Paul Davies Quotes

If you don't feel it, flee from it. Go where you are celebrated, not merely tolerated.

The sun always shines above the clouds.

Leave your excuses and live your dreams!

Many investigators feel uneasy stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they admit they are baffled.

Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics". To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile. Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.

One of the tests for positive thinking, for constructive thinking, is to test one’s idle moments. At those times, is one’s mind turning over negative critical thoughts; fighting battles that have been won or lost; rehashing senseless arguments? If so, then one is out of tune. But if one is thinking how to improve a situation or a procedure, how to gain a worthwhile objective, then one is on the constructive side of life.

Can a truly absurd universe so convincingly mimic a meaningful one?

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

When I was a child, I often used to lie awake at night, in fearful anticipation of some unpleasant event the following day, such as a visit to the dentist, and wish I could press some sort of button that would have the effect of instantly transporting me twenty-four hours into the future. The following night, I would wonder whether that magic button was in fact real, and that the trick had indeed worked. After all, it was twenty-four hours later, and though I could remember the visit to the dentist, it was, at that time, only a memory of an experience, not an experience.

One of the confusions surrounding the Intelligent Design movement’s propaganda is a failure to distinguish between the fact of evolution and the mechanism of evolution.

A really big question is why the universe is fit for life; it looks like it has been ‘fixed up’.

So, that was the original Happy Mondays line-up before Bez joined. Shaun Ryder, Paul Ryder, Mark Day, Paul Davis and Gaz Whelan. X, Horse, Cowhead, Knobhead and No Arse.

physicist Paul Davies comments, nonlinear systems “possess the remarkable ability to leap spontaneously from relatively featureless states to those involving complex cooperative behavior.”5 And those behaviors? They can be as different as water to ice.

if life is widespread and Earth is typical, there should have been many planets with advanced spacefaring civilizations long, long ago. So why haven’t the aliens come here already?

Paul Davies’s The Mind of God seems to hover somewhere between Einsteinian pantheism and an obscure form of deism—for

Since the multiverse argument is often invoked as a way to abolish the need for divine providence, it is ironic that it provides the best scientific argument yet for the existence of a god!

The living cell is the most complex system of its size known to mankind. Its host of specialized molecules, many found nowhere else but within living material, are themselves already enormously complex. They execute a dance of exquisite fidelity, orchestrated with breathtaking precision. Vastly more elaborate than the most complicated ballet, the dance of life encompasses countless molecular performers in synergetic coordination. Yet this is a dance with no sign of a choreographer. No intelligent supervisor, no mystic force, no conscious controlling agency swings the molecules into place at the right time, chooses the appropriate players, closes the links, uncouples the partners, moves them on. The dance of life is spontaneous, self-sustaining, and self-creating.

the groundbreakers in many sciences were devout believers. Witness the accomplishments of Nicolaus Copernicus (a priest) in astronomy, Blaise Pascal (a lay apologist) in mathematics, Gregor Mendel (a monk) in genetics, Louis Pasteur in biology, Antoine Lavoisier in chemistry, John von Neumann in computer science, and Enrico Fermi and Erwin Schrodinger in physics. That’s a short list, and it includes only Roman Catholics; a long list could continue for pages. A roster that included other believers—Protestants, Jews, and unconventional theists like Albert Einstein, Fred Hoyle, and Paul Davies—could fill a book.

The sergeant frowned. “Really, sir? And who might they be? Is there a gang of militant atheists at work in the district, that I know nothing about? Or a guerrilla unit of disaffected campanologists, perhaps?

It is easy to imagine an advanced civilization sending out von Neumann probes to explore the galaxy. On arrival in a star system, one such machine would mine raw materials from asteroids or comets in order to replicate.

Can the genome of an individual cell profit by experience?’17 just as Lamarck had proposed. They hinted that the answer might be yes, and that they were dealing with a case of mutations ‘​“directed” toward a useful goal’.

When all that is put together, my answer is that we are probably the only intelligent beings in the observable universe, and I would not be very surprised if the solar system contains the only life in the observable universe.

Until now, I've been writing about "now" as if it were literally an instant of time, but of course human faculties are not infinitely precise. It is simplistic to suppose that physical events and mental events march along exactly in step, with the stream of "actual moments" in the outside world and the stream of conscious awareness of them perfectly synchronized. The cinema industry depends on the phenomenon that what seems to us a movie is really a succession of still pictures, running at twenty-five [sic] frames per second. We don't notice the joins. Evidently the "now" of our conscious awareness stretches over at least 1/25 of a second. In fact, psychologists are convinced it can last a lot longer than that. Take he familiar "tick-tock" of the clock. Well, the clock doesn't go "tick-tock" at all; it goes "tick-tick," every tick producing the same sound. It's just that our consciousness runs two successive ticks into a singe "tick-tock" experience—but only if the duration between ticks is less than about three seconds. A really bug pendulum clock just goes "tock . . . tock . . . tock," whereas a bedside clock chatters away: "ticktockticktock..." Two to three seconds seems to be the duration over which our minds integrate sense data into a unitary experience, a fact reflected in the structure of human music and poetry.

By some accounts, humans are dwarfed and shown to be trivial on the cosmic scale. By some accounts, humans are reduced and shown to be nothing but electronic molecules in motion on the atomic scale. But by equally impressive accounts, humans live at the center of complexity.

According to Paul Davies, 'the general multiverse explanation is simply naive deism dressed up in scientific language. Both appear to be an infinite unknown, invisible and unknowable system. Both require an infinite amount of information to be discarded just to explain the (finite) universe we live in.

No attempt to explain the world, either scientifically or theologically, can be considered successful until it accounts for the paradoxical conjunction of the temporal and the atemporal, of being and becoming. And no subject conforms this paradoical conjuction more starkly than the origin of the universe.

Tidak ada kesalah-pahaman mengenai ilmuwan yang lebih besar daripada kepercayaan yang berkembang bahwa mereka adalah individu-individu yang dingin, keras, dan tak berjiwa.

rise in entropy in all physical systems and the resulting one-way slide of the universe from order to chaos, tending towards what physicists call its ‘heat death’.

But creating a totally synthetic organism wouldn’t on its own prove that life is ubiquitous.

aliens would be unlikely to succumb to terrestrial germs (as they did in H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds).

Most obvious is that DNA may be only one of many ways that biological information is encoded, and it is hard to see how the aliens would know in advance what terrestrial life uses.

From the beginning, mankind has been divided into three parts, among men of prayer, men of toil, and men of war. Gerard, Bishop of Cambrai (1012-1051)

It is a striking thought that ten years of radio astronomy have taught humanity more about the creation and organization of the universe than thousands of years of religion and philosophy.

Thinking about SETI requires us to abandon all our presuppositions about the nature of life, mind, civilization, technology and community destiny. In short, it means thinking the unthinkable.

[T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some–an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book The Mind of God, proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces" (Davies 1992, p. 232). This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn't the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin's inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of "mindless, purposeless forces.

The Einstein equivalence equation has, in effect, begun the ‘dematerialization’ of physical reality. The only way in which the world can still be described as the ‘material’ world, or the term materialism can preserve its original significance, is to redefine ‘matter’. But how? Materialism, if one wants to retain the term, seems to have unexpectedly become a much more open doctrine.

Since the multiverse argument is often invoked as a way to abolish the need for divine providence, it is ironic that it provides the best scientific argument yet for the existence of a god! Clearly,

Each person who understands him- or herself in this way, as a spark of the divine, with some small part of the divine power, integrally interwoven into the process of the creation of the psycho-physical universe, will be encouraged to participate in the process of plumbing the potentialities of, and shaping the form of, the unfolding quantum reality that it is his or her birthright to help create.

David Park is a physicist and philosopher at Williams College in Massachusetts with a lifelong interest in a time which he too thinks doesn't pass. For Park, the passage of time is not so much an illusion as a myth, "because it involves no deception of the senses.... One cannot perform any experiment to tell unambiguously whether time passes or not." This is certainly a telling argument. After all, what reality can be attached to a phenomenon that can never be demonstrated experimentally? In fact, it is not even clear how to think about demonstrating the flow of time experimentally. As the apparatus, laboratory, experimenter, technicians, humanity generally and the universe as a whole are apparently caught up in the same inescapable flow, how can any bit of the universe be "stopped in time" in order to register the flow going on in the rest of it? It is analogous to claiming that the whole universe is moving through space at the same speed—or, to make the analogy closer, that space is moving through space. How can such a claim ever be tested?

Why is nature so ingeniously, one might even say suspiciously, friendly to life? What do the laws of physics care about life and consciousness that they should conspire to make a hospitable universe? It's almost as if a Grand Designer had it all figured out.

Perhaps there are many "nows" of varying duration, depending on just what it is we are doing. We must face up to the fact that, at least in the case of humans, the subject experiencing subjective time is not a perfect, structureless observer, but a complex, multilayered, multifaceted psyche. Different levels of our consciousness may experience time in quite different ways. This is evidently the case in terms of response time. You have probably had the slightly unnerving experience of jumping at the sound of a telephone a moment or two before you actually hear it ring. The shrill noise induces a reflex response through the nervous system much faster than the time it takes to create the conscious experience of the sound. It is fashionable to attribute certain qualities, such as speech ability, to the left side of the brain, whereas others, such as musical appreciation, belong to processes occurring on the right side. But why should both hemispheres experience a common time? And why should the subconscious use the same mental clock as the conscious?

His plan incorporated the packet-switching concept of Paul Baran and Donald Davies, the suggestion for standardized IMPs proposed by Wes Clark, the theoretical insights of J. C. R. Licklider, Les Earnest, and Leonard Kleinrock, and the contributions of many other inventors.

At the root of all physical reality is not “primary matter” or little atoms of “stuff.” Relativity theory in cosmology and the complementarity thesis in quantum physics suggest that the basic reality is some sort of hybrid “matter–energy.” Quantum field theory and string theory (if it survives as a physical theory, which now seems unlikely) suggest the even more radical idea that this reality is more energy-like than matter-like. Either result is sufficient to falsify materialism in anything like the form that dominated the first 300 years of modern science.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

James was disturbed by the way the computers quietly went about their business, running the network of trains, unconcerned about whether anyone was there to see them or not. It made him feel, as he left the room, that he was closing the door on a parallel universe with an entirely independent existence.

What sets the carbon atom apart is that it is shamelessly promiscuous. It is the party animal of the atomic world, latching on to many other atoms (including itself) and holding tight, forming molecular conga lines of hearty robustness—the very trick of nature necessary to build proteins and DNA. As Paul Davies has written: “If it wasn’t for carbon, life as we know it would be impossible. Probably any sort of life would be impossible.” Yet carbon is not all that plentiful even in humans, who so vitally depend on it. Of every 200 atoms in your body, 126 are hydrogen, 51 are oxygen, and just 19 are carbon.†

viruses to ‘infect’ any DNA-based cells with which they come into contact. The virus inserts its message into the genetic material of the host organism’s germ cells (that’s what so-called endogenous retroviruses do), and the cell obligingly replicates it and passes the message on to all future generations

When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the subject entitled The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche). But now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established, some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look. * Physicist Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection—more precisely a correlation—between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden.

Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?

Paul Davies comments . . . To date biology is rooted in the old physics, the physics of the nineteenth century. Newtonian mechanics and theromodynamics play the central role. More recent developments, such as field theory and quantum mechanics, are largely ignored. In spite of the fact that the molecular basis for life is so crucial, and that molecular processes are quantum mechanical, atoms are treated like classical building blocks to be fitted together. Distinctively quantum effects, such as nonlocal correlations, coherence, and phase information, let alone possible exotic departures from quantum mechanics as suggested above, are not considered relevant.21

God is a pure mathematician!' declared British astronomer Sir James Jeans. The physical Universe does seem to be organised around elegant mathematical relationships. And one number above all others has exercised an enduring fascination for physicists: 137.0359991.... It is known as the fine-structure constant and is denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α).

What is the minimum level of complexity needed to attain the twin features of non-trivial replication and open-ended evolvability? If the complexity threshold is quite low, we might expect life to arise easily and be widespread in the cosmos. If it is very high, then life on Earth may be an exception, a freak product of a series of highly improbable events.

Immuable : Dieu est immuable, c’est-à-dire n’est point susceptible de changer ; cependant nous trouvons dans ses papiers que souvent il a changé de projets, d’amis et même de religion : mais tous ces changements ne peuvent nuire à son immutabilité, ni à celle de ses prêtres immuables, qui jamais ne changent d’avis sur le dessein de mener les laïques par le nez.

The best way to express inheritance is to say that information about earlier generations is passed along to the next – the information needed to build a new organism in the likeness of the old. This information is encoded in the organism’s genes, which are replicated as part of the reproductive process. The essence of biological reproduction, then, is the replication of heritable information.

My conclusion is a startling one. I think it very likely—in fact inevitable—that biological intelligence is only a transitory phenomenon, a fleeting phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe. If we ever encounter extraterrestrial intelligence, I believe it is overwhelmingly likely to be post-biological in nature, a conclusion that has obvious and far-reaching ramifications for SETI.

COOL JAZZ: RECOMMENDED LISTENING Chet Baker, “But Not for Me,” February 15, 1954 Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, “You Go to My Head,” October 1952 Miles Davis and Gil Evans, “Blues for Pablo,” May 23, 1957 Miles Davis, “Fran Dance,” May 26, 1958 Miles Davis, “So What,” March 2, 1959 Stan Getz, “Moonlight in Vermont,” March 11, 1952 Modern Jazz Quartet, “Django,” December 23, 1954 Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, “Line for Lyons,” September 2, 1952

In the emerging picture of mankind in the universe, the future (if it exists) will surely entail discoveries about space and time which will open up whole new perspectives in the relationship between mankind, mind, and the uni-verse.… But what is now? There is no such thing in physics;it is not even clear that ‘now’ could ever be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics.… Notions such as ‘the past,’ ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ seem to be more linguistic than physical.… There is no universal now, but only a personal one—a ‘here and now.’ This strongly suggests that we look to the mind, rather than to the physical world, as the origin of the division of time into past, present, and future.…There is none of this in physics.… No physical experiment has ever been performed to detect the passage of time. As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost into the night.

Reality, according to Heisenberg, is built not out of matter, as matter was conceived of in classical physics, but out of psycho-physical events – events with certain aspects that are described in the language of psychology and with other aspects that are described in the mathematical language of physics – and out of objective tendencies for such events to occur. ‘The probability function…represents a tendency for events and our knowledge of events’ (Heisenberg, 1958, p. 46).

And there is more still. DNA, proteins, and the other components of life couldn’t prosper without some sort of membrane to contain them. No atom or molecule has ever achieved life independently. Pluck any atom from your body, and it is no more alive than is a grain of sand. It is only when they come together within the nurturing refuge of a cell that these diverse materials can take part in the amazing dance that we call life. Without the cell, they are nothing more than interesting chemicals. But without the chemicals, the cell has no purpose. As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, “If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?” It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

But from an evolutionary standpoint, there are good grounds to assert that “language” is indeed a natural phenomenon, which originates in the molecular language of the genome and has found, in the course of evolution, its hitherto highest expression in human language (Küppers, 1995). For evolutionary biologists, there is no question as to whether languages below the level of human language exist; the issue is rather about identifying the general conditions under which linguistic structures originate and evolve.

By virtue of this filling of the causal gap, the most important demand of intuition – namely that one's conscious efforts have the capacity to affect one's own bodily actions – is beautifully met by the quantum ontology. And in this age of computers, and information, and flashing pixels there is nothing counterintuitive about the ontological idea that nature is built – not out of ponderous classically conceived matter but – out of events, and out of informational waves and signals that create tendencies for these events to occur.

The mechanism by which quantum mechanics injects an element of chance into the operation of the universe is called “decoherence” (Gell-Mann and Hartle, 1994). Decoherence effectively creates new bits of information, bits which previously did not exist. In other words, quantum mechanics, via decoherence, is constantly injecting new bits of information into the world. Every detail that we see around us, every vein on a leaf, every whorl on a fingerprint, every star in the sky, can be traced back to some bit that quantum mechanics created. Quantum bits program the universe.

Unfortunately, most of the prevailing descriptions of quantum theory tend to emphasize puzzles and paradoxes in a way that makes philosophers, theologians, and even non-physicist scientists leery of actually using in any deep way the profound changes in our understanding of human beings in nature wrought by the quantum revolution. Yet, properly presented, quantum mechanics is thoroughly in line with our deep human intuitions. It is the 300 years of indoctrination with basically false ideas about how nature works that now makes puzzling a process that is completely in line with normal human intuition.

Clearly, then, the orthodox concept of laws of physics derives directly from theology. It is remarkable that this view has remained largely unchallenged after 300 years of secular science. Indeed, the “theological model” of the laws of physics is so ingrained in scientific thinking that it is taken for granted. The hidden assumptions behind the concept of physical laws, and their theological prov-enance, are simply ignored by almost all except historians of science and theologians. From the scientific standpoint, however, this uncritical acceptance of the theological model of laws leaves a lot to be desired.

In the following pages I argue that we have both philosophical and scientific reasons to doubt the adequacy of this widely accepted doctrine of materialism. In the history of Western philosophy, as we will see, it has turned out to be notoriously difficult to formulate a viable concept of matter. And physics in the twentieth century has produced weighty reasons to think that some of the core tenets of materialism were mistaken. These results, when combined with the new theories of information, complexity, and emergence summarized elsewhere in this volume, point toward alternative accounts of the natural world that deserve careful attention and critical evaluation.

I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And the only way we can do this is by moving toward a revolutionary society where the needs and wishes of all people can be respected.' With these words the radical philosophy professor Angela Davis paraphrases Isaiah's ancient messianic dream of the lion that will peacefully lie down with the lamb in a completely good world. But what the Biblical prophet perhaps could not know is contained with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired in the opening sentence of an address of the French Senate to Napoleon I: "Sire, the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can affect the human mind.

Network theory confirms the view that information can take on 'a life of its own'. In the yeast network my colleagues found that 40 per cent of node pairs that are correlated via information transfer are not in fact physically connected; there is no direct chemical interaction. Conversely, about 35 per cent of node pairs transfer no information between them even though they are causally connected via a 'chemical wire' (edge). Patterns of information traversing the system may appear to be flowing down the 'wires' (along the edges of the graph) even when they are not. For some reason, 'correlation without causation' seems to be amplified in the biological case relative to random networks.

The deepest human intuition is not the immediate grasping of the classical-physics-type character of the external world. It is rather that one's own conscious subjective efforts can influence the experiences that follow. Any conception of nature that makes this deep intuition an illusion is counterintuitive. Any conception of reality that cannot explain how our conscious efforts influence our bodily actions is problematic. What is actually deeply intuitive is the continually reconfirmed fact that our conscious efforts can influence certain kinds of experiential feedback. A putatively rational scientific theory needs at the very least to explain this connection in a rational way to be in line with intuition.

This conception of nature, in which the consequences of our choices enter not only directly in our immediate neighbourhood but also indirectly and immediately in far-flung places, alters the image of the human being relative to the one spawned by classical physics. It changes this image in a way that must tend to reduce a sense of powerlessness, separateness, and isolation, and to enhance the sense of responsibility and of belonging. Each person who understands him- or herself in this way, as a spark of the divine, with some small part of the divine power, integrally interwoven into the process of the creation of the psycho-physical universe, will be encouraged to participate in the process of plumbing the potentialities of, and shaping the form of, the unfolding quantum reality that it is his or her birthright to help create.

In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me, over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line.” That was Harriet Tubman in the 1800s. And let me tell you something: The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. So here’s to all the writers, the awesome people that are Ben Sherwood, Paul Lee, Peter Nowalk, Shonda Rhimes, people who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black. And to the Taraji P. Hensons, the Kerry Washingtons, the Halle Berrys, the Nicole Beharies, the Meagan Goods, to Gabrielle Union: Thank you for taking us over that line. Thank you to the Television Academy. Thank you.

Perhaps the main basis for the claim that quantum mechanics is weird is the existence of what Einstein called ‘spooky action at a distance’. These effects are not only ‘spooky’ but are also absolutely impossible to achieve within the framework of classical physics. However, if the conception of the physical world is changed from one made out of tiny rock-like entities to a holistic global informational structure that represents tendencies to real events to occur, and in which the choice of which potentiality will be actualized in various places is in the hands of human agents, there is no spookiness about the occurring transfers of information. The postulated global informational structure called the quantum state of the universe is the ‘spook’ that does the job. But it does so in a completely specified and understandable way, and this renders it basically non-spooky.

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is? I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths! Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born.

Later that week, I was bicycling down a pavement in the City of London when I passed a company called DLE, which stands for Davis Langdon & Everest. Hmm, I thought, as I skidded to a halt. I took a deep breath and then confidently walked into their ultraclean, ultrasmart reception, and asked to be put through to the CEO’s office, saying it was both urgent and confidential. Once I had the CEO’s secretary on the line, I pleaded with her to help me get just two minutes of her boss’s time. Eventually after three attempts, due to a combination of pity and intrigue, she agreed to ask the CEO to see me for “literally two minutes.” Bingo. I was escorted into a lift and then ushered into the calm of the CEO’s top-floor office. I was very nervous. The two head guys, Paul Morrell and Alastair Collins, came in, looking suspiciously at this scruffy youngster holding a pamphlet. (They later described it as one of the worst-laid-out proposals they had ever seen.) But they both had the grace to listen. By some miracle, they caught the dream and my enthusiasm, and for the sake of £10,000 (which to me was the world, but to them was a marketing punt), they agreed to back my attempt to put the DLE flag on top of the world. I promised an awesome photograph for their boardroom. We stood up, shook hands, and we have remained great friends ever since. I love deals like that.

Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Paul Chambers, Bill Evans, and Jimmy Cobb playing “All Blues,” a moody, blues form piece in 6/8, off the 1959 album Kind of Blue.

Thus it can be argued that quantum theory provides an opening for an idea of nature and of our role within it that is in general accord with certain religious concepts, but that, by contrast, is quite incompatible with the precepts of mechanistic deterministic classical physics. Thus the replacement of classical mechanics by quantum mechanics opens the door to religious possibilities that formerly were rationally excluded.

Physicist Paul Davies 1 Would

Obama mentor Frank Marshall Davis is an unimaginably outrageous case in point—one that must be read to be appreciated. Davis's brutal demonization of, and vile accusations against, Democratic Party heroes like Truman, a man of true courage and character, ought to disgust modern Democrats. His accusations against Truman and his secretary of state, George Marshall—Davis dubbed the Marshall Plan “white imperialism” and “colonial slavery”—make Joe McCarthy's accusations look mild by comparison.

Labor and employment firm Fisher & Phillips LLP opened a Seattle office by poaching partner Davis Bae from labor and employment competitor Jackson Lewis PC. Mr. Bea, an immigration specialist, will lead the office, which also includes new partners Nick Beermann and Catharine Morisset and one other lawyer. Fisher & Phillips has 31 offices around the country. Sara Randazzo LAW Cadwalader Hires New Partner as It Looks to Represent Activist Investors By Liz Hoffman and David Benoit | 698 words One of America’s oldest corporate law firms is diving into the business of representing activist investors, betting that these agitators are going mainstream—and offer a lucrative business opportunity for advisers. Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP has hired a new partner, Richard Brand, whose biggest clients include William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management LP, among other activist investors. Mr. Brand, 35 years old, advised Pershing Square on its campaign at Allergan Inc. last year and a board coup at Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. in 2012. He has also defended companies against activists and has worked on mergers-and-acquisitions deals. His hiring, from Kirkland & Ellis LLP, is a notable step by a major law firm to commit to representing activists, and to do so while still aiming to retain corporate clients. Founded in 1792, Cadwalader for decades has catered to big companies and banks, but going forward will also seek out work from hedge funds including Pershing Square and Sachem Head Capital Management LP, a Pershing Square spinout and another client of Mr. Brand’s. To date, few major law firms or Wall Street banks have tried to represent both corporations and activist investors, who generally take positions in companies and push for changes to drive up share prices. Most big law firms instead cater exclusively to companies, worried that lining up with activists will offend or scare off executives or create conflicts that could jeopardize future assignments. Some are dabbling in both camps. Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, for example, represented Trian Fund Management LP in its recent proxy fight at DuPont Co. and also is steering Time Warner Cable Inc.’s pending sale to Charter Communications Inc. Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP have done work for activist firm Third Point LLC. But most firms are more monogamous. Those on one end, most vocally Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, defend management, while a small band including Schulte Roth & Zabel LLP and Olshan Frome Wolosky LLP primarily represent activists. In embracing activist work, Cadwalader thinks it can serve both groups better, said Christopher Cox, chairman of the firm’s corporate group. “Traditional M&A and activism are becoming increasingly intertwined,” Mr. Cox said in an interview. “To be able to bring that perspective to the boardroom is a huge advantage. And when a threat does emerge, who’s better to defend a company than someone who’s seen it from the other side?” Mr. Cox said Cadwalader has been thinking about branching out into activism since late last year. The firm is also working with an activist fund launched earlier this year by Cadwalader’s former head of M&A, Jim Woolery, that hopes to take a friendlier stance toward companies. Mr. Cox also said he believes activism can be lucrative, pooh-poohing another reason some big law firms eschew such assignments—namely, that they don’t pay as well as, say, a large merger deal. “There is real money in activism today,” said Robert Jackson, a former lawyer at Wachtell and the U.S. Treasury Department who now teaches at Columbia University and who also notes that advising activists can generate regulatory work. “Law firms are businesses, and taking the stance that you’ll never, ever, ever represent an activist is a financial luxury that only a few firms have.” To be sure, the handful of law firms that work for both sides say they do so

However, the answer can be inferred from the WMAP data, by measuring the sizes of the temperature fluctuations—the hot and cold (light and dark) splotches in Figure 3 ([>]). Before WMAP was launched, theorists had already worked out how big the physical sizes of the strongest fluctuations should be. Converting that into apparent angular size in the sky depends on the geometry of space: if the universe is positively curved, it would make the angles appear larger, while negative curvature would make them smaller. If the universe is geometrically flat (that is, has Euclidean geometry), the angular size of the strongest hot and cold fluctuations should be about 1° across. The results that flowed back from the satellite were definitive.14 The fluctuations were very close to 1° in size, a result confirmed by ground-based and balloon-based experiments. Cosmologists then declared that to within observational accuracy of about 2 percent, space is flat.15

At the end of inflation, the intense energy released would have heated the universe to around a thousand trillion trillion degrees—more than sufficient to create all 1050 tons of matter in the observable universe.

A particular cellular automaton, devised by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970 and known appropriately enough as The Game of Life, has become quite fashionable, and exhibits a remarkably rich and complex ecology of shapes that move and interact.

O Trinity of love and power, Our brethren shield in danger’s hour; From rock and tempest, fire and foe, Protect them wheresoe’er they go; Thus evermore shall rise to thee, Glad hymns of praise from land and sea.

Inferring from the behaviour of a whole to a quality of its parts expressed only when they are acting as parts of that whole is just the opposite of reduction, understood as explaining the behaviour of a whole in terms of the properties of its parts when these parts are considered in isolation (McMullin, 1972). The former inference might be better described as explaining the parts in terms of the whole. The whole in such a case might still be said to be nothing more in ontological terms than a collection of its parts, but only on condition that the ‘parts’ are defined in equally ontological terms by the role they play in the whole. Reductionism and holism point in different ways.

The significance of [the fine-structure constant] goes far beyond atomic physics, however. It is the smallness of 1/137 compared to unity that enables us to treat the coupling between the electromagnetic field and a charged particle such as an electron as a small perturbation, a fact of great computational importance. [Forces of Nature]

The problem of the origin of the laws of physics is an acute one for physicists. Einstein's suggestion that they may turn out necessarily to possess the form that they do has little support. It is sometimes said that a truly unified theory of physics might be so tightly constrained logically that its mathematical formulation is unique. But this claim is readily refuted. It is easy to construct artificial universe models, albeit impoverished ones bearing only a superficial resemblance to the real thing, which are nevertheless mathematically and logically self-consistent.

96. It may be difficult to adjust to a vacation if they are too infrequent. Plan

According to Russell Simmons, producer Eric B once claimed he could have created fifteen albums with the ideas from Paul’s Boutique. Even the late Miles Davis reportedly once said he never tired of the record.

autonomy,

The computational paradigm for the universe supplements the ordinary mechanistic paradigm: the universe is not just a machine, it is a machine that processes information. The universe computes. The computing universe is not a metaphor, but a mathematical fact: the universe is a physical system that can be programmed at its most microscopic level to perform universal digital computation. Moreover, the universe is not just a computer: it is a quantum computer. Quantum mechanics is constantly injecting fresh, random bits into the universe. Because of its computational nature, the universe processes and interprets those bits, naturally giving rise to all sorts of complex order and structure (Lloyd, 2006).

If one accepts as fundamental this Aristotelian idea of potentia – of objective tendencies – then the whole scheme of things becomes intuitively understandable. There is nothing intrinsically incomprehensible about the idea of ‘tendencies’. Indeed, we build our lives upon this concept. However, three centuries of false thinking has brought many physicists and philosophers to expect and desire an understanding of nature in which everything is completely predetermined in terms of the physically described aspects of nature alone. Contemporary physics violates that classical ideal.

The upshot of all this is that the arguments that were supposed to show why quantum mechanics is not relevant to the mind–body problem all backfire, and end up supporting the viability of a quantum mechanical solution that is completely in line with our normal intuitions. One need only accept what orthodox quantum mechanics insists upon – to the extent that it goes beyond an agnostic or pragmatic stance – namely that the physically described world is not a world of material substances, as normally conceived, but is rather a world of potentialities for future experiences.

The most positive outcome I know to such a friendship is the recognition that we do not have to figure out which one of us is wrong; indeed, that concept may not even apply. By ordinary logic, if two people or groups disagree, then one is wrong — or it is all relative and does not much matter anyway. But the basis for both disagreement and friendship is something that is neither strictly logical nor entirely relative. Rather, the basis for theological friendship between Christians and Jews is a mystery — the word Paul rightly uses (Rom 11:25; cf. 11:33) as he struggles with this most painful new fact of salvation history, the separation of Jews and Gentiles within the household of Israel’s faith. The mystery has only deepened over time, as the two communities have over a period of two thousand years sustained an allegiance to the God to whom Israel’s Scriptures bear witness, and likewise have experienced the faithfulness of that God to them. This prolonged duality is something neither Paul nor anyone else in the first century anticipated. At the very least, it should caution us all to modesty in our theological assertions.

philosophy is no longer concerned with the quest for the truth of the world and so is reduced to a limited sphere, which only ensures the uninterrupted flow of capitalist markets. Truth as a philosophical category thus becomes enslaved to the unthinking markets of capitalism; philosophy at the service of the robber barons. Truth's instantiation is thus brutally reduced to the exercise of pure and arbitrary power in various domains of the world.

In principio Dio creò il cielo e la terra (Genesi, 1,1) ma non c'era nessuno a guardare (Steven Weinberg, The first three minutes)

The stardust in your eyes If atom stocks are inexhaustible, Greater than power of living things to count, If Nature’s same creative power were present too To throw the atoms into unions—exactly as united now, Why then confess you must That other worlds exist in other regions of the sky, And different tribes of men, kinds of wild beasts.

even interesting. It was

Una de las grandes tragedias de nuestra sociedad es que, sea por miedo, por una enseñanza insuficiente o por falta de motivación, la inmensa mayoría de la gente se ha cerrado a la poesía matemática y a la música de la naturaleza. La visión global que revelan las matemáticas les es negada. Pueden sentirse encantados con el aroma de una rosa o el color de un ocaso, pero son ciegos a toda una dimensión de experiencias estéticas.

El atractivo místico de la nueva física ha cautivado a mucha gente de mente religiosa o filosófica que ve en los recientes descubrimientos una liberación del mundo materialista e impersonal producto de la moderna sociedad tecnológica.

Common as lanterns were as a means of illumination, in the eyes of the seventeenth-century artist, of far greater importance was what they represented. Allegory in art was a useful tool. Especially when what was being relayed wasn’t something the artist intended to reveal in plain sight.

Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Breslaw, Elaine G. Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Clark, Stuart. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cross, Tom Peete. Witchcraft in North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1919. Davies, Owen. Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gibson, Marion. Witchcraft Myths in American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2007. Godbeer, Richard. The Devil’s Dominion: Magic and Religion in Early New England. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Goss, K. David. Daily Life During the Salem Witch Trials. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2012. Hall, David D. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. New York: Knopf, 1989. Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: G. Braziller, 1969. Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton, 1987. Levack, Brian P. The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe. 3rd ed. Harlow, England, New York: Pearson Longman, 2006. Macfarlane, Alan. Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1991. Matossian, Mary K. “Ergot and the Salem Witchcraft Affair.” American Scientist 70 (1970): 355–57. Mixon Jr., Franklin G. “Weather and the Salem Witch Trials.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (2005): 241–42. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Parke, Francis Neal. Witchcraft in Maryland. Baltimore: 1937.