Umwelt Hacking: Difference between revisions

'''It's not that there's no more low hanging fruit. It's that this was a particular orchard, and it was the Umwelt Hacking Orchard.''' And just by hacking your Umwelt with instruments—you know, you want to see whether you have a tumor? If you didn't have a CAT scan, or, you know, you wanted to watch the brain work? Well, we didn't have functional MRI, you know, that's a good—that's probably a better example. Now that we have that, we can ask simple questions, and the tool will tell you things that you could never have known about any other way.  

Well, a lot of what we're now finding with these tools has no industrial application, doesn't change your life. And I always point to the same one, which is that in 1968, we found quarks. Every proton and every neutron has three valence quarks in it, and it doesn't have any industrial applications whatsoever. So try to imagine that in every atom, you found additional structure, and you haven't been unable to do anything with it. You know, now we can hear the chirps of black holes colliding through the LIGO experiment.