The Need to Know

We humans are uniquely endowed with both the capacity and the desire to understand ourselves and our world. Leonard Mlodinow - The Upright Thinkers Our need to know may even exceed our drive for food as my guest this week, on most of our PBS stations, emphasizes in his latest book The Upright Thinkers. The renowned physicist Dr. Leonard Mlodinow, is the co-author of The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking and author of The Drunkard's Walk, Sublime and others that explain the universe and world we live in and the role we play with in it. Our conversation of this primal drive to know is divided into two parts. The first episode airing this week takes us from our primitive ancestors who lived in trees to Sir Isaac Newton. In Part II, which airs next week, we go from the wisdom of Newton to the most current knowledge we have about our universe. However, what does it really mean to have knowledge in our current "Age of Information?" With nearly an infinite amount of information at our fingertips it seems that our focus on knowledge is too often usurped by trivial data and an overall lack of deep insight into the real concerns of our time. "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" -- T.S. Eliot Unlike T.S. Eliot, I do not believe we lost the wisdom or knowledge but that it is hiding from us amidst the vast oceans of information and it is up to us to go deep sea fishing and reel it up from the depths of some very cho...

Source: Science - The Huffington Post - July 25, 2015 Category: Science Source Type: news