Adam Becker

We wouldn't understand how our eyes can see that the sun shines.

We wouldn't understand, and I mean this in the most general way possible, the phenomenon of solidness.

Wow.

Like, we wouldn't understand not only why I'm not passing through this couch right now, but why my bones are solid at all in the first place.

Quantum physics.

Physics is necessary for understanding where the periodic table of the elements comes from and the idea of molecular structure.

So all of chemistry and thus all of biochemistry and thus all of life.

So quantum physics explains, you know, or has a really important role in explaining almost every single possible natural phenomenon.

Humans are curious.

If we're going to try to engage in the dangerous game of coming up with fundamental human behaviors that are true across cultures, I do think that curiosity is a really good candidate for one.

And also, more generally, and this is me stealing from my book, so the ideas that we get from science, the picture of the world that comes with our best scientific theories,

it filters out into the wider culture.

Science is not a separate human activity from the rest of the human world.

It is of a piece with the rest of human activity, with art and politics and music and the social sciences and the physical sciences and the biological sciences.

These all form a unified whole.

And so the pictures of the world that come from science

not only go out into the other sciences, but out into the wider world.

Like a really, really simple and facile and total white dude example.

If Copernicus and company had not un-centered the Earth,

and shown us that no, the Earth is not at the center of the universe.