Too many cooks… (Image: Spencer Wilson)
A watched pot never boils and the early bird does catch the worm, but you can teach old dogs new tricks
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise
Answering that would involve tracking how our habits influence our development over many years. Luckily, the US has been doing just that with some 15,000 young people since 1994. In the fourth wave of interviews in 2008, with respondents aged between 24 and 34, self-confessed night owls tended to have higher IQs – and higher-paid jobs. Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics : the more intelligent you are, the more likely you are to adopt novel evolutionary practices such as being up at the witching hour. So while the jury remains out on the healthy part, if you want to make a packet, take a mallet to that alarm clock.
No time like the present
We might feel as if we are perpetually trapped in the present, unable to ever reach the future or return to the past. Poppycock, say physicists. Since Einstein, time and space have been bound together in one combined space-time. In this picture, all of time just “is” and there’s no distinctive “now” any more than there is an objectively defined “here” (New Scientist, 2 November 2013, p 34). In the words of the moustachioed meister himself, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” That’s you told.
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Seems so. It has been shown, for instance, that countries where the highest executive bodies are smaller tend to score better on measures of economic and social development (New Scientist, 10 January 2009, p 38). The latest example comes from Paola Aversa of the Cass Business School in London. Looking at every Formula 1 race in the 30 years until 2010, she found teams with two star drivers .
Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight
Or sailor’s delight, as another common version has it. Either way, there is a grain of truth in the saying. , it is most reliable in places such as Britain, where the weather tends to come from the west. High pressure systems – an augury of good weather – trap dust particles in the atmosphere that scatter and attenuate bluish wavelengths of light, making for a rosy hue from the setting sun.
If the red light comes from the rising sun in the east, meanwhile, the high-pressure system has already passed over you, with wetter, windier conditions on the way – and a shepherd’s or sailor’s warning.
The early bird catches the worm
True, if of the University of Oxford is anything to go by. Following the foraging strategies of tits in a nearby woodland, they found that most food was discovered in the very early hours of the day. Oddly, though, birds often returned to fully exploit their finds later – perhaps, the researchers speculate, because otherwise the early bird-eater might catch the early bird stuffed full of worms.
A watched pot never boils
True – as long as it’s a quantum pot. Objects governed by quantum laws lead generally shadowy lives, and according to the most popular interpretation of this most bamboozling theory are only usually nudged to take on a definitive guise by observing them. One odd consequence, described by mathematician Alan Turing in 1954, is the quantum Zeno effect: observe an unstable quantum particle often enough and you can actually prevent it from ever evolving. First in ions trapped in a magnetic field in 1990, the effect could be used to tame the annoyingly unruly “qubits” of future super-powerful quantum computers.
Familiarity breeds contempt
Family get-togethers can be as full of needles as the carpet under the Christmas tree. But do we really treat people worse the better we know them? Convincing proof is thin on the ground, perhaps because we tend to act differently when men and women with clipboards are watching us. In 2007, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and his colleagues did claim proof with evidence that the more information we are fed about a hypothetical person, . This only unleashed with rival researchers about whether that . So perhaps pretend you don’t know your nearest and dearest, and see if that makes things any better.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks
Not so: the past few years have seen a sea change in our estimations of what the adult human brain can do. Any decline in our learning abilities with age would seem to have more to do with the fact that we have a lot more to think about rather than our capabilities (New Scientist, 25 May 2013, p 32).
As for Bouncer, it might look as if he’s intent on imitating a fireside rug for the rest of his days, but Lisa Wallis of the at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria, and her colleagues have shown that attention span and sensorimotor abilities actually peak in canine middle age – and .
There is life in the old dog yet.
Two wrongs don’t make a right
The true value of a double negative divides logicians and linguists. Back in 2008, quantum-information researchers found their own answer of sorts. They were experimenting with sending quantum-encoded signals down channels so noisy that the signals were obliterated in transit. Sending the same signal simultaneously down two such channels, you might expect the same thing to happen twice. In fact, the signal arrived crystal clear – . As so often with quantum physics, the aim isn’t to understand, just to accept. “Shut up and calculate!”, as the discipline’s practitioners are wont to say.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Pearls of wisdom”