Each contribution is an article in itself, and great effort has been made by the authors to be lucid and not too technical. A few brief highlights of the round-table discussions are given between the chapters.
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. Authors include Yakir Aharanov and Anton Zeilinger, plus Nobel laureates Anthony J. Leggett (2003) and Gerardus t Hooft (1999).
Foreword written by Sir Roger Penrose, best-selling...
Each contribution is an article in itself, and great effort has been made by the authors to be lucid and not too technical. A few brief highlights ...
Information and Its Role in Nature presents an in-depth interdisciplinary discussion of the concept of information and its role in the control of natural processes. After a brief review of classical and quantum information theory, the author addresses numerous central questions, including: Is information reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry? Does the Universe, in its evolution, constantly generate new information? Or are information and information-processing exclusive attributes of living systems, related to the very definition of life? If so, what is the role...
Information and Its Role in Nature presents an in-depth interdisciplinary discussion of the concept of information and its role in...
Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crises, or epileptic seizures are the topics of this book. It describes unifying and distinguishing features of extreme events, including problems of understanding and modelling their origin, spatial and temporal extension, and potential impact.
Significant, and usually unwelcome, surprises, such as floods, financial crises, or epileptic seizures are the topics of this book. It describes unify...
How can our societies be stabilized in a crisis? Why can we enjoy and understand Shakespeare? Why are fruitflies uniform? How do omnivorous eating habits aid our survival? What makes the Mona Lisa s smile beautiful? How do women keep our social structures intact? Could there possibly be a single answer to all these questions? This book shows that the statement: "weak links stabilize complex systems" provides the key to understanding each of these intriguing puzzles, and many others too. The author (recipient of several distinguished science communication prizes) uses weak (low affinity,...
How can our societies be stabilized in a crisis? Why can we enjoy and understand Shakespeare? Why are fruitflies uniform? How do omnivorous eating ...
This book gathers concepts of information across diverse fields physics, electrical engineering and computational science surveying current theories, discussing underlying notions of symmetry, and showing how the capacity of a system to distinguish itself relates to information. The author develops a formal methodology using group theory, leading to the application of Burnside's Lemma to count distinguishable states. This provides a tool to quantify complexity and information capacity in any physical system."
This book gathers concepts of information across diverse fields physics, electrical engineering and computational science surveying current theorie...
The spectacular success of the scientific enterprise over the last four hundred years has led to the promise of an all encompassing vision of the natural world. In this elegant picture, everything we observe is based upon just a few fundamental processes and entities. The almost infinite variety and complexity of the world is thus the product of emergence. But the concept of emergence is fraught with controversy and confusion. This book ponders the question of how emergence should be understood within the scientific picture, and whether a complete vision of the world can be attained that...
The spectacular success of the scientific enterprise over the last four hundred years has led to the promise of an all encompassing vision of the natu...
This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). 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. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect...
This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to s...
In the last hundred years, modern physics and cosmology have shown that there exist regions of the universe forever beyond our reach, hidden by truly ultimate horizons. Such regions exist in those remote parts of the universe where, from our point of view, space expands faster than the speed of light. They are found in black holes, where the gravity is strong enough to retain even light within its field of attraction. And in the realm of the very small, quarks must remain forever confined to their world of extreme density and can never be removed from it. The aim of this book is to describe...
In the last hundred years, modern physics and cosmology have shown that there exist regions of the universe forever beyond our reach, hidden by truly ...
The essays in this book look at way in which the fundaments of physics might need to be changed in order to make progress towards a unified theory. They are based on the prize-winning essays submitted to the FQXi essay competition Which of Our Basic Physical Assumptions Are Wrong?, which drew over 270 entries.
As Nobel Laureate physicist Philip W. Anderson realized, the key to understanding nature s reality is not anything magical, but the right attitude, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for...
The essays in this book look at way in which the fundaments of physics might need to be changed in order to make progress towards a unified theory....
This book explores the limits of our knowledge. The author shows how uncertainty and indefiniteness not only define the borders confining our understanding, but how they feed into the process of discovery and help to push back these borders. Starting with physics the author collects examples from economics, neurophysiology, history, ecology and philosophy.
The first part shows how information helps to reduce indefiniteness. Understanding rests on our ability to find the right context, in which we localize a problem as a point in a network of connections. New elements must be combined...
This book explores the limits of our knowledge. The author shows how uncertainty and indefiniteness not only define the borders confining our under...
