Top Highlights

• Books such as The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins advise us to peer fearlessly into the void, to accept our irrelevance with good cheer. But this belies the real challenge: Most people without endowed professorships at Oxford University find it difficult to think of their own unimportance with equanimity. In fact, in a meeting at his beautiful home...
• Consider this simplest of examples—the organ you are using to read this book: In any given second, the human eye collects about a billion bits of information. This flood of data is compressed a thousand times, and only one million bits of information are sent to the brain via the optic nerve. The brain keeps just forty bits of this data, and discar...