Time Travel

October 27, 2015

This week’s episode of EconTalk opens with an amazing quote, which I felt was to good not to share:

It took only 26 minutes for Anna to push Iris into the hands of the nervous but focused medical student who received her. Twenty-six minutes sounds like a short time for delivery. And it is. And I will argue that the trip that Iris made that night was not a 26-minute trip down a few inches of birth canal, but a hundred thousand year journey from a distant past to an alien future. In 26 minutes, Iris traveled from the ancientness of her mother’s womb to the modernity of 21st century society. Birth is in essence time travel.

-César Hidalgo, Why Information Grows

During the rest of the interview, César discusses less philosophical, and more concrete topics, including his research on physics, economics, complex networks and data visualization. I had previously played with his Observatory of Economic Complexity project, and I am very much looking forward to reading about his new work on collective memory.

I definitely know what book I am reading next.

Image: “Studies of embryos” by Leonardo da Vinci - Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

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