Bøger i The Frontiers Collection serien

Like its much acclaimed predecessor "Quantum [Un]Speakables: From Bell to Quantum Information" (published 2002), it comprises essays by many of the worlds leading quantum physicists and philosophers.

This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy.

In this essay collection, leading physicists, philosophers, and historians attempt to fill the empty theoretical ground in the foundations of information and address the related question of the limits to our knowledge of the world.Over recent decades, our practical approach to information and its exploitation has radically outpaced our theoretical understanding - to such a degree that reflection on the foundations may seem futile. But it is exactly fields such as quantum information, which are shifting the boundaries of the physically possible, that make a foundational understanding of information increasingly important. One of the recurring themes of the book is the claim by Eddington and Wheeler that information involves interaction and putting agents or observers centre stage. Thus, physical reality, in their view, is shaped by the questions we choose to put to it and is built up from the information residing at its core. This is the root of Wheeler¿s famous phrase ¿it from bit.¿ After reading the stimulating essays collected in this volume, readers will be in a good position to decide whether they agree with this view.

The prize-winning essays in this book address the fascinating but sometimes uncomfortable relationship between physics and mathematics. Is mathematics merely another natural science? Or is it the result of human creativity? Does physics simply wear mathematics like a costume, or is math the lifeblood of physical reality?The nineteen wide-ranging, highly imaginative and often entertaining essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries to the FQXi essay competition ¿Trick or Truth¿, which attracted over 200 submissions. The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates 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.

Presents unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact. This book aims to help in the difficult problem of anticipation: forecasting the event and proposing measures to moderate or prevent it.

Extraterrestrial Altruism examines a basic assumption of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): that extraterrestrials will be transmitting messages to us for our benefit.

The release of this second volume of CHIPS 2020 coincides with the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, a critical year marked by the end of the nanometer roadmap and by a significantly reduced annual rise in chip performance.

Born after World War II, large-scale experimental high-energy physics (HEP) has found itself limited ever since by available accelerator, detector and computing technologies.

The physics of condensed matter, in contrast to quantum physics or cosmology, is not traditionally associated with deep philosophical questions. However, as science - largely thanks to more powerful computers - becomes capable of analysing and modelling ever more complex many-body systems, basic questions of philosophical relevance arise.

Each contribution is an article in itself, and great effort has been made by the authors to be lucid and not too technical. Topics include: Quantum non-locality, the measurement problem, quantum insights into relativity, cosmology and thermodynamics, and possible bearings of quantum mechanics to biology and consciousness.

The fundamental question whether, or in which sense, science informs us about the real world has pervaded the history of thought since antiquity.

Participants: Guido Bacciagaluppi, Caslav Brukner, Jeffrey Bub, Arthur Fine, Christopher Fuchs, GianCarlo Ghirardi, Shelly Goldstein, Daniel Greenberger, Lucien Hardy, Anthony Leggett, Tim Maudlin, David Mermin, Lee Smolin, Antony Valentini, David Wallace, Anton Zeilinger, and Wojciech Zurek.

These essays by leading philosophers and scientists focus on recent ideas at the forefront of modern Darwinism, showcasing and exploring the challenges they raise as well as open problems.

Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity.

Chips 2020 presents a new, sustainable roadmap towards femto(10-15)-Joule low-energy, high-performance electronics. The text focuses on the energy-efficiency of all chip functionalities, sensing, processing, and communication.

The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death.

Questioning the Foundations of Physics

The essays in this book look at the question of whether physics can be based on information, or - as John Wheeler phrased it - whether we can get "It from Bit".

Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver - an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality.

Converging evidence from disciplines including sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and human biology forces us to adopt a new idea of what it means to be a human. What emerges is a new human, the homo novus, a human being without illusions.

Participants: Guido Bacciagaluppi, Caslav Brukner, Jeffrey Bub, Arthur Fine, Christopher Fuchs, GianCarlo Ghirardi, Shelly Goldstein, Daniel Greenberger, Lucien Hardy, Anthony Leggett, Tim Maudlin, David Mermin, Lee Smolin, Antony Valentini, David Wallace, Anton Zeilinger, and Wojciech Zurek.

Born after World War II, large-scale experimental high-energy physics (HEP) has found itself limited ever since by available accelerator, detector and computing technologies.

Presents an in-depth interdisciplinary discussion of the concept of information and its role in the control of natural processes. Reviews briefly classical and quantum information theory. Addresses numerous questions, including: Is information reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry?

With contributions from a team of leading experts, this volume provides a comprehensive survey of recent achievements in our scientific understanding of evolution.

Extraterrestrial Altruism examines a basic assumption of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI): that extraterrestrials will be transmitting messages to us for our benefit.

The fundamental question whether, or in which sense, science informs us about the real world has pervaded the history of thought since antiquity.

This volume brings together leading quantum physicists to expound on the meaning and future directions of quantum mechanics. All the authors have written for a broad readership, and the resulting volume will appeal to everyone wishing to keep abreast of new developments in quantum mechanics, as well as its history and philosophy.

A clear and engaging discussionWritten by a highly respected quantum physicistPuzzling phenomena made comprehensibleDescribes solutions to challenging quandries in physics

Seeks answers to these questions using the underlying assumption that consciousness can be understood using the intellectual potential of modern physics and other sciences.