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POPSThe Physics of Information: What the Universe Doesn't Want You to Know The panellists for the discussion were:Dr. Leonard Susskind is widely recognized as one of the most creative researchers in the field of theoretical particle physics. Dr. Seth Lloyd is a Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Dr. Christopher Fuchs is a Long Term Visitor with Perimeter Institute and is an adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of New Mexico. Sir Anthony Leggett is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
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POPSARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION? we need not assume that the thesis of substrate-independence is necessarily true (either analytically or metaphysically) – just that, in fact, a computer running a suitable program would be conscious
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POPSThe Great Silence His question became famously known as the Fermi Paradox. The paradox is the contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and yet the lack of evidence for, or contact with, any such civilizations.
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POPSFoundational Questions Institute (FQXi) Mission To catalyze, support, and disseminate research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.
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POPSDYNAMIC OPTIMISM Unimaginably vast in scope and complexity, reality cannot be fully recognized at any one time. a worthwhile read
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POPSWhat is Thought? (book review) "One thing that most impressed me about the book is the underlying theme that he refers to as his version of Occam's razor and summarizes as follows: mind is a complex but still compact program that captures and exploits the underlying compact structure of the world.To understand something about the world is to capture its features in a compact subroutine that allows one to effectively interact with it.
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POPSUnder a Green Sky "that we are on a planet that has violent convulsions, and that we humans are playing with nature in such a way that we could recreate what were some really awful times in earth's history, that we really tinker with the earth's atmosphere at our peril."
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POPSHow cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict Author Robert Wright explains "non-zero-sumness," a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the Muslim world and the West, will lead to all of us losing the "game." Once we recognize that life is a non-zero-sum game, in which we all must cooperate to succeed, it will force us to see that moral progress -- a move toward empathy -- is our only hope.
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POPSAbsinthe Wormwood (in French, absinthe; in German, Wermut) is an herb with a perennial root system from which arise branched, firm, leafy stems that are almost woody at the base and reach a height of two to three feet. Its flowers are tiny, greenish-yellow and globular, and its indented leaves have a silvery-gray sheen. The species was cultivated from the Middle Ages to the early part of the 20th century.
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