It’s twenty-five years later from the time that I started working on this, and we understand something quite different about the Gospel of Thomas. What it looks like more than anything else, when you put it in context with other historical material, is Jewish mystical thought, or, Kabbalah. Kabbalah, we thought, was first known from written texts from the 10th to the 15th centuries from Spanish-Jewish communities. Before that, there was a prohibition on writing about secret teaching. It was mystical teaching that you were not supposed to write about because you don't know what fool could get ahold of it if you did. So, there was a prohibition on teaching anyone mystical Judaism before he was thirty-five, and certainly not to women. People were old by thirty-five, so you had to be a mature Jewish man to have access to that kind of teaching. 
 
 I, and others who study Jewish mystical thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, suspect that this tradition goes back 2,000 years. This text says it’s Jesus’ secret teaching. Could it be? It could be. I don't know if it is or not, but it’s fascinating to see that what rabbis called “mystical thought” was labeled by Christian bishops in the 4th century to be heresy. That’s when I realized how religious imagination and politics coincide, because of the politics in the 4th century when Christian bishops were beginning to ask who this Jesus of Nazareth was. Jesus was God in human form, and he’s the only one who is the Son of God in human form. So, you can create a monopoly on divine energy and power with a religion that has the only access to the only person in the universe who ever channeled God directly, or was God and became human. That works very well for Orthodox Christianity. . . . 
 
 These discoveries are changing the way we understand how cultural traditions were shaped and how they became part of the culture in very different forms than they had begun. I find that enormously exciting. They involve everything from attitudes about gender and sexuality to attitudes about power and politics, about race, and gender, and ethnicity. That’s why I began to write about Adam and Eve. I mean, who cares about Adam and Eve? You realize that those traditions still play out in the culture—in the laws of the United States, or the laws of Britain, or the laws in Africa, the laws against homosexuality, and the ones that claim that the only true marriage can be a marriage between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation. The Defense of Marriage Act was written by Professor Robert George at Princeton for G.W. Bush. These things still resonate, often very unconsciously, in the culture. 
 
 ELAINE PAGELS is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author, most recently, of Why Religion?: A Personal Story. Elaine Pagels' Edge Bio Page ||||| NEW YORK (Reuters) - From Darwinian evolution to the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance, the favorite theories of the world's most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself. 
 
 Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question. 
 
 In previous years, they have included "how is the Internet changing the way you think?" and "what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?" 
 
 This year, he posed the open-ended question "what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?" 
 
 The responses, released at midnight on Sunday, provide a crash course in science both well known and far out-of-the-box, as admired by the likes of Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, physicist Freeman Dyson and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. 
 
 Several of the nearly 200 scholars nominated what are arguably the two most powerful scientific theories ever developed. "Darwin's natural selection wins hands down," argues Dawkins, emeritus professor at Oxford University. 
 
 "Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few," he says of the theory that encompasses everything about life, based on the idea of natural selection operating on random genetic mutations. 
 
 Einstein's theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the curvature of space, also gets a few nods. 
 
 As theoretical physicist Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, writes, "This central idea has shaped our ideas of modern cosmology (and) given us the image of the expanding universe." 
 
 General relativity explains black holes, the bending of light and "even offers a possible explanation of the origin of our Universe - as quantum tunneling from 'nothing,'" he writes. 
 
 Many of the nominated ideas, however, won't be found in science courses taught in high school or even college. 
 
 Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, extols the discovery that the conscious, deliberative mind is not the author of important decisions such as what work people do and who they marry. Instead, he writes, "an ancient brain system called the basal ganglia, brain circuits that consciousness cannot access," pull the strings. 
 
 Running on the neurochemical dopamine, they predict how rewarding a choice will be - if I pick this apartment, how happy will I be? - "evaluate the current state of the entire cortex and inform the brain about the best course of action," explains Sejnowski. Only later do people construct an explanation of their choices, he said in an interview, convincing themselves incorrectly that volition and logic were responsible. 
 
 To neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University, the most beautiful idea is emergence, in which complex phenomena almost magically come into being from extremely simple components. 
 
 For instance, a human being arises from a few thousand genes. The intelligence of an ant colony - labor specialization, intricate underground nests - emerges from the seemingly senseless behavior of thousands of individual ants. 
 
 "Critically, there's no blueprint or central source of command," says Sapolsky. Each individual ant has a simple algorithm for interacting with the environment, "and out of this emerges a highly efficient colony." 
 
 Among other tricks, the colony has solved the notorious Traveling Salesman problem, or the challenge of stopping at a long list of destinations by the shortest route possible. 
 
 THE OTHER PAVLOVIAN EFFECT 
 
 Stephen Kosslyn, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, is most impressed by Pavlovian conditioning, in which a neutral stimulus such as a sound comes to be associated with a reward, such as food, producing a response, such as salivation. 
 
 That much is familiar. Less well known is that Pavlovian conditioning might account for placebo effects. After people have used analgesics such as ibuprofen or aspirin many times, the drugs begin to have effects before their active ingredients kick in. 
 
 From previous experience, the mere act of taking the pill has become like Pavlov's bell was for his dogs, causing them to salivate: the "conditioned stimulus" of merely seeing the pill "triggers the pain-relieving processes invoked by the medicine itself," explains Kosslyn. 
 
 Science theories that explain puzzling human behavior or the inner workings of the universe were also particular favorites of the Edge contributors: 
 
 * Psychologist Alison Gopnik of the University of California, Berkeley, is partial to one that accounts for why teenagers are so restless, reckless and emotional. Two brain systems, an emotional motivational system and a cognitive control system, have fallen out of sync, she explains. 
 
 The control system that inhibits impulses and allows you to delay gratification kicks in later than it did in past generations, but the motivational system is kicking in earlier and earlier. 
 
 The result: "A striking number of young adults who are enormously smart and knowledgeable but directionless, who are enthusiastic and exuberant but unable to commit to a particular work or a particular love until well into their twenties or thirties." 
 
 BEAUTIFUL IDEAS 
 
 * Neurobiologist Sam Barondes of the University of California, San Francisco, nominates the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance. One serendipitous force is which parental genes happen to be in the egg and sperm that produced the child. 
 
 "But there is also chance in how neurodevelopmental processes unfold - a little virus here, an intrauterine event there, and you have chance all over the place," he said in an interview. Another toss of the dice: how a parent will respond to a child's genetic disposition to be outgoing, neurotic, open to new experience and the like, either reinforcing the innate tendencies or countering them. 
 
 The role of chance in creating differences between people has moral consequences, says Barondes, "promoting understanding and compassion for the wide range of people with whom we share our lives." 
 
 * Timothy Wilson nominates the idea that "people become what they do." While people's behavior arises from their character - someone returns a lost wallet because she is honest - "the reverse also holds," says the University of Virginia psychologist. If we return a lost wallet, our assessment of how honest we are rises through what he calls "self-inference." One implication of this phenomenon: "We should all heed Kurt Vonnegut's advice," Wilson says: "'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.'" 
 
 * Psychologist David Myers of Hope College finds "group polarization" a beautiful idea, since it explains how interacting with others tends to amplify people's initial views. In particular, discussing issues with like-minded peers -increasingly the norm in the United States, where red states attract conservatives and blue states attract liberals - push people toward extremes. "The surprising thing is that the group as a whole becomes more extreme than its pre-discussion average," he said in an interview. 
 
 * Martin Rees, professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, nominates the "astonishing concept" that what we consider the universe "could be hugely more extensive" than what astronomers observe. 
 
 If true, the known cosmos may instead "be a tiny part of the aftermath of 'our' big bang, which is itself just one bang among a perhaps-infinite ensemble," Rees writes. Even more intriguing is that different physics might prevail in these different universes, so that "some of what we call 'laws of nature' may ... be local bylaws." 
 
 (Reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Michele Gershberg) ||||| Why Is Our World Comprehensible? 
 
 "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." This is one of the most famous quotes from Albert Einstein. "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." Similarly, Eugene Wigner said that the unreasonable efficiency of mathematics is "a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." Thus we have a problem that may seem too metaphysical to be addressed in a meaningful way: Why do we live in a comprehensible universe with certain rules, which can be efficiently used for predicting our future? 
 
 One could always respond that God created the universe and made it simple enough so that we can comprehend it. This would match the words about a miracle and an undeserved gift. But shall we give up so easily? Let us consider several other questions of a similar type. Why is our universe so large? Why parallel lines do not intersect? Why different parts of the universe look so similar? For a long time such questions looked too metaphysical to be considered seriously. Now we know that inflationary cosmology provides a possible answer to all of these questions. Let us see whether it might help us again. 
 
 To understand the issue, consider some examples of an incomprehensible universe where mathematics would be inefficient. Here is the first one: Suppose the universe is in a state with the Planck density r ~ 1094 g/cm3. Quantum fluctuations of space-time in this regime are so large that all rulers are rapidly bending and shrinking in an unpredictable way. This happens faster than one could measure distance. All clocks are destroyed faster than one could measure time. All records about the previous events become erased, so one cannot remember anything and predict the future. The universe is incomprehensible for anybody living there, and the laws of mathematics cannot be efficiently used. 
 
 If the huge density example looks a bit extreme, rest assured that it is not. There are three basic types of universes: closed, open and flat. A typical closed universe created in the hot Big Bang would collapse in about 10-43 seconds, in a state with the Planck density. A typical open universe would grow so fast that formation of galaxies would be impossible, and our body would be instantly torn apart. Nobody would be able to live and comprehend the universe in either of these two cases. We can enjoy life in a flat or nearly flat universe, but this requires fine-tuning of initial conditions at the moment of the Big Bang with an incredible accuracy of about 10-60. 
 
 Recent developments in string theory, which is the most popular (though extremely complicated) candidate for the role of the theory of everything, reveal an even broader spectrum of possible but incomprehensible universes. According to the latest developments in string theory, we may have about 10500 (or more) choices of the possible state of the world surrounding us. All of these choices follow from the same string theory. However, the universes corresponding to each of these choices would look as if they were governed by different laws of physics; their common roots would be well hidden. Since there are so many different choices, some of them may describe the universe we live in. But most of these choices would lead to a universe where we would be unable to live and efficiently use mathematics and physics to predict the future. 
 
 At the time when Einstein and Wigner were trying to understand why our universe is comprehensible, everybody assumed that the universe is uniform and the laws of physics are the same everywhere. In this context, recent developments would only sharpen the formulation of the problem: We must be incredibly lucky to live in the universe where life is possible and the universe is comprehensible. This would indeed look like a miracle, like a "gift that we neither understand nor deserve." Can we do anything better than praying for a miracle? 
 
 During the last 30 years the way we think about our world changed profoundly. We found that inflation, the stage of an exponentially rapid expansion of the early universe, makes our part of the universe flat and extremely homogeneous. However, simultaneously with explaining why the observable part of the universe is so uniform, we also found that on a very large scale, well beyond the present visibility horizon of about 1010 light years, the universe becomes 100% non-uniform due to quantum effects amplified by inflation. 
 
 This means that instead of looking like an expanding spherically symmetric ball, our world looks like a multiverse, a collection of an incredibly large number of exponentially large bubbles. For (almost) all practical purposes, each of these bubbles looks like a separate universe. Different laws of the low energy physics operate inside each of these universes. 
 
 In some of these universes, quantum fluctuations are so large that any computations are impossible. Mathematics there is inefficient because predictions cannot be memorized and used. Lifetime of some of these universes is too short. Some other universes are long living but laws of physics there do not allow existence of anybody who could live sufficiently long to learn physics and mathematics. 
 
 Fortunately, among all possible parts of the multiverse there should be some exponentially large parts where we may live. But our life is possible only if the laws of physics operating in our part of the multiverse allow formation of stable, long-living structures capable of making computations. This implies existence of stable (mathematical) relations that can be used for long-term predictions. Rapid development of the human race was possible only because we live in the part of the multiverse where the long-term predictions are so useful and efficient that they allow us to survive in the hostile environment and win in the competition with other species. 
 
 To summarize, the inflationary multiverse consists of myriads of 'universes' with all possible laws of physics and mathematics operating in each of them. We can only live in those universes where the laws of physics allow our existence, which requires making reliable predictions. In other words, mathematicians and physicists can only live in those universes which are comprehensible and where the laws of mathematics are efficient. 
 
 One can easily dismiss everything that I just said as a wild speculation. It seems very intriguing, however, that in the context of the new cosmological paradigm, which was developed during the last 30 years, we might be able, for the first time, to approach one of the most complicated and mysterious problems which bothered some of the best scientists of the 20th century.
– Every year, the website Edge poses a big, open-ended question to leading scientists. This year's query—"What is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?"—received 191 answers covering a wide range of ideas, with Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution receiving the most replies, reports Reuters. Some interesting responses: "Darwin's natural selection wins hands down," writes Richard Dawkins, unsurprisingly. "Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few." Einstein's Relativity: "This central idea has shaped our ideas of modern cosmology (and) given us the image of the expanding universe," writes one theoretical physicist. The human brain's fundamental irrationality: "An ancient brain system called the basal ganglia, brain circuits that consciousness cannot access" control our major life decisions, one neuroscientist writes. Group polarization: Interacting with others does not mellow our opinions, but pushes us to extremes in politics and other issues. "The surprising thing is that the group as a whole becomes more extreme than its pre-discussion average," writes a psychologist.