Some people get depressed when they find out how huge the universe is. They feel tiny and insignificant and think that nothing matters in this world.

That makes no more sense than getting depressed when you find out that cows are bigger than you. What is the big deal about bigness? A cow is much bigger than you, but it is a ridiculous animal and you are a valuable person. You know it’s a cow. It doesn’t know anything. it just stands there eating grass (grass!) and mooing. And if it were bigger, that would only make it more ridiculous.

I think that is a complete refutation of the idea that the size of the universe makes us insignificant, or is depressing any other way.

Here’s an interesting little manifestation of the connection between knowledge and wealth. Thanks to the wonderfully low transaction costs that the internet has made possible in certain areas of the economy, people are making money by correcting the spelling of other people hundreds of miles away whom they do not know and need not even consult.

My answer to the Edge question 2004, What Is Your Law? is here.

A preprint of my new paper Qubit Field Theory is available here.

An article Quantum Computers by me appears in The New Humanists: Science at the Edge, John Brockman, Ed. (Barnes & Noble, 2003).

My contribution It From Qubit (PDF file here) to the celebrations of John Wheeler’s 90th birthday will appear in Science & Ultimate Reality, John Barrow, Paul Davies, Charles Harper, Eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

If you know any of the answers, please email them to me at david.deutsch@qubit.org and earn my eternal gratitude.

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In what class of 4-dimensional spacetimes does there exist a real, non-constant scalar field φ with the following properties:

• It obeys the wave equation: ⧠φ=0
• Its gradient is everywhere null: ∇φ.∇φ=0

(I would like the answer to be: “almost none”, but don’t let that influence you.)

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I read somewhere (I think it was in the works of George Mikes) that in the early months of World War 2, one of the London newspapers staged the following stunt: they got someone to dress in the uniform of a Nazi storm trooper and march up and down Whitehall all day, and no one paid any attention. Did that happen, and if so, where can I find out about it?

Answer: Thanks to K.A. Taipale and Ben McCracken for this story. It’s so similar to what I remember reading that it must presumably refer to the same event, though some of the details are significantly different. Memory – mine or George Mikes’s – may have played tricks.

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Churchill once quoted Disraeli as saying “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews”. Is this merely a paraphrase of Disraeli quoting Genesis 12:3, or is it literally a quote from Disraeli? Either way, where did Disraeli say it?

Answer: Thanks to Steven Gerard Wagner for the following: “Although the quote captured what Disraeli conveyed in his 1854 parliamentary speech, as well as several of his literary works, Disraeli never put it exactly that way; the quote was apparently transmitted orally by Gladstone.” (Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land, page 47, with note 15 reference to Jenkins’s bio. of Gladstone).”

Thanks also to Michael Bacon, Guido Deutsch (no relation), Caroline Rogers, and Richard Dowling, each of whom supplied essentially the same answer independently.

You’ve heard of Crop Circles? Well, here’s something even stranger which I have seen with my own eyes, and have personally photographed:

Crop CylindersMoreover, I will stake my scientific reputation on the proposition that these cylinders not only existed, but were no accident: they were placed there by intelligent beings – and later removed to a destination I can only guess at.