Mathematics became an experimental subject. Individuals could follow previously intractable problems by simply watching what happened when they were … - John Barrow

If musical appreciation is a by-product of a more general pattern-processing propensity of the brain, then why are our senses heightened by pink noises? It is significant that the world around us is full of variations with 1/f spectra. Benoit Mandelbrot has pioneered the study of natural and computer-generated patterns that are scale-free. (He calls them fractals...) Mandelbrot draws attention to the fact that there is a pattern to the noise spectrum displayed by the human nervous system. At the extremities of the body... it tends to be of white-noise form; but, as one approaches closer to the central nervous system and the brain, these variations become 1/f-like. Our nervous system may act as a spectral filter to prevent the brain from being swamped with uninteresting white background noise about the world...

While we have no reason to expect that our position in the universe is special in every way, we would be equally misled were we to assume that it could not be special in any way.

Everyone knows there are billions and billions of stars, and national debts conjure up similar astronomical numbers. Yet we have found a way to hide the zeros: 10⁹ doesn't look as bad as 1,000,000,000.