will rise to power again and again on tidal waves of aggressive nationalism and intolerance, even in places where it seems utterly incomprehensible.
“Where do we come from?” he asked. “The truth is—we come from nowhere...and from everywhere. We come from the same laws of physics that create life across the cosmos. We are not special. We exist with or without God. We are the inevitable result of entropy. Life is not the point of the universe. Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces in order to dissipate energy.
Despise Chaos, Create Order- this is our brain’s root program.
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Chronology
1508: The Heliocentric Model is theorized by Nicolaus Copernicus; the belief that the planets revolve around the sun, ignites a scientific revolution in the 1500s that entirely obliterated the Church’s long-held teaching that mankind occupied the center of God’s universe. His discovery was condemned by the Church for three centuries.-Origin by Brown.
1090-ish: The Incoherence of the Philosophers is published by Hamid al-Ghazali; at the time the greatest intellectual exploration and discoveries on earth were taking place in and around Baghdad. Then, almost overnight, that changed. A brilliant scholar named Hamid al-Ghazali—now considered one of the most influential Muslims in history—wrote a series of persuasive texts questioning the logic of Plato and Aristotle and declaring mathematics to be ‘the philosophy of the devil.’ This began a confluence of events that undermined scientific thinking. The study of theology was made compulsory, and eventually the entire Islamic scientific movement collapsed.-Origin by Brown.
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