Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018 at the age of 76, was a physicist from another time.He had more in common with the celebrity scientists of the first half of the 20th century — especially the politically-inclined scientist-intellectuals like Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, and Enrico Fermi who came out of the Manhattan Project — than he did with any of his contemporaries. This isn’t so much a question of brainpower as it is of public positioning, as getting the public to understand new scientific ideas is a very different job than coming up with them. On the whole, our most prominent science communicators (Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Michio Kaku, etc.) do not actively produce science. Consequently, they are removed from the everyday slog and department politics that pervade the life of a working researcher. Meanwhile, our greatest researchers (a huge list of people I don’t want to enumerate for fear of leaving someone out) don’t prioritize telling the public what their work is and why it matters. Hawking, with his precise insights about physics and beyond who also possessed the power to capture the attention of the public, was a rare link between these two groups. Though some younger physicists like, for instance, Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at Caltech, and Lisa Randall, a particle physicist at Harvard, have similarly rare combinations of theoretical sophistication and an ability to communicate this sophistication clearly, the Hawking’s wide-ranging skills will be hard to replace. After all, I can’t think of anyone else who was able to both shape the modern understanding of black holes and make the only actually funny joke ever aired on The Big Bang Theory.
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An artist’s concept illustrates a quasar or feeding black hole. Photo from NASA / ESA / Getty Images.
Physicists who have been roaming the “landscape” of string theory—the space of zillions and zillions of mathematical solutions of the theory, where each solution provides the kinds of equations physicists need to describe reality—have stumbled upon a subset of such equations that have the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe.
But this is no small subset: there are at least a quadrillion such solutions, making it the largest such set ever found in string theory.
According to string theory, all particles and fundamental forces arise from the vibrational states of tiny strings. For mathematical consistency, these strings vibrate in 10-dimensional spacetime. And for consistency with our familiar everyday experience of the universe, with three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time, the additional six dimensions are “compactified” so as to be undetectable.
The town of Yokadouma lies in remote eastern Cameroon, close to the border with the Central African Republic, at a juncture of narrow roads that—when I visited, in May 2010, near the end of the long dry season—were unpaved and parched, their laterite clay pounded to powder by logging trucks rumbling north from the Republic of the Congo. The town’s name translates as Standing Elephant, and in the central roundabout stood an elephant statue, its tusks and part of its trunk broken off, rebar protruding. I checked in to the Hotel Elephant, whose dining room had a gorilla skull hung on one wall, a python skin stretched beside it. I remember the place because it was here, on the following morning, that I met my first pangolin, which was also my last.
A young man from the kitchen staff had just brought this piteous creature back from the town market. He carried it by its tail as it dangled, groggy, and helpless. It was reddish-brown, like the roadside trees, and for the same reason—it was caked with dust. The scales covering its head, body, and tail looked like rusty metal feathers. Pangolins are amazing animals, loosely known as scaly anteaters because of their armored skin and their diet, their elongated heads and their toothless mouths, though they aren’t closely related to true anteaters. In fact, they constitute a group of their own, one of the oddest of mammalian orders, the Pholidota, which contains only eight living species (the order of bats comprises fourteen hundred species). They are similar to carnivores by descent, and to armadillos by convergent evolution. They eat termites as well as ants, but they are virtually incapable of harming any other form of a living creature, except in their own defense.
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Pangolins are susceptible to capture by humans—and to coronaviruses. Photograph by Brent Stirton / Getty
What makes someone great at their job? Having knowledge, smarts, and vision, to be sure. But what really distinguishes the world’s most successful leaders is emotional intelligence — or the ability to identify and monitor emotions (of their own and of others).
Companies today are increasingly looking through the lens of emotional intelligence when hiring, promoting, and developing their employees. Years of studies show that the more emotional intelligence someone has, the better their performance.
What most people fail to realize, though, is that mastering emotional intelligence doesn’t come naturally. Tom, for example, considers himself an emotionally intelligent person. He’s a well-liked manager who is kind, respectful, nice to be around, and sensitive to the needs of others.
And yet, he often wonders, I have all the qualities of emotional intelligence, so why do I still feel stuck in my career?
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“The Office”: Steve Carell as Michael Scott (Photo: Chris Haston/NBCU Photo Bank)
In an era of better technology, we are all being rewired to do more to the detriment of our brains. According to experts, our modern lifestyle is chipping away at neural pathways and making us slower, denser, and less capable of original thought. Hyperconnectivity is increasingly taking its toll on our brains. In the end, we end up less productive and ineffective.
When it comes to our health, we don’t always think about nurturing our brains the way we nourish our bodies. But to be our most productive self, we need to do more of what improves our brain health, and less of what causes cognitive decline. Start by adjusting your daily habits and avoiding these common modern habits — your mind will thank you.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
James' World 2 