Richard Feynman

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Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, gravity well, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, sexual politics, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, uranium enrichment

F-W, 800–801. 378 THE WESTERN UNION “TELEFAX": Erik Rundberg to Feynman, 21 October 1965, PERS. 378 THE FIRST CALL HAD COME: F-W, 801; “Dr. Richard Feynman Nobel Laureate!” California Tech, 22 October 1965, 1. 378 WILL YOU PLEASE TELL US: F-W, 804. 378 WHAT APPLICATIONS DOES THIS PAPER: “Dr. Richard Feynman Nobel Laureate!” 378 LISTEN, BUDDY, IF I COULD TELL YOU: F-W, 804. 378 JULIAN SCHWINGER CALLED: Schwinger, interview. 378 I THOUGHT YOU WOULD BE HAPPY: Feynman to Lucille Feynman, n.d., PERS. 379 [FEYNMAN:] CONGRATULATIONS: “Dr. Richard Feynman Nobel Laureate!” 379 THERE WERE CABLES FROM SHIPBOARD: F-W, 806. 379 HE PRACTICED JUMPING BACKWARD: Ibid., 808–9. 380 FEYNMAN REALIZED THAT HE HAD NEVER READ: Ibid., 812. 380 HE BELIEVED THAT HISTORIANS: Feynman 1965a. 380 WE HAVE A HABIT IN WRITING: Ibid. 380 AS I WAS STUPID: Ibid. 381 THE CHANCE IS HIGH: Feynman 1965c. 381 I DISCOVERED A GREAT DIFFICULTY: Ibid. 382 THE ODDS THAT YOUR THEORY: Feynman 1965a. 382 DR.

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Genius The Life and Science of Richard Feynman James Gleick For my mother and father, Beth and Donen I was born not knowing and have only had a little time to change that here and there. —Richard Feynman CONTENTS PROLOGUE FAR ROCKAWAY •Neither Country nor City •A Birth and a Death •It’s Worth It •At School •All Things Are Made of Atoms •A Century of Progress •Richard and Julian MIT • The Best Path • Socializing the Engineer • The Newest Physics • Shop Men • Feynman of Course Is Jewish • Forces in Molecules • Is He Good Enough? PRINCETON • A Quaint Ceremonious Village • Folds and Rhythms • Forward or Backward?

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London: Walter Scott. Lopes, J. Leite. 1988. “Richard Feynman in Brazil: Recollections.” Manuscript. Lopes, J. Leite, and Feynman, Richard. 1952. “On the Pseudoscalar Meson Theory of the Deuteron.” Symposium on New Research Techniques in Physics, 251. Macfarlane, Gwyn. 1984. Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth. London: Hogarth Press. Mach, Ernst. 1960. The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of Its Development. Translated by Thomas J. McCormack. Lasalle, Ill.: Open Court. Maddox, John. 1988. “The Death of Richard Feynman.” Nature 331:653. Mann, Thomas. 1927. The Magic Mountain.

Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time by Richard P. Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, Matthew Sands

Albert Einstein, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, time dilation

He was a showman, certainly, sometimes even a clown; but his overriding purpose was always serious. And what more serious purpose can there be than the understanding of the nature of our universe at its deepest levels? At conveying this understanding, Richard Feynman was supreme. ROGER PENROSE December 1996 SPECIAL PREFACE (from The Feynman Lectures on Physics) Toward the end of his life, Richard Feynman’s fame had transcended the confines of the scientific community. His exploits as a member of the commission investigating the space shuttle Challenger disaster gave him widespread exposure; similarly, a best-selling book about his picaresque adventures made him a folk hero almost of the proportions of Albert Einstein.

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He also authored a number of advanced publications that have become classic references and textbooks for researchers and students. Richard Feynman was a constructive public man. His work on the Challenger commission is well-known, especially his famous demonstration of the susceptibility of the O-rings to cold, an elegant experiment which required nothing more than a glass of ice water. Less well-known were Dr. Feynman’s efforts on the California State Curriculum Committee in the 1960s where he protested the mediocrity of textbooks. A recital of Richard Feynman’s myriad scientific and educational accomplishments cannot adequately capture the essence of the man.

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2-8 Antimatter 2-9 Broken symmetries Chapter 3 - THE SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY 3-1 The principle of relativity 3-2 The Lorentz transformation 3-3 The Michelson-Morley experiment 3-4 Transformation of time 3-5 The Lorentz contraction 3-6 Simultaneity 3-7 Four-vectors 3-8 Relativistic dynamics 3-9 Equivalence of mass and energy Chapter 4 - RELATIVISTIC ENERGY AND MOMENTUM 4-1 Relativity and the philosophers 4-2 The twin paradox 4-3 Transformation of velocities 4-4 Relativistic mass 4-5 Relativistic energy Chapter 5 - SPACE-TIME 5-1 The geometry of space-time 5-2 Space-time intervals 5-3 Past, present, and future 5-4 More about four-vectors 5-5 Four-vector algebra Chapter 6 - CURVED SPACE 6-1 Curved spaces with two dimensions 6-2 Curvature in three-dimensional space 6-3 Our space is curved 6-4 Geometry in space-time 6-5 Gravity and the principle of equivalence 6-6 The speed of clocks in a gravitational field 6-7 The curvature of space-time 6-8 Motion in curved space-time 6-9 Einstein’s theory of gravitation INDEX ABOUT RICHARD FEYNMAN Copyright Page Also by Richard P. Feynman The Character of Physical Law Elementary Particles and the Laws of Physics: The 1986 Dirac Memorial Lectures (with Steven Weinberg) Feynman Lectures on Computation (edited by Anthony J. G. Hey and Robin Allen) Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (with Fernando B.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman, Jeffrey Robbins

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, impulse control, index card, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, scientific worldview, the scientific method

And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students. 12 RICHARD FEYNMAN BUILDS A UNIVERSE In a previously unpublished interview made under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Feynman reminisces about his life in science: his terrifying first lecture to a Nobel laureate-packed room; the invitation to work on the first atomic bomb and his reaction; cargo-cult science; and that fateful predawn wake-up call from a journalist informing him that he’d just won the Nobel prize. Feynman’s answer: “You could have told me that in the morning.” NARRATOR: Mel Feynman was a salesman for a uniform company in New York City. On May 11, 1918, he welcomed the birth of his son Richard. Forty-seven years later, Richard Feynman received the Nobel Prize for Physics. In many ways, Mel Feynman had a lot to do with that accomplishment, as Richard Feynman relates. FEYNMAN: Well, before I was born, he [my father] said to my mother that “this boy is going to be a scientist.” You can’t say things like that in front of women’s lib these days, but that is what they said in those days.

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Yet I must not give Nature all: Thy art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part. For though the poet’s matter nature be, His art does give the fashion; and, that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, . . . For a good poet’s made, as well as born.” What have Jonson and Shakespeare to do with Richard Feynman? Simply this. I can say as Jonson said, “I did love this man this side idolatry as much as any.” Fate gave me the tremendous luck to have Feynman as a mentor. I was the learned and scholarly student who came from England to Cornell University in 1947 and was immediately entranced by the slapdash genius of Feynman.

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To put this result in perspective, it is as if Galileo had dropped his cannonballs from the Tower of Pisa and they took two years to reach the ground. I was left breathless by the lecture (even Einstein would have been impressed, I think). For the first time in my life I felt a smidgen of what Richard Feynman called “the kick in the discovery,” the sudden feeling (probably akin to an epiphany, albeit in this case a vicarious one) that I had grasped a wonderful new idea, that there was something new in the world; that I was present at a momentous scientific event, no less dramatic or exciting than Newton’s feeling when he realized that the mysterious force that caused that apocryphal apple to land on his head was the same force that caused the moon to orbit the earth; or Feynman’s when he achieved that first grudging step toward understanding the nature of the interaction between light and matter, which led eventually to his Nobel Prize.

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

While they may be strange, the connections unearthed by Einstein and Minkowski can be intuitively understood—given the constancy of the speed of light—as I have tried to demonstrate. Far less intuitive was the next discovery, which was that on very small scales, nature behaves in a way that human intuition cannot ever fully embrace, because we cannot directly experience the behavior itself. As Richard Feynman once argued, no one understands quantum mechanics—if by understand one means developing a concrete physical picture that appears fully intuitive. Even many years after the rules of quantum mechanics were discovered, the discipline would keep yielding surprises. For example, in 1952 the astrophysicist Hanbury Brown built an apparatus to measure the angular size of large radio sources in the sky.

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It was not the proper description when relativistic effects needed to be taken into account. Ultimately Dirac succeeded where all others had failed, and the equation he discovered, one of the most important in modern particle physics, is, not surprisingly, called the Dirac equation. (Some years later, when Dirac first met the physicist Richard Feynman, whom we shall come to shortly, Dirac said after another awkward silence, “I have an equation. Do you?”) Dirac’s equation was beautiful, and as the first relativistic treatment of the electron, it allowed correct and precise predictions for the energy levels of all electrons in atoms, the frequencies of light they emit, and thus the nature of all atomic spectra.

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He had little physical intuition to back it up, which is one reason why Dirac himself and others were initially so skeptical of his result. Clarifying the physical imperative for antimatter came through the work of one of the most important physicists of the latter half of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman. Feynman could not have been more different from Dirac. While Dirac was taciturn in the extreme, Feynman was gregarious and a charming storyteller. While Dirac rarely, if ever, intentionally joked, Feynman was a prankster who openly enjoyed every aspect of life. While Dirac was too shy to meet women, Feynman, after the death of his first wife, sought out female companions of every sort.

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

Review of Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (Basic Books, 2005), in The New York Review of Books, July 14, 2005. 23. Review of Richard Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, edited and with an introduction by Michelle Feynman (Basic Books, 2005), in The New York Review of Books, October 20, 2005. 24. Bernal Lecture given at Birkbeck College, London, May 1972, published as Appendix D, pp. 371–389, to Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence, edited by Carl Sagan (MIT Press, 1973). 25. Review of Richard Feynman, The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (Addison-Wesley, 1998); and John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (Yale University Press, 1998), in The New York Review of Books, May 28, 1998. 26.

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Norbert Wiener (Chapter 22) was a great mathematician who refused on moral grounds to have anything to do with either industry or government. Desmond Bernal (Chapter 24) was one of the founding fathers of molecular biology, and also a faithful member of the Communist Party and a passionate believer in Marxism. Three chapters (23, 25, and 26) are devoted to my teacher Richard Feynman, the physicist who most closely resembled Eric James. Feynman was another rebellious spirit who combined a serious dedication to science with joyful adventures in the world outside. The scientist who described most eloquently the role of the rebel in science was the paleontologist Loren Eiseley.

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On a much more humble level, my own activities as a theoretical physicist have a similar quality. When I am working, I feel myself to be practicing a craft rather than following a method. When I did my most important piece of work as a young man, putting together the ideas of Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman to obtain a simplified version of quantum electrodynamics, I had consciously in mind a metaphor to describe what I was doing. The metaphor was bridge-building. Tomonaga and Schwinger had built solid foundations on one side of a river of ignorance, Feynman had built solid foundations on the other side, and my job was to design and build the cantilevers reaching out over the water until they met in the middle.

The Intelligence Trap: Revolutionise Your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions by David Robson

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Atul Gawande, autism spectrum disorder, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, classic study, cognitive bias, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, deep learning, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake news, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, illegal immigration, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, post-truth, price anchoring, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, theory of mind, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Norton. 2 The following article, an interview with one of Feynman’s former students, offers this interpretation: Wai, J. (2011), ‘A Polymath Physicist on Richard Feynman’s “Low” IQ and Finding another Einstein’, Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-the-next-einstein/201112/polymath-physicist-richard-feynmans-low-iq-and-finding-another. 3 Gleick, J. (1992), Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (Kindle Edition), pp. 30?5. 4 Gleick, J. (17 February 1988), ‘Richard Feynman Dead at 69: Leading Theoretical Physicist’, New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/17/obituaries/richard-feynman-dead-at-69-leading-theoretical-physicist.html?pagewanted=all. 5 The Nobel Prize in Physics 1965: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1965/. 6 Kac, M. (1987), Enigmas of Chance: An Autobiography, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, p. xxv. 7 Gleick, ‘Richard Feynman Dead at 69’. 8 Feynman, R.P. (1999), The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, New York: Perseus Books, p. 3. 9 Feynman, R.P. (2006), Don’t You Have Time to Think, ed.

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He devoured the family encyclopaedia, and as a young adolescent he soon took to teaching himself from a series of mathematics primers – filling his notebooks with trigonometry, calculus and analytic geometry, often creating his own exercises to stretch his mind.3 When he moved to the Far Rockaway High School, he joined a physics club and entered the Interscholastic Algebra League. He eventually reached the top place in New York University’s annual maths championship – ahead of students from all the city’s schools. The next year, he began his degree at MIT – and the rest is history. Schoolchildren would later learn Ritty’s full name – Richard Feynman ? as one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century. His new approach to the field of quantum electrodynamics revolutionised the study of subatomic particles4 – research that won him a Nobel Prize in 1965 with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger.5 (It was an accolade that none of Terman’s cohort would achieve.)

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Once we understand what they have done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with magicians . . . the working of their minds is for all intents and purposes incomprehensible. Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre.’6 But Feynman’s genius did not end with physics. During a sabbatical from his physics research at Caltech, he applied himself to the study of genetics, discovering the ways that some mutations within a gene may suppress each other. Despite his apparent inaptitude for drawing and foreign languages, he later learnt to be a credible artist, to speak Portuguese and Japanese, and to read Mayan hieroglyphs – all with the relentlessness that had driven his education as a child.

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking

We cannot know, not even in principle, both the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously. There is an inherent uncertainty about where the particle is going, and if a particle starts out at point A and is later detected at point B we cannot know exactly how it got from A to B, unless it is watched all the way along its path. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from the California Institute of Technology, applied this quantum-mechanical view to the history of particles as presented in the kind of space-time diagrams used by relativists. These are diagrams like graphs, with one axis representing time and the other space.

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But each path, direct or circuitous, fast or slow, has associated with it a definite probability (strictly speaking a ‘probability amplitude’), which can be calculated. The amplitudes are measured in terms of a quantity called action, which is energy×time, and which happens to be the unit Planck's constant, h, is measured in. Figure 1.5 Classical (that is Newtonian) physics says that a particle follows a definite trajectory from A to B. Richard Feynman's quantum mechanical ‘sum over histories’ approach says that we must calculate the contribution of every possible path and add them together. Also known as the ‘path integral’ approach, this explains, among other things, how a single electron (or a single photon) can pass through both holes in a double-slit experiment (see Figure 1.2) and interfere with itself.

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He then moved to Caltech, to begin his career in research, and spent three years struggling with a high energy experiment at an accelerator called the Bevatron, before he decided to concentrate on theory and began to investigate physicists’ understanding of the nature of the material world, under the guidance of Richard Feynman. As a newcomer to the field, he perhaps lacked some of the caution, or tact, of his elders, and when he realized that the eightfold way patterns of mesons and baryons could be explained in terms of combinations of two or three sub-particles, he immediately treated these sub-particles as real entities, which he called aces, and described them as such in his work.

Beyond Weird by Philip Ball

Albert Einstein, Bayesian statistics, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, dark pattern, dematerialisation, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes

Niels Bohr [Quantum mechanics] is a peculiar mixture describing in part4 realities of Nature, in part incomplete human information about Nature – all scrambled up by Heisenberg and Bohr into an omelette that nobody has seen how to unscramble. Edwin Jaynes Arguably the most important lesson of quantum mechanics5 is that we need to critically revisit our most basic assumptions about nature. Yakir Aharonov et al. I hope you can accept Nature as she is – absurd.6 Richard Feynman “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Richard Feynman said that in 1965. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, for his work on quantum mechanics. In case we didn’t get the point, Feynman drove it home in his artful Everyman style. ‘I was born not understanding quantum mechanics8,’ he exclaimed merrily, ‘[and] I still don’t understand quantum mechanics!’

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Contents Cover About the Book About the Author Title Page By way of introduction … No one can say what quantum mechanics means (and this is a book about it) Quantum mechanics is not really about the quantum Quantum objects are neither wave nor particle (but sometimes they might as well be) Quantum particles aren’t in two states at once (but sometimes they might as well be) What ‘happens’ depends on what we find out about it There are many ways of interpreting quantum theory (and none of them quite makes sense) Whatever the question, the answer is ‘Yes’ (unless it’s ‘No’) Not everything is knowable at once The properties of quantum objects don’t have to be contained within the objects There is no ‘spooky action at a distance’ The everyday world is what quantum becomes at human scales Everything you experience is a (partial) copy of what causes it Schrödinger’s cat has had kittens Quantum mechanics can be harnessed for technology Quantum computers don’t necessarily perform ‘many calculations at once’ There is no other ‘quantum’ you Things could be even more ‘quantum’ than they are (so why aren’t they)? The fundamental laws of quantum mechanics might be simpler than we imagine Can we ever get to the bottom of it? Notes Acknowledgements Bibliography Index Copyright About the Book ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ Richard Feynman wrote this in 1965 – the year he was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work on quantum mechanics. Quantum physics is regarded as one of the most obscure and impenetrable subjects in all of science. But when Feynman said he didn’t understand quantum mechanics, he didn’t mean that he couldn’t do it – he meant that’s all he could do.

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But neither, in that case, would be a career in fluid mechanics, population dynamics, or economics, which are equally inscrutable to the numerically challenged. No, the equations aren’t why quantum mechanics is perceived to be so hard. It’s the ideas. We just can’t get our heads around them. Neither could Richard Feynman. His failure, Feynman admitted, was to understand what the maths was saying. It provided numbers: predictions of quantities that could be tested against experiments, and which invariably survived those tests. But Feynman couldn’t figure out what these numbers and equations were really about: what they said about the ‘real world’.

The Meaning of It All by Richard P. Feynman

means of production, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method

He also authored a number of advanced publications that have become classic references and textbooks for researchers and students. Richard Feynman was a constructive public man. His work on the Challenger commission is well known, especially his famous demonstration of the susceptibility of the O-rings to cold, an elegant experiment, which required nothing more than a glass of ice water. Less well known were Dr. Feynman’s efforts on the California State Curriculum Committee in the 1960s where he protested the mediocrity of textbooks. A recital of Richard Feynman's myriad scientific and educational accomplishments cannot adequately capture the essence of the man.

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For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02412, or call (800) 255–1514 or (617) 252–5298, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com. 05 06 07 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Publisher’s Note The Uncertainty of Science The Uncertainty of Values This Unscientific Age Index About Richard Feynman PUBLISHER’S NOTE In April 1963, Richard P. Feynman was invited to give a three-night series of lectures at the University of Washington (Seattle) as part of the John Danz Lecture Series. Here is Feynman the man revealing, as only he could, his musings on society, on the conflict between science and religion, on peace and war, on our universal fascination with flying saucers, on faith healing and telepathy, on people’s distrust of politicians—indeed on all the concerns of the modern citizen-scientist.

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Research Associates, 102, 105 Statistical sampling, 84, 89–91 Stupidity, phenomena result of a general, 95 Systems, traffic, 118 Technology applications of, 62 and science, 50 Telekinesis, 68 Telepathy, mental, 71–74 Television advertising in, 85 looker, intelligence of average, 87–88 Testing, nuclear, 106–7 Theories, allowing for alternative, 69 Thoroughness, concept of, 17 Tops, spinning, 24–26 Traffic systems, 118 Troubles and lack of information, 91 Truth of ideas, 21 writing, 56 Uncertainties admission of, 34 dealing with, 66–67, 71 relative certainties out of, 98 remaining, 70–71 of science, 1–28 scientists dealing with, 26–27 of values, 29–57 Uncertainty, 67–68 Universe contemplation of, 39 origins of, 12 Unscientific age, 59–122 Values ethical, 43 moral, 120–21 uncertainty of, 29–57 Venus flying saucers from, 75 Mariner II voyage to, 109–12 Vocabulary, 116 War, dislike of, 32 Water, and deserts, 96 Weight, as not affected by motion, 24 Western civilization, 47 Witch doctors, 114 Words, as meaningless, 20 Writing truth, 56 ABOUT RICHARD FEYNMAN Born in 1918 in Brooklyn, Richard P. Feynman received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942. Despite his youth, he played an important part in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. Subsequently, he taught at Cornell and at the California Institute of Technology. In 1965 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Sin–Itero Tomanaga and Julian Schwinger, for his work in quantum electrodynamics.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, augmented reality, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, Doomsday Book, Eddington experiment, index card, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, Marshall McLuhan, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, The future is already here, time dilation, Wayback Machine, wikimedia commons

ALSO BY JAMES GLEICK Chaos: Making a New Science Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier Isaac Newton The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood Copyright © 2016 by James Gleick All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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He also says, “Time is the label we stick on different moments in the life of the world.” Physicists like this bumper-sticker game. John Archibald Wheeler is supposed to have said, “Time is nature’s way to keep everything from happening all at once,” but Woody Allen said that, too, and Wheeler admitted having found it scrawled in a Texas men’s room.*3 Richard Feynman said, “Time is what happens when nothing else happens,” which he knew was a wisecrack. “Maybe it is just as well if we face the fact that time is one of the things we probably cannot define (in the dictionary sense), and just say that it is what we already know it to be: it is how long we wait.”

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Events in our universe can be connected, such that one is the cause of the other, but, alternatively, they can be close enough in time and far enough apart that they cannot be connected and no one can even say which came first. (Outside the light cone, says the physicist.) We are more isolated, then, than we may have imagined, alone in our corners of spacetime. You know how fortune-tellers pretend to know the future? It turns out, said Richard Feynman, that no fortune-teller can even know the present. Einstein’s powerful ideas spread in the public press as rapidly as in the physics journals and disrupted the placid course of philosophy. The philosophers were surprised and outgunned. Bergson and Einstein clashed publicly in Paris and privately by post and seemed to be speaking different languages: one scientific, measured, practical; the other psychological, flowing, untrustworthy. “ ‘The time of the universe’ discovered by Einstein and ‘the time of our lives’ associated with Bergson spiraled down dangerously conflicting paths, splitting the century into two cultures,” notes the science historian Jimena Canales.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

These include favorable reaction kinetics and thermodynamics, adequate mechanical stiffness, and substantial geometrical separations between transition states leading to alternative reaction outcomes; each of these requirements stems from the need to constrain thermal fluctuations. 82The methods of organic chemistry aren’t widely understood: In his 1959 talk, Richard Feynman joked that “The chemist does a mysterious thing when he wants to make a molecule. He sees that it has got that ring, so he mixes this and that, and he shakes it, and he fiddles around. And, at the end of a difficult process, he usually does succeed in synthesizing what he wants.” (Richard Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Engineering and Science 23, no. 5 [1960].) Chapter 7: Science and the Timeless Landscape of Technology 90a timeless aspect of physical law, a latent structure: Scientific understanding of physical law has changed over time, but physical law itself has not, and within the accuracy of both laboratory measurement and cosmological observation, “physical constants” do indeed appear to be constant. 96Over the last four hundred or so years: Sean Carroll, “Cosmic Variance” blog at Discover Magazine, 16 June 2010 (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/06/16/reluctance-to-let-go/).

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Over the years, more and more biomolecular structures have been mapped in atomic detail, first a few in the 1950s, and today, tens of thousands, earning Nobel Prizes for James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins for their discovery of the structure of DNA and for John Kendrew and Max Perutz for their use of X-ray diffraction techniques to provide the first atomically precise maps of protein structures. This emerging knowledge of biomolecular machinery intrigued Richard Feynman. At Caltech in 1959, speaking after dinner at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Feynman discussed the physics of artificial micro- and nanoscale machinery, “inspired by the biological phenomena in which chemical forces are used in a repetitious fashion to produce all kinds of weird effects (one of which is the author).”

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Some world leaders regard nanotechnology as a crucial part of the future and share a vision linked to my work. For example, when the president of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam, who had formerly led India’s missile and space program, delivered a series of addresses in which he spoke of nanotechnology as India’s future, he cited both Richard Feynman’s talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” and my technical book, Nanosystems. In 2001 I met Dmitry Medvedev, president of Russia, after he delivered an address on nanotechnology at the opening session of Rusnanotech 2011; he had read my first book, Engines of Creation. More than a decade ago, in support of a vision of atomically precise fabrication, President Clinton announced a plan for the world’s first national nanotechnology program; today, China’s program has a larger (and rapidly growing) budget.

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

Even Schrödinger, who had introduced the concept of the electron wave in the first place, rejected this probabilistic interpretation of his very own equations. Even today, there are arguments among physicists debating the philosophical implications of the wave theory. How can you be two places at the same time? Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Ever since Newton, physicists believed in something called determinism, the philosophy that all future events can be accurately predicted. The laws of nature determine the motion of all things in the universe, making them ordered and predictable.

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So there was an essential flaw in simply combining the Dirac equation of electrons and Maxwell’s theory of photons. This haunted physicists for nearly two decades. Many physicists worked on this problem, but little progress was made. Finally, in 1949, three young physicists working independently, Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger in the United States, and Shin’Ichiro Tomonaga in Japan, cracked this long-standing problem. They were spectacularly successful, able to compute things like the magnetic property of the electron with enormous accuracy. But the way they did it was controversial and still causes physicists some unease and consternation even today.

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Einstein, we recall, introduced a four-dimensional symmetry that turned space into time and vice versa. Gell-Mann introduced equations containing three quarks; when you interchanged them inside an equation, the equation remained the same. This new symmetry described the reshuffling of three quarks. Polar Opposites II The other great physicist at Caltech, Richard Feynman, who renormalized QED, and Murray Gell-Mann, who introduced the quark, were polar opposites in their personality and temperament. In the popular media, physicists are universally portrayed either as mad scientists (like Doc Brown in Back to the Future) or hopelessly inept nerds, as in The Big Bang Theory.

Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster by Allan J McDonald, James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, flying shuttle, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway

The NASA Select TV channel was broadcasting live the first meeting of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident. The chairman of the Presidential Commission was William P. Rogers, former Secretary of State for President Nixon. Other members were Neil Armstrong, Vice-Chairman and former astronaut and first man to walk on the Moon; Dr. Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics from California Institute of Technology; General Donald J. Kutyna, Commander of the U.S. Air Force Space Systems Command in Los Angeles; Dr. Sally Ride, NASA astronaut and first American woman in space; Dr. Eugene Covert, head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Robert Hotz, former publisher of Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine; Dr.

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You recommended against a flight on one night and then have meetings with NASA people and they seem anxious to go ahead, or at least they were asking questions about it, and they gave you some data and you checked back to your home office and you got word back from home office to go-ahead because the evidence is inconclusive!” “He said something about having something,” Commission member Richard Feynman noted. “He does have some data there from the people who made the decision, I guess,” Rogers allowed. “I have some of that, but I also have the material that was reviewed at the meeting by all three parties, because I was party to that.” “Which meeting now are we talking about?” Rogers asked.

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The flight rationale for STS-51L stated that the ability of the primary O-ring seal could be seriously degraded by the cold temperatures, but that the secondary O-ring would seal, which was in total violation of the established critical items list and should have required a waiver from the Mission Management Team prior to launch. The critical items list did not address O-ring resiliency even though it was an even more important issue relative to the ability of the O-rings to seal at the cold temperatures forecast for this launch—and this issue should also have been addressed in the waiver. Physicist Richard Feynman was very interested in the dynamics of the field-joint, particularly the pressure actuation and extrusion of the O-rings into the gap created by the motor pressure. I explained to Dr. Feynman how this occurred and why it was so important to understand the timing function in the early phases of ignition for assessing the ability of the O-rings to seal properly.

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

Classification: LCC QC174.13 (ebook) | LCC QC174.13 .S6545 2019 (print) | DDC 530.12--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045679 Version_2 For Dina and Kai All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws. —JOHN COLTRANE I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. —RICHARD FEYNMAN Contents Also by Lee Smolin Title Page Copyright Dedication Epigraph Preface PART 1. AN ORTHODOXY OF THE UNREAL ONE Nature Loves to Hide TWO Quanta THREE How Quanta Change FOUR How Quanta Share FIVE What Quantum Mechanics Doesn’t Explain SIX The Triumph of Anti-Realism PART 2.

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A nuclear theorist and a mystic, he transmitted the legacies of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr to my generation through the stories he told us of his friendships with them. Wheeler was a committed cold warrior who worked on the hydrogen bomb even as he pioneered the study of quantum universes and black holes. He was also a great mentor who counted among his students Richard Feynman, Hugh Everett, and several of the pioneers of quantum gravity. And he might have been my mentor, had I had better judgment. A true student of Bohr, Wheeler spoke in riddles and paradoxes. His blackboard was unlike any I’d ever encountered. It had no equations, and only a few elegantly written aphorisms, each set out in a box, distilling a lifetime of seeking the reason why our world is a quantum universe.

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A few made careers in philosophy or mathematics, others by teaching in small undergraduate colleges. It was the promise of quantum computing that began, just before the turn of this century, to open doors to people who wanted to work on quantum foundations. The idea that quantum mechanics could be used to construct a new kind of computer was broached by Richard Feynman in a lecture1 in 1981. That talk, and other early anticipations of the idea, seemed to make little impression until David Deutsch, originally a specialist in quantum gravity who held a position at Oxford, proposed in 1989 an approach to quantum computation in the context of a paper on the foundations of mathematics and logic.2 In his paper, Deutsch introduced the idea of a universal quantum computer, analogous to a Turing machine.

Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology by Johnjoe McFadden, Jim Al-Khalili

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Ernest Rutherford, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Medieval Warm Period, New Journalism, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, synthetic biology, theory of mind, traveling salesman, uranium enrichment, Zeno's paradox

It is likely to yield more efficient ways to make drugs, grow crops or destroy pollutants. But in these and many other similar experiments, scientists did not create new life. Despite Venter’s achievement, life’s essential mystery continues to grin back at us. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman is credited with insisting that “what we can’t make, we don’t understand.” By this definition, we do not understand life because we have not yet managed to make it. We can mix biochemicals, we can heat them, we can irradiate them; we can even, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, use electricity to animate them; but the only way we can make life is by injecting these biochemicals into already living cells, or by eating them, thereby making them part of our own bodies.

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It performed the same function in the dinosaur, and continues to perform that function in our bodies: dismantling collagen fibers to allow growth and re-formation of tissue during development and after injury. To see this enzymatic process in action, we will borrow an idea from a science-transforming lecture delivered by Richard Feynman to an audience at the California Institute of Technology in 1959 entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” The lecture is generally acknowledged as having been the intellectual foundation of the field of nanotechnology: engineering on the scale of atoms and molecules. Feynman’s ideas are also said to have inspired the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, in which a submarine and its crew were shrunk small enough to be injected into a scientist’s body to find and repair a potentially fatal blood clot in his brain.

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Why these supposedly innocuous modifications to enzyme structure make such a dramatic difference remains something of a mystery within standard transition state theory; but it turns out that they make sense if quantum mechanics is brought into the picture. We will return to this discovery in the last chapter of the book. Yet another problem is that transition state theory has so far failed to deliver artificial enzymes that work as well as the real ones. You may remember Richard Feynman’s famous dictum, “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” This is relevant to enzymes because, despite knowing so much about enzyme mechanisms, no one has so far managed to design an enzyme from scratch that can produce anything like the rate enhancements delivered by natural enzymes.6 According to Feynman’s criterion, we do not yet understand how enzymes work.

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

Oppenheimer worked out that these fleeting photons could cause infinite changes in the energy of an atom. That was impossible, which could mean only one thing: there was something badly wrong with the theory. It was fine as a rough guide, but nothing more. One of the physicists Dyson fell in with at Cornell was Richard Feynman, a self-assured and brilliant New Yorker who was determined to rescue the beleaguered quantum field theory.4 In 1947, Feynman realized that, instead of worrying about each and every particle of light that popped into existence around an electron, it was better to pull back and view the particles more as a cloud of energy.

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He talked his options over with Charles Coulson, who warned him that quantum field theory was in a mess. “It’s the kind of field where you either achieve nothing or win a Nobel prize,” Coulson said. Higgs didn’t know it at the time, but Coulson’s fears were out of date: the problem he had in mind was the one that had been sorted out at least a year earlier by Freeman Dyson, Richard Feynman, and the others. Higgs decided to play it safe and stayed on at King’s College. His Ph.D. studies focused on theoretical problems in chemistry that were important for understanding the structure of molecules. When young scientists finish their Ph.D.s, they usually spend time in what can be an academic no-man’s-land of postdoctorate fellowships. 6 These are typically one- or two-year posts, and they serve universities well by keeping them supplied with cheap labor.

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Scientists feared that his theory suffered from the same problem that nearly sank quantum electrodynamics in the 1940s. Their worry was that, in certain circumstances, Weinberg’s theory might churn out results that included infinities. That meant it would predict particles doing things more often than always, which was clearly impossible. Richard Feynman had solved the trouble of infinities in quantum electrodynamics by inventing a technique called renormalization, and Weinberg was sure the same could be done for his theory. The only problem was, he had no idea how to prove it. The Singel Canal curves like a warm embrace around the ancient town of Utrecht in the Netherlands.

E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation by David Bodanis

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, British Empire, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, Nelson Mandela, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Thorstein Veblen, time dilation

Crow’s Paul Valéry and Maxwell’s Demon: Natural Order and Human Possibility (Hull, England: University of Hull Publications, 1972) brings out rich insights from a different examination of the French tradition. Richard Feynman would have had little use for Valéry or most historians, which is a pity, but for exploring the actual science of light, his writing (and research) has had few peers: along with the physics texts in the next entry, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, by Richard Feynman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985) is a fine start. Du Châtelet and “Squared” Du Châtelet hasn’t been favored by her English language biographers, but readers with some French are in for a guide to further reading treat.

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How he and Lawrence overcame their own warinesses to become best friends—and then exhausted, dismayed enemies—is the drama in Nuel Phar Davis’s masterpiece Lawrence and Oppenheimer (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969). Richard Feynman’s best-selling reminiscences “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” ed. Edward Hutchings (New York: Norton, 1985) are vivid on the personal level; James Gleick’s Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (New York: Pantheon, 1992), gives a far richer story of what Feynman and others experienced on the mesa. The best overall account of the U.S. and German projects is Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), a deserved winner of the National Book Award.

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He knew—instantly—that the young postgraduate physicists he needed in large numbers wouldn’t pass up work at MIT’s radar lab or other famous wartime projects to head to this unknown New Mexico site, simply on the basis of salaries, or offers of future jobs. They’d come only if they thought the top physicists in America were going there. Oppenheimer, accordingly, recruited the senior physicists first; the postgrads followed fast. He even got the authority-resistant genius Richard Feynman on his side. (Tell Feynman that something was a national emergency and his country needed him, and he’d give his mocking New York snort and tell you to get lost.) But Oppenheimer understood that Feynman was 147 adulthood so hostile in large part out of furious anger: his young wife had tuberculosis, and in this era before antibiotics it was likely she would soon die.

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Consequently, exomoons, rather than planets like the earth, may be the most likely locations in our galaxy to find extraterrestrial life. 21. HEX APPEAL At the north pole of Saturn is a hurricane twice the size of the earth and the shape of a hexagon “Nature’s imagination’s so much greater than man’s. She’s never gonna let us relax.” —RICHARD FEYNMAN WHEN AIR CIRCULATES IN the earth’s atmosphere, it circulates—well—in a circle. Have you ever seen a triangular hurricane? Or a square one? Or a hexagonal one? Of course you haven’t. However, things are different at the north pole of Saturn. In 2007 NASA’s Cassini space probe flew over the ringed planet and captured the most bizarre image of a hexagonal arrangement of clouds turning around the pole.

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The key thing is that the smaller the particle, the bigger its quantum wave.2 The smallest particle of familiar matter is the electron; it therefore has the biggest quantum wave. And it is because the electron wave needs tons of elbow room that atoms have to be so big relative to their nuclei—why they contain so much empty space.3 In fact, the wave nature of the electron is why atoms exist. As the American Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman said: “Atoms are completely impossible from the classical point of view.” What Feynman meant is that, according to the theory of electromagnetism, an electron whirling around a nucleus in an atom should constantly broadcast “electromagnetic waves” like a tiny radio transmitter. This should cause it to lose energy and spiral into the nucleus in less than a hundred-millionth of second.

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How we discovered this remarkable fact—that we are far more intimately connected to the stars than even astrologers dared imagine—is a long and torturous story. First came the discovery that everything is made of atoms. “If in some cataclysm all of scientific knowledge were destroyed and only one sentence passed on to succeeding generations, what statement would convey the most information in the fewest words?” asked Richard Feynman. He had absolutely no doubt about the answer: “Everything is made of atoms.” Paradoxically, the fact that nature is ultimately made of tiny indestructible grains that cannot be changed into anything else became clear only after centuries of failed attempts to change one substance into another—for instance, lead into gold.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The clever young Thomasina says in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, “You cannot stir things apart,” and this is precisely the same as “Time flows on, never comes back.” Such processes run in one direction only. Probability is the reason. What is remarkable—physicists took a long time to accept it—is that every irreversible process must be explained the same way. Time itself depends on chance, or “the accidents of life,” as Richard Feynman liked to say: “Well, you see that all there is to it is that the irreversibility is caused by the general accidents of life.”♦ For the box of gas to come unmixed is not physically impossible; it is just improbable in the extreme. So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.

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A few months after that, Crick showed this to be utterly wrong: experimental data on protein sequences ruled out the diamond code. But Gamow was not giving up. The triplet idea was seductive. An unexpected cast of scientists joined the hunt: Max Delbrück, an ex-physicist now at Caltech in biology; his friend Richard Feynman, the quantum theorist; Edward Teller, the famous bomb maker; another Los Alamos alumnus, the mathematician Nicholas Metropolis; and Sydney Brenner, who joined Crick at the Cavendish. They all had different coding ideas. Mathematically the problem seemed daunting even to Gamow. “As in the breaking of enemy messages during the war,” he wrote in 1954, “the success depends on the available length of the coded text.

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—Seth Lloyd (2006)♦ QUANTUM MECHANICS HAS WEATHERED in its short history more crises, controversies, interpretations (the Copenhagen, the Bohm, the Many Worlds, the Many Minds), factional implosions, and general philosophical breast-beating than any other science. It is happily riddled with mysteries. It blithely disregards human intuition. Albert Einstein died unreconciled to its consequences, and Richard Feynman was not joking when he said no one understands it. Perhaps arguments about the nature of reality are to be expected; quantum physics, so uncannily successful in practice, deals in theory with the foundations of all things, and its own foundations are continually being rebuilt. Even so, the ferment sometimes seems more religious than scientific.

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

To accommodate the fact that people observe only three dimensions of space and the dimension of time, theorists recalled an idea developed by Swedish physicist Oskar Klein in the 1920s and proposed that six of the dimensions are curled into a ball so tiny that it cannot physically be observed. That worked well mathematically but offered no incentive for experimenters to try to probe the theory. Given the inability to obtain experimental proof, string theory’s skeptics—Glashow and Richard Feynman, among the prominent examples—argued that it remained on shaky ground. Laboratory researchers were enticed to a greater extent by a more conservative application of supersymmetry, called the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). Proposed in 1981 by Stanford University physicist Savas Dimopoulos, along with Howard Georgi, it offered a way of extending the Standard Model to include additional fields with the goal of preparing it to be part of a greater unified theory.

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The details of how photons, electrons, protons, neutrons, and other constituents interacted with one another in the eons before atoms, and particularly in the first moments after the Big Bang reflect the properties of the fundamental natural interactions. Therefore, like colliders, the early universe represents a kind of particle physics laboratory; any discoveries from one venue can be compared to the other. The same year that Alpher and Gamow published their alphabet paper, three physicists, Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman of the United States and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga of Japan, independently produced a remarkable set of works describing the quantum theory of the electromagnetic interaction. (Tomonaga developed his ideas during the Second World War when it was impossible for him to promote them.) Distilled into a comprehensive theory through the vision of Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, quantum electrodynamics (QED), as it was called, became seen as the prototype for explaining how natural forces operate.

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Though it will crash particles together at lower energies than the SSC was supposed to—14 TeV in total instead of 20 TeV—most theoretical estimates indicate that if the Higgs is out there the LHC will find it. If all goes well, modern physics will soon have cause for celebration. 8 Crashing by Design Building the Large Hadron Collider The age in which we live is the age in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of Nature, and that day will never come again —RICHARD FEYNMAN (THE CHARACTER OF PHYSICAL LAW, 1965) Compared to the wild flume ride of American high-energy physics, CERN has paddled steadily ahead like a steam-boat down the Rhone River. Each milestone has been part of a natural progression to machines of increasing might—able to push particle energies higher and higher.

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

At that time it was only just understood descriptively. And that became a problem that I think von Neumann became very much interested in. He wanted a real problem that you really needed computers for.”20 Software—first called “coding” and later “programming”—was invented on the spot to suit the available (or unavailable) machines. Physicist Richard Feynman served on the front lines in developing the computational methods and troubleshooting routines used at Los Alamos in early 1944, when desk calculators and punched-card accounting machines constituted the only hardware at hand. The calculations were executed by dozens of human computers (“girls” in Feynman’s terminology) who passed intermediate results back and forth, weaving together a long sequence, or algorithm, of simpler steps.

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“Perhaps some day in the dim future, it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances,” hoped Richardson, “and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained.”27 Richardson thereby anticipated massively parallel computing, his 64,000 mathematicians reincarnated seventy years later as the multiple processors of Danny Hillis’s Connection Machine. “We had decided to simplify things by starting out with only 64,000 processors,” explained Hillis, recalling how Richard Feynman helped him bring Lewis Richardson’s fantasy to life.28 Even without the Connection Machine, Richardson’s approach to cellular modeling would be widely adopted once it became possible to assign one high-speed digital computer rather than 64,000 human beings to keep track of numerical values and relations among individual cells.

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We have made only limited progress in the three hundred years since Robert Hooke explained how the soul is somehow “apprehensive” of “a continued Chain of Ideas coyled up in the Repository of the Brain.”47 What mind, if any, will become apprehensive of the great coiling of ideas now under way is not a meaningless question, but it is still too early in the game to expect an answer that is meaningful to us. 10 THERE’S PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE TOP We’re doing this the way you’d plan walkways in a park: Plant grass, then put sidewalks where the paths form. —JOE VAN LONE1 “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” was the title of an after-dinner talk given by physicist Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology on 29 December 1959. Feynman’s timing was perfect. He kept his audience awake with a series of outlandish speculations that soon turned out to be spectacularly right. “In the year 2000, when they look back at this age,” announced Feynman, “they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction.”

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

noredirect=on&utm_term=.b81dd6679eee; Wyatt Andrews and Anna Werner, “Healthcare.gov Plagued by Crashes on 1st Day,” CBS News, October 1, 2013, www.cbsnews.com/news/healthcaregov-plagued-by-crashes-on-1st-day; Adrianne Jeffries, “Why Obama’s Healthcare.gov Launch Was Doomed to Fail,” Verge, October 8, 2013, www.theverge.com/2013/10/8/4814098/why-did-the-tech-savvy-obama-administration-launch-a-busted-healthcare-website; “The Number 6 Says It All About the HealthCare.gov Rollout,” NPR, December 27, 2013, www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/12/27/257398910/the-number-6-says-it-all-about-the-healthcare-gov-rollout; Kate Pickert, “Report: Cost of HealthCare.Gov Approaching $1 Billion,” Time, July 30, 2014, http://time.com/3060276/obamacare-affordable-care-act-cost. 2. Marshall Fisher, Ananth Raman, and Anna Sheen McClelland, “Are You Ready?,” Harvard Business Review, August 2000) https://hbr.org/2000/07/are-you-ready. 3. Fisher, Raman, and McClelland, “Are You Ready?” 4. Richard Feynman, Messenger Lectures, Cornell University, BBC, 1964, www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messenger-lectures/player. 5. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “The FIDO Rover,” NASA, https://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/systems/system.cfm?System=1. 6. NASA, “Space Power Facility,” www1.grc.nasa.gov/facilities/sec. 7. The discussion on the airbag tests for the Mars Exploration Rovers is based on the following sources: Steve Squyres, Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet (New York: Hyperion, 2005); Adam Steltzner and William Patrick, Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016). 8.

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We put our mouths on the spigot of their seemingly clear opinions, happily removing the burden of critical thinking from our shoulders. The problem with the modern world, as Bertrand Russell put it, is that “the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” Even after physicist Richard Feynman earned a Nobel prize, he thought of himself as a “confused ape” and approached everything around him with the same level of curiosity, which enabled him to see nuances that others dismissed. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing,” he remarked, “than to have answers which might be wrong.”

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Take his third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Centuries before the advent of human flight, this simple law explained how rockets reach space. The mass of their fuel goes down, and the rocket goes up. “The more we understand something,” Peter Attia explained to me, “the less complicated it becomes. This is classic Richard Feynman teaching.” Attia is a mechanical engineer turned medical doctor, a renowned expert in increasing people’s life span and health span. If you’re reading a study in medicine, he said, “and you see words like multifaceted, multifactorial, complex, to explain the current understanding,” the authors are basically saying, “We don’t know what the heck we’re talking about yet.”

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

I didn’t have to deal with it, because I left India when I was nineteen, but I know Indian scientists had to deal with it. Today they have access to information at the click of a button. More important, they have access to lectures. They can listen to Richard Feynman. That would have been a dream of mine when I was growing up. They can just watch Richard Feynman on the Web. That’s a big leveling in the field.” And yet . . . “Along with the benefits [of the Web], there is now a huge amount of noise. You have all of these people spouting pseudoscientific jargon and pushing their own ideas as if they were science.”

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I was a bit puzzled when I received an invitation—a very late invitation indeed—which they explained was based on their interest in the ideas I presented in a book called Afterwords, which were very much on their wavelength. I jumped at the opportunity, the main reason being that the keynote speaker was none other than Richard Feynman. I love to spend time with physicists, because they think about the universe, i.e., everything. And no physicist was reputed to be as articulate as Feynman. I couldn’t wait to meet him. I accepted. That said, I am not a scientist, and I had never entertained the idea of getting on a stage and delivering a “lecture” of any kind, least of all a commentary on an obscure mathematical theory in front of a group identified as the world’s most interesting thinkers.

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Since I had an MBA from Columbia Business School and a series of relative successes in business, I was dragooned into becoming an agent, initially for Gregory Bateson and John Lilly, whose books I sold quickly, and for sums that caught my attention, thus kick-starting my career as a literary agent. I never did meet Richard Feynman. THE LONG AI WINTERS This new career put me in close touch with most of the AI pioneers, and over the decades I rode with them on waves of enthusiasm, and into valleys of disappointment. In the early eighties the Japanese government mounted a national effort to advance AI. They called it the Fifth Generation; their goal was to change the architecture of computation by breaking “the von Neumann bottleneck” by creating a massively parallel computer.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

There seemed to be a mystifying universal conspiracy among textbook authors to make certain the material they dealt with never strayed too near the realm of the mildly interesting and was always at least a long-distance phone call from the frankly interesting. I now know that there is a happy abundance of science writers who pen the most lucid and thrilling prose—Timothy Ferris, Richard Fortey, and Tim Flannery are three that jump out from a single station of the alphabet (and that's not even to mention the late but godlike Richard Feynman)—but sadly none of them wrote any textbook I ever used. All mine were written by men (it was always men) who held the interesting notion that everything became clear when expressed as a formula and the amusingly deluded belief that the children of America would appreciate having chapters end with a section of questions they could mull over in their own time.

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For all his achievements, however, Halley's greatest contribution to human knowledge may simply have been to take part in a modest scientific wager with two other worthies of his day: Robert Hooke, who is perhaps best remembered now as the first person to describe a cell, and the great and stately Sir Christopher Wren, who was actually an astronomer first and architect second, though that is not often generally remembered now. In 1683, Halley, Hooke, and Wren were dining in London when the conversation turned to the motions of celestial objects. It was known that planets were inclined to orbit in a particular kind of oval known as an ellipse—“a very specific and precise curve,” to quote Richard Feynman—but it wasn't understood why. Wren generously offered a prize worth forty shillings (equivalent to a couple of weeks' pay) to whichever of the men could provide a solution. Hooke, who was well known for taking credit for ideas that weren't necessarily his own, claimed that he had solved the problem already but declined now to share it on the interesting and inventive grounds that it would rob others of the satisfaction of discovering the answer for themselves.

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For a memorial you must look to the sky and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990 and named in his honor. 9 THE MIGHTY ATOM WHILE EINSTEIN AND Hubble were productively unraveling the large-scale structure of the cosmos, others were struggling to understand something closer to hand but in its way just as remote: the tiny and ever- mysterious atom. The great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman once observed that if you had to reduce scientific history to one important statement it would be “All things are made of atoms.” They are everywhere and they constitute every thing. Look around you. It is all atoms. Not just the solid things like walls and tables and sofas, but the air in between.

Stephen Hawking by Leonard Mlodinow

Albert Michelson, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, do what you love, Ernest Rutherford, Eyjafjallajökull, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Nelson Mandela, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Due to difficulties of that sort, when Stephen moved to Cambridge the practitioners of general relativity and cosmology were mainly mathematicians whose work was detached from reality and whose models of the universe were unrealistic. That kept them occupied, but nobody paid much attention to their papers. The low quality of the work prompted Caltech physicist Richard Feynman to write his wife from a 1962 conference on gravity in Warsaw, “Because there are no experiments this field is not an active one…there are hosts of dopes here and it is not good for my blood pressure: such inane things are said and seriously discussed that I get into arguments…” Most physicists concurred that questions of the origin of the universe were dead ends, but those were the questions that had won Stephen’s heart.

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Quantum theory made it possible for Bekenstein’s entropy theory to be correct. Stephen said that he was annoyed at what he’d discovered and kept it quiet for a while. As he wrote in A Brief History of Time, “I was afraid that if Bekenstein found out about it, he would use it as a further argument to support his ideas.” But as Richard Feynman used to say, physicists don’t tell nature how things behave, nature shows physicists. So Stephen eventually accepted that Bekenstein was correct: black holes have nonzero entropy that is proportional to the surface area of their horizon; they have a nonzero temperature; and they slowly convert the matter and energy they have swallowed up into radiation that they emit back into space, gradually shrinking in the process until they eventually disappear.

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Kip, who was about Stephen’s age, studied classical general relativity, the original Einstein theory without quantum modifications. At the other end of the Caltech theorist spectrum were two Nobel laureates who specialized in quantum theories and for the most part ignored general relativity. They were the two most influential theoretical physicists of their era, Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman. A decade after Stephen’s Fairchild year, I arrived at Caltech and had the office next to Murray, and down the hall from Feynman. Gell-Mann was “Murray” to me and to most people. He derived his greatest fame from discovering a mathematical scheme to classify and understand the properties of elementary particles.

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

As we improved our technology and expanded the range of phenomena that we could observe, we began to find nature behaving in ways that were less and less in line with our everyday experience and hence with our intuition, as evidenced by the experiment with buckyballs. That experiment is typical of the type of phenomena that cannot be encompassed by classical science but are described by what is called quantum physics. In fact, Richard Feynman wrote that the double-slit experiment like the one we described above “contains all the mystery of quantum mechanics.” The principles of quantum physics were developed in the first few decades of the twentieth century after Newtonian theory was found to be inadequate for the description of nature on the atomic—or subatomic—level.

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Those who find those principles weird or difficult to believe are in good company, the company of great physicists such as Einstein and even Feynman, whose description of quantum theory we will soon present. In fact, Feynman once wrote, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” But quantum physics agrees with observation. It has never failed a test, and it has been tested more than any other theory in science. In the 1940s Richard Feynman had a startling insight regarding the difference between the quantum and Newtonian worlds. Feynman was intrigued by the question of how the interference pattern in the double-slit experiment arises. Recall that the pattern we find when we fire molecules with both slits open is not the sum of the patterns we find when we run the experiment twice, once with just one slit open, and once with only the other open.

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The strong force is the energy source for the sun and nuclear power, but, as with the weak force, we don’t have direct contact with it. The first force for which a quantum version was created was electromagnetism. The quantum theory of the electromagnetic field, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED for short, was developed in the 1940s by Richard Feynman and others, and has become a model for all quantum field theories. As we’ve said, according to classical theories, forces are transmitted by fields. But in quantum field theories the force fields are pictured as being made of various elementary particles called bosons, which are force-carrying particles that fly back and forth between matter particles, transmitting the forces.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

I wanted to take us into a new era of biology by generating a new life form that was described and driven only by DNA information that had been created in the laboratory. This would be the ultimate proof by synthesis. 8 Synthesis of the M. mycoides Genome If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar. —Richard Feynman, 19881 Many believe that the most important innovations of human creativity are the result of some kind of visionary gift, a gift associated with such extraordinary and singular geniuses as Isaac Newton, Michelangelo, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. I don’t doubt the incredible impact of individuals who can make great intellectual leaps, who can see further than anyone before them, and who discern patterns where others see only noise.

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The third watermark included, alongside the names of several scientists, the second quotation: “See things not as they are, but as they might be,” attributed to one of Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s early teachers and cited in the biography American Prometheus. The fourth watermark contained the remaining names of the forty-six scientists and a quotation from the Nobel Prize–winning quantum physicist Richard Feynman: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” We had accomplished what had been only a wild dream almost fifteen years earlier, and had effectively come full circle. Starting with DNA from cells, we learned how to accurately read the DNA sequence. We successfully digitized biology by converting the four-letter chemical analog code (A, T, C, G) into the digital code of the computer (1s and 0s).

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But sometimes it is just as important not to get too obsessed by them, particularly when you are venturing into a new area, as they can be distractions that hinder how you think and what you do. They can become a trap, as they did in the first half of the twentieth century, when scientists were certain that proteins were the genetic material. Richard Feynman issued a famous warning about the dangers of attempting to define anything with total precision: “We get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers . . . one saying to the other: ‘You don’t know what you are talking about!’ The second one says: ‘What do you mean by “talking”? What do you mean by “you”?

The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman, Anthony Brandt

active measures, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Burning Man, cloud computing, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, microbiome, Netflix Prize, new economy, New Journalism, pets.com, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Simon Singh, skeuomorphism, Solyndra, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, X Prize

After participating in the sailing seeds exercise, children will appreciate Nature’s designs their whole lives, because they’ve attempted new creations themselves. Even when the answer is fixed, creative teaching encourages students to find different ways of arriving at it. In 1965, the renowned physicist Richard Feynman was asked to review math textbooks for the California State Curriculum Committee (“18 feet of shelf space, 500 pounds of books!” he complained in his report). He felt that the modern method of teaching math, in which teachers train students in a single way of solving problems, was misguided. He argued that students should be directed to find as many ways as they can of reaching the correct solution: What we want in arithmetic textbooks is not to teach a particular way of doing every problem but, rather, to teach what the original problem is, and to leave a much greater freedom in obtaining the answer … We must remove the rigidity of thought … We must leave freedom for the mind to wander about in trying to solve problems … The successful user of mathematics is practically an inventor of new ways of obtaining answers in given situations.4 When encouraging alternatives, an effective strategy is to inspire students to go different distances from the hive.

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In Partimento and Continuo Playing in Theory and in Practice, edited by Dirk Moelants and Kathleen Snyers. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2010. Gladwell, Malcolm. “Creation Myth.” New Yorker. May 16, 2011. Accessed May 1, 2016. <http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth> Gleick, James. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. Gogh, Vincent van, and Martin Bailey. Letters from Provence. London: Collins & Brown, 1990. Gogh, Vincent van, and Ronald de Leeuw. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1996. Gold, H.L. “Ready, Aim — Extrapolate!” Galaxy Science Fiction.

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Botía and Dimitris Charitos (Amsterdam: IOS Press Ebooks, 2013), accessed August 21, 2015, <http://ebooks.iospress.nl/volume/workshop-proceedings-of-the-9th-international-conference-on-intelligent-environments> 2 Shumei Zhang and Victor Callaghan, “Using Science Fiction Prototyping as a Means to Motivate Learning of STEM Topics and Foreign Languages,” 2014 International Conference on Intelligent Environments (Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society, 2014). 3 Amy Russell and Stephen Rice, “Sailing Seeds: An Experiment in Wind Dispersal,” Botanical Society of America, March 2001, accessed August 21, 2015, <http://botany.org/bsa/misc/mcintosh/dispersal.html> 4 James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992). 5 Kamal Shah et. al, “Maji: A New Tool to Prevent Overhydration of Children Receiving Intravenous Fluid Therapy in Low-Resource Settings,” American Journal of Tropical Medical Hygiene 92, no. 5 (2015), accessed May 11, 2016, <http://dx.doi.org/10.4269/ajtmh.14-0495> 6 Carol Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Random House, 2006). 7 The school is the Renaissance Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound School.

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Researchers are entitled to keep data private until published but once they accomplish that, they should throw the doors open to give the community every opportunity to make a proper assessment. Any attempt at accuracy is bound to fall short if the truthseeking group has only limited access to potentially pertinent information. Without all the facts, accuracy suffers. This ideal of scientific sharing was similarly described by physicist Richard Feynman in a 1974 lecture as “a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results . . .” It is unrealistic to think we can perfectly achieve Feynman’s ideal; even scientists struggle with it.

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Remember the thought experiment I suggested at the beginning of the book about what the headlines would have looked like if Pete Carroll’s pass call had won the 2015 Super Bowl? Those headlines would have been about his brilliance. People would have analyzed Carroll’s decision differently. Knowing how something turned out creates a conflict of interest that expresses itself as resulting. Richard Feynman recognized that in physics—a branch of science that most of us consider as objective as 2 + 2 = 4—there is still demonstrable outcome bias. He found that if those analyzing data knew, or could even just intuit, the hypothesis being tested, the analysis would be more likely to support the hypothesis being tested.

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Thinking in bets demands the imperative of skepticism. Without embracing uncertainty, we can’t rationally bet on our beliefs. And we need to be particularly skeptical of information that agrees with us because we know that we are biased to just accept and applaud confirming evidence. If we don’t “lean over backwards” (as Richard Feynman famously said) to figure out where we could be wrong, we are going to make some pretty bad bets. If we embrace uncertainty and wrap that into the way we communicate with the group, confrontational dissent evaporates because we start from a place of not being sure. Just as we can wrap our uncertainty into the way we express our beliefs (“I’m 60% sure the waiter is going to mess up my order”), when we implement the norm of skepticism, we naturally modulate expression of dissent with others.

Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

More than just O-rings When the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch on 28 January 1986, killing all seven people onboard, a Presidential Commission was formed to investigate the disaster. As well as including Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride (the first American woman in space), the commission also featured Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The Challenger exploded because of a leak from one of the solid rocket boosters. For take-off, the space shuttle had two of these boosters, each of which weighed over 500 tonnes and, amazingly, used metal as fuel: they burned aluminium. Once the fuel was spent, the solid rocket boosters were jettisoned by the shuttle at an altitude of over 40 kilometres and eventually deployed a parachute so they would splash down into the Atlantic Ocean.

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Rubber gaskets called O-rings were placed between the sections to provide a tight seal. It was these O-rings that failed during the launch of Challenger, allowing hot gases to escape from the boosters and start the chain of events which led to its destruction. Famously, during the investigation, Richard Feynman demonstrated how the O-rings lost their elasticity at low temperatures. It was vital that, as the separate sections of the booster moved about, the O-rings sprang back to maintain the seal. In front of the media, Feynman put some of the O-ring rubber in a glass of iced water and showed that it no longer sprang back.

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In my imaginary cartoon version of human evolution, the false positives of assuming there is a danger when there isn’t are usually not punished as severely as when a human underestimates a risk and gets eaten. The selection pressure is not on accuracy. Wrong and alive is evolutionarily better than correct and dead. But we owe it to ourselves to try to work out these probabilities as best we can. This is what Richard Feynman was faced with during the investigation into the shuttle disaster. The managers and high-up people in NASA were saying that each shuttle launch had only a one in 100,000 chance of disaster. But, to Feynman’s ears, that did not sound right. He realized it would mean there could be a shuttle launch every day for three hundred years with only one disaster.

The Gene Machine by Venki Ramakrishnan

CRISPR, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, ghettoisation, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Feynman, Robert Shiller, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

I was nineteen years old and had just graduated from Baroda University. It was customary to stay on to get a master’s degree in India before going abroad for a PhD, but I was eager to go to America as soon as I could. To me, it was not only the land of opportunity but also of rational heroes like Richard Feynman, whose famous Lectures on Physics had been part of my undergraduate curriculum. Besides, my parents were already there, as my father was taking a short sabbatical at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Since this was a last-minute decision, I had not taken the GRE exam that is a requirement for American graduate schools, and most universities would not even consider my application.

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Just being able to see detail had transformed biology from the anatomy of humans to the structures inside a cell. But what were all these things inside cells made of? Like all everyday matter, cells and their components are made of molecules, which are groups of atoms that are held together in a very specific way. The atomic theory of matter took such a long time to develop and is so important that Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, said that if all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed and only one sentence could be passed on to the next generations of humans, it should be ‘all things are made of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into each other.’

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It is enormously satisfying to know that your fellow scientists think so highly of you. It is also a great tribute to the students, postdocs, and staff who had risked their own careers on the project and without whom nothing would have been accomplished. And of course, the cash is always welcome. Even Richard Feynman, who disdained awards, had accepted it. I realized then that Måns was a man of real integrity. He had obviously put aside his differences with me about one aspect of our work and considered the bigger picture. At that level of discussion, even a slight lack of enthusiasm can sink a candidate.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-pattern, anti-work, antiwork, Arthur Eddington, artificial general intelligence, availability heuristic, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, cosmological constant, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dematerialisation, different worldview, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, effective altruism, experimental subject, Extropian, friendly AI, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, hindsight bias, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, mental accounting, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, money market fund, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Necker cube, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), P = NP, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, planetary scale, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, scientific worldview, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, strong AI, sunk-cost fallacy, technological singularity, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Turing complete, Turing machine, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

But a culture that sees life running inexorably downward is very different from a culture in which you can reach unprecedented heights. (I say “culture,” and not “society,” because you can have more than one subculture in a society.) You could say that the difference between e.g. Richard Feynman and the Inquisition was that the Inquisition believed they had truth, while Richard Feynman sought truth. This isn’t quite defensible, though, because there were undoubtedly some truths that Richard Feynman thought he had as well. “The sky is blue,” for example, or “2 + 2 = 4.” Yes, there are effectively certain truths of science. General Relativity may be overturned by some future physics—albeit not in any way that predicts the Sun will orbit Jupiter; the new theory must steal the successful predictions of the old theory, not contradict them.

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Search for “heat conduction.” Taken from Joachim Verhagen, http://web.archive.org/web/20060424082937/http://www.nvon.nl/scheik/best/diversen/scijokes/scijokes.txt, archived version, October 27, 2001. 31 Guessing the Teacher’s Password When I was young, I read popular physics books such as Richard Feynman’s QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter. I knew that light was waves, sound was waves, matter was waves. I took pride in my scientific literacy, when I was nine years old. When I was older, and I began to read the Feynman Lectures on Physics, I ran across a gem called “the wave equation.”

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It does seem plausible that if the Inquisition had been made up of relativists, professing that nothing was true and nothing mattered, they would have mustered less enthusiasm for their torture. They would also have been less enthusiastic if lobotomized. I think that’s a fair analogy. And yet . . . I think the Inquisition’s attitude toward truth played a role. The Inquisition believed that there was such a thing as truth, and that it was important; well, likewise Richard Feynman. But the Inquisitors were not Truth-Seekers. They were Truth-Guardians. I once read an argument (I can’t find the source) that a key component of a zeitgeist is whether it locates its ideals in its future or its past. Nearly all cultures before the Enlightenment believed in a Fall from Grace—that things had once been perfect in the distant past, but then catastrophe had struck, and everything had slowly run downhill since then: In the age when life on Earth was full . . .

Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports From My Life With Autism by Temple Grandin

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, factory automation, Gregor Mendel, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, source of truth, theory of mind, twin studies

Gardner describes Einstein as returning to the conceptual world of a child, and says that he was not hampered by the conventional paradigms of physics. It is interesting that autism is caused by brain immaturity. In many ways I have remained a child. Even today I do not feel like a grownup in the realm of interpersonal relationships. Some scientists are strictly analytical thinkers. The physicist Richard Feynman denied the validity of poetry and art. In his biography of Feynman, Genius, James Gleick wrote, “He would not concede that poetry or painting or religion could reach a different kind of truth.” Of course, many scientists do value poetry and share traits from both the creative and scientific end of the continuum, just as some scientists, artists, and highly analytical philosophers have some autistic traits.

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My grades in high school were poor until I became motivated in my senior year. In college I did well in biology and psychology but had great difficulty with French and math. Most of the great geniuses have had very uneven skills. They are usually terrible in one subject and brilliant in their special area. Richard Feynman had very low scores on the Graduate Record Exam in English and history. His physics score was perfect, but his art score was in the seventh percentile. Even Einstein, after graduating from the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology, was not able to obtain an academic appointment. He annoyed big important professors when he told them that their theories were wrong.

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He went on to say in the same paper: “The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.” But my favorite of Einstein's words on religion is “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.” I like this because both science and religion are needed to answer life's great questions. Even scientists such as Richard Feynman, who rejected religion and poetry as sources of truth, concede grudgingly that there are questions that science cannot answer. I am deeply interested in the new chaos theory, because it means that order can arise out of disorder and randomness. I've read many popular articles about it, because I want scientific proof that the universe is orderly.

The Burning Answer: The Solar Revolution: A Quest for Sustainable Power by Keith Barnham

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Arthur Eddington, carbon footprint, credit crunch, decarbonisation, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, uranium enrichment, wikimedia commons

There are a few disappointed and hyperactive children, excluded from the game, like the electrons in the next, empty orbit. Why are full electron orbits so stable? There was still one more question for the physicists. How come electron orbits with two or eight outer electrons are so stable they can bond atoms together? One of my heroes from my particle physics days, the late Richard Feynman, provided the most stimulating mathematical account of quantum bonding using the simplest example: two hydrogen atoms forming a hydrogen molecule. When two hydrogen atoms share two electrons the total energy is lower than when the two atoms are separate, each with one electron. As noted earlier, when faced by two options, a high energy one and a low energy one, nature chooses the lower energy option.

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Quantum bonding demonstrated by a quantum revolutionary? While a young postdoc in Berkeley I missed out on an opportunity to meet one of the greats of quantum physics. One of the highlights of my two years there was going to be presenting some results at a conference in Caltech, where I hoped to get the chance to hear one of my scientific heroes, Richard Feynman. In fact, the conference turned out to be one of the most traumatic in my research career. I was presenting work trying to reconcile apparently inconsistent data from different experimental teams with a quantum model. This model had been developed by my then boss and subsequent, long-term friend: the late Gerson Goldhaber.

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The speaker was giving the impression to his listeners that he knew it all. I was some way past the group before it struck me … I had seen a photo of that face … he did know it all! I was too embarrassed to retrace my steps to join the throng to find what he was talking about. I like to think, however, that by reclining over a number of seats in the auditorium, Richard Feynman was illustrating the subtleties of quantum bonding. Quantum bonding and fossil fuels Quantum bonding explains the cornucopia of carbon-based molecules that make up our plastics, our fossil fuels and the even more complex molecules of life. The way quantum bonding explains all these amazingly different molecules was first worked out in the 1930s by another of my heroes, the American Linus Pauling.

Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing Illusion With Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life by Emanuel Derman

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, Cepheid variable, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency risk, diversified portfolio, Douglas Hofstadter, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, Ford Model T, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, law of one price, low interest rates, Mikhail Gorbachev, Myron Scholes, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Feynman, riskless arbitrage, savings glut, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, stochastic volatility, the scientific method, washing machines reduced drudgery, yield curve

Like the vacuum cleaner and washing machine that promised to liberate suburban housewives of the 1950s from drudgery, models provide easy and automated ways of letting other people do the thinking for you. When I worked on my PhD thesis to test the Weinberg-Salam Model in the early 1970s, I carried out each calculation using Feynman diagrams, the cartoonlike representations invented by Richard Feynman in the late 1940s to systematize and enumerate the ways particles interact during collisions. Using a formal set of rules that Feynman developed with his inimitable blend of mathematics and intuition, rules that were later justified by the more rigorous mathematics of Freeman Dyson,13 I elaborated and drew all the possible diagrams that could occur in the Standard Model, and then, using Feynman’s rules, translated each picture into a mathematical formula and evaluated it.

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MAXWELL MODELS THE LINES From a long view of the history of mankind—seen from, say, ten thousand years from now—there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics. The American Civil War will pale into provincial insignificance in comparison with this important scientific event of the same decade. —Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics The historic achievement of James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist with a very practical streak, was the unification of electricity and magnetism into a consistent set of equations for electromagnetic theory. Feynman, no mean achiever himself, is accurate about the magnitude of Maxwell’s discovery, which was the midpoint on the trajectory from Newton’s discovery of the laws of mechanics to Einstein’s theories of relativity.

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New developments in mathematics, from calculus to topology, have often been initiated by physicists who, by means of intuition and persistence, have sneakily but sloppily invented new kinds of mathematics that were only later made rigorous by purists. Newton invented the calculus in the seventeenth century to handle mechanics, and its foundations were satisfactorily cleaned up years later by Augustin-Louis Cauchy and his contemporaries. In the late 1940s, reconnoitering around the technical difficulties of the Dirac sea, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga found an ingenious way to suppress the technical infinities of quantum electrodynamics by means of a judicious combination of extreme care and chicanery. Their starting point was never to forget that the normal quotidian electron we “see” every day is not the bare electron.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

However, for orbits whose lengths were not a whole number of wavelengths, each wave crest would eventually be canceled out by a trough as the electrons went round; these orbits would not be allowed. A nice way of visualizing the wave/particle duality is the so-called sum over histories introduced by the American scientist Richard Feynman. In this approach the particle is not supposed to have a single history or path in space-time, as it would in a classical, nonquantum theory. Instead it is supposed to go from A to B by every possible path. With each path there are associated a couple of numbers: one represents the size of a wave and the other represents the position in the cycle (i.e., whether it is at a crest or a trough).

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This was the first indication that quantum mechanics might remove the singularities that were predicted by general relativity. However, the methods that I and other people were using in 1974 were not able to answer questions such as whether singularities would occur in quantum gravity. From 1975 onward I therefore started to develop a more powerful approach to quantum gravity based on Richard Feynman’s idea of a sum over histories. The answers that this approach suggests for the origin and fate of the universe and its contents, such as astronauts, will be described in the next two chapters. We shall see that although the uncertainty principle places limitations on the accuracy of all our predictions, it may at the same time remove the fundamental unpredictability that occurs at a space-time singularity.

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Thus they can act freely, without the constraint of consistency with their previous history. Steven Spielberg had fun with this notion in the Back to the Future films: Marty McFly was able to go back and change his parents’ courtship to a more satisfactory history. The alternative histories hypothesis sounds rather like Richard Feynman’s way of expressing quantum theory as a sum over histories, which was described in Chapters 4 and 8. This said that the universe didn’t just have a single history: rather it had every possible history, each with its own probability. However, there seems to be an important difference between Feynman’s proposal and alternative histories.

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

In Britain, Klaus Fuchs, a physicist at the same Harwell laboratory where Pontecorvo worked, confessed to spying for the Russians while employed by the Manhattan Project, and was swiftly convicted in a high-profile trial. In the United States, the FBI investigated others who worked at Los Alamos, including the colorful physicist Richard Feynman, who was known for his brilliance as well as his mischievous deeds, including picking locks of secure cabinets just to prove that he could. Feynman was cleared, but the federal agents found that a chemist named Harry Gold had acted as a courier for Fuchs. Gold, in turn, led them to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were arrested on suspicion of espionage along with Ethel’s younger brother David Greenglass, a former machinist at Los Alamos.

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To detect any solar neutrinos at all, to peer into the heart of a star for the first time, would have been a remarkable feat—but what made headlines was the large discrepancy between theory and observation. Bahcall feared that Davis’s results meant his solar model was wrong. The young theorist appeared so glum at the Caltech meeting that the legendary physicist Richard Feynman, who had received a share of the physics Nobel Prize three years earlier for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics, asked him whether he would like to go for a walk. The two strolled around the campus, making small talk. Eventually, as recalled by Bahcall, Feynman tried to console him: “Look, I saw that after this talk you were depressed, and I just wanted to tell you that I don’t think you have any reason to be depressed.

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Other useful sources include Randy Kennedy’s New York Times obituary (September 28, 1993), and Luisa Bonolis, “Bruno Pontecorvo: From Slow Neutrons to Oscillating Neutrinos,” American Journal of Physics 73, no. 6 (June 2005): 487–99. 58 “It occurred to me”: Quoted in Bruno Pontecorvo, “Fifty Years of Neutrino Physics: A Few Episodes,” in Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, ed. Ettore Fiorini (New York: Plenum Press, 1982). 60 Klaus Fuchs: See “The Atom Spy Case” on the FBI website at www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/the-atom-spy-case. 60 Richard Feynman: See “The Feynman Files” at www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2012/jun/06/feynman-files-professors-invitation-past-iron-curt/. 61 newspapers at the time: The commotion and suspicions surrounding Pontecorvo’s disappearance were reflected in media reports at the time, including “Atom Man Flies Away” in Daily Express (London; October 21, 1950), “Atomic Expert Missing” in The Manchester Guardian (October 21, 1950), “Top Atom Expert Flees to Russia” in The Mail (Adelaide, Australia; October 21, 1950) and “Atom Scientist Mystery” in The Sydney Morning Herald (October 23, 1950). 62 Even the BBC: From “On This Day 1950: Hunt for missing atomic scientist,” online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october27/newsid_3091000/3091390.stm. 63 Pontecorvo revealed that: As recounted in Charles Richards, “Confessions of an Atom Spy,” The Independent, August 2, 1992. 64 Fred Reines: Biographical details of Fred Reines are based on his own recollections at www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/reines-autobio.html, and on William Kropp, Jonas Schultz, and Henry Sobel, Frederick Reines, 1918–1998: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 2009). 67 With this design: Primary sources for describing the project are Fred Reines’s 1995 Nobel Prize Lecture, “The Neutrino: From Poltergeist to Particle” (online at www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1995/reines-lecture.html); E.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang onto.”12 When you want to learn a new subject, first identify the fundamental principles and learn those in a clear and deep manner. Is there a way for us to do this effectively? It turns out that, indeed, a simple way to do this exists. It’s simple but not easy. The Feynman Technique The Feynman technique, named after Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, is a great method for learning anything in a clear and deep manner and for improving retention. The Feynman technique has four simple steps: 1. Pick and study a topic. 2. Take out a blank sheet of paper and write at the top the subject you want to learn. Write out what you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to someone who is unfamiliar with the topic—and not your smart adult friend but rather a ten-year-old child who can understand only basic concepts and relationships. 3.

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When you can use your skills to make a difference in someone’s life and get paid for it, that’s a happy life. When you’re passionate about it as well, that’s a calling. The feeling is almost divine. —Ed Latimore The only way to deep happiness is to do something you love to the best of your ability. —Richard Feynman Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you. —Naval Ravikant According to Gordon Matthews, professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, how people understand ikigai can, in fact, often be mapped to two other Japanese ideas—ittaikan and jiko jitsugen.

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A tree that wants to touch the sky must extend its roots into the earth. The more it wants to rise upward, the more it has to grow downward. Similarly, to rise in life, we need to be down to earth and humble. I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. —Richard Feynman Always question what you think you know, and remember that every subject probably is more complex than we currently recognize. Such self-awareness creates a more accurate mental map of reality, which in turn results in adopting language that more closely reflects the nuances of the world. This is particularly true when we encounter absolutist words—such as “never” instead of “seldom,” “all” instead of “many,” and “always” instead of “usually” (even “etc.” is a powerful reminder that we are leaving things out).

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI by Edward Dolnick

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, clockwork universe, complexity theory, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Leo Hollis, lone genius, music of the spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

How fast are they traveling when they hit the ground? Aristotle’s why explained the world, Galileo’s how described it. The new scientists began, that is, by dismissing the very question that all their predecessors had taken as fundamental. (Modern-day physicists often strike the same impatient tone. When someone asked Richard Feynman to help him make sense of the world as quantum mechanics imagines it, he supposedly snapped, “Shut up and calculate.”) Aristotle had an excellent answer to the question why do rocks fall when you drop them? Galileo proposed not a different answer or a better one, but no answer at all. People do not “know a thing until they have grasped the ‘why’ of it,” Aristotle insisted, but Galileo would have none of it.

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., p. 40. 65 dizzy and temporarily deaf: Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits, p. 56. CHAPTER 11. TO THE BARRICADES! 66 “I swear to you by God’s”: David Berlinski, Infinite Ascent, p. 66. 67 “like torches, that in the lighting”: Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 330. 68 “I’ve known since yesterday”: Simon Singh, Big Bang (New York: Harper, 2004), p. 302. Richard Feynman tells the story in its classic, romantic form in his Feynman Lectures on Physics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1963), pp. 3–7, almost as soon as he begins. 68 For decades Hooke argued: Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 347. 68 “Nothing considerable in that kind”: Ibid., p. 347. 68 “Do not throw your pearls”: Paolo Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science, p. 18. 69fn The historian Paolo Rossi: Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science, p. 15. 70 “to improve the knowledge”: Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, p. 348. 70 “not by a glorious pomp”: Ibid., p. 25, quoting Sprat, History of the Royal Society, pp. 62–63. 70 “a close, naked, natural way”: Sprat, History of the Royal Society, p. 113. 71 “All that I mean”: Carey, John Donne, p. 58.

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Donald Olson, a Texas State University astronomer, has carried out similar work, notably a study of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. 93 “The falling body moved more jubilantly”: Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, p. 6. 93 “a book written in mathematical characters”: The passage is from Galileo’s Assayer (1623), available at http://www.princeton.edu/∼hos/h291/assayer.htm. 94fn Galileo’s intellectual offspring: Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, p. 58. 94 “the actuality of a potentiality”: Quoted in Joe Sachs, “Aristotle: Motion and Its Place in Nature,” at http://www.iep.utm.edu/aris-mot/. The remark is quoted in slightly different form in Oded Balaban, “The Modern Misunderstanding of Aristotle’s Theory of Motion,” at http://tinyurl.com/y24yvwo. 94 “If the ears, the tongue”: Galileo, The Assayer. 95 “communicate in the language”: Charles Coulston Gillispie, The Edge of Objectivity, p. 43. 95 “Do not all charms fly”: John Keats, Lamia, part 2. 95 “When I heard the learn’d astronomer”: Walt Whitman, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.” 96 “Shut up and calculate”: The remark is nearly always attributed to Feynman, it seems to have been coined by the physicist David Mermin.

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, availability heuristic, Bluma Zeigarnik, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, fear of failure, feminist movement, functional fixedness, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Richard Feynman, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Walter Mischel

When a physicist dreams up a new experiment or a biologist decides to test the properties of a newly isolated compound, he doesn’t always realize that his specific question, his approach, his hypothesis, his very view of what he is doing would be impossible without the elemental knowledge at his disposal, that he has built up over the years. Indeed, he may have a hard time telling you from where exactly he got the idea for a study—and why he first thought it would make sense. After World War II, physicist Richard Feynman was asked to serve on the State Curriculum Commission, to choose high school science textbooks for California. To his consternation, the texts appeared to leave students more confused than enlightened. Each book he examined was worse than the one prior. Finally, he came upon a promising beginning: a series of pictures, of a windup toy, an automobile, and a boy on a bicycle.

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Why, of all things to mention to Lestrade, does Holmes focus on this particular feature, and what is it doing in something as strict-sounding as the scientific method of the mind? Lestrade isn’t the first to turn his nose up at the thought of imagination playing a role in good old scientific reason, nor is Holmes alone in his insistence to the contrary. One of the greatest scientific thinkers of the twentieth century, Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman, frequently voiced his surprise at the lack of appreciation for what he thought was a central quality in both thinking and science. “It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science,” he once told an audience. Not only is that view patently false, but “it is a very interesting kind of imagination, unlike that of the artist.

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When Ofey first started to paint, he was a middle-aged physicist who hadn’t drawn a day in his life. He wasn’t sure he’d ever learn how. But learn he did, going on to have his own one-man show and to sell his art to collectors all over the world. Ofey, of course, is not your typical case. He wasn’t just any physicist. He happens to have been the Nobel Prize–winning Richard Feynman, a man of uncommon genius in nearly all of his pursuits. Feynman had created Ofey as a pseudonym to ensure that his art was valued on its own terms and not on those of his laurels elsewhere. And yet there are multiple other cases. While Feynman may be unique in his contributions to physics, he certainly is not in representing the brain’s ability to change—and to change in profound ways—late in life.

The Logician and the Engineer: How George Boole and Claude Shannon Created the Information Age by Paul J. Nahin

air gap, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, thinkpad, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test, V2 rocket

Shannon displayed an early interest in “how things work,” building model airplanes, a radio-controlled boat, and a telegraph system linking his house to a friend’s a half-mile distant (with the help of a strategically located wire fence). He earned pocket money during high school by delivering telegrams and fixing radios at a local department store. (This was common among many youngsters in the 1920s and 1930s who went on to technical careers; a similar story is told by Richard Feynman in his famous 1985 autobiographical Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) Following in the footsteps of his sister, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, from which he graduated in 1936 with double bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and electrical engineering. It was in a class there that Shannon was introduced to Boole’s algebra of logic.

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With his PhD in hand, and after spending the summer of 1940 back at Bell Labs, Shannon used a National Research Council Fellowship for a year’s stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked under the great mathematician Hermann Weyl. Also there were such luminaries as John von Neumann and Albert Einstein. He might even have bumped into Richard Feynman, who was working on his PhD in physics at Princeton. Also there with Shannon was his first wife, Norma Levor (born 1920), whom he had married in 1939. Theirs was an intense, passionate, but ultimately doomed brief marriage, and Norma left him in June 1941. With all that going on in his life, it isn’t surprising that writing up his doctoral dissertation wasn’t high on Shannon’s list of things to do.

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Bennett and Rolf Landauer, “The Fundamental Limits of Computation,” Scientific American, July 1985, pp. 48–56. The opening quotation to this chapter comes from this paper. 6. In Feynman Lectures on Computation (edited by A.J.G. Hey and R.W. Allen), Addison-Wesley, 1996, the American physicist Richard Feynman (1918–1988) says of this conservation property (p. 39): “Fredkin … demanded that not only must a gate be reversible, but the number of 1s and 0s should never change. There is no good reason for this [my emphasis], but he did it anyway.” Contrary to Feynman, you’ll see in the last section of this chapter that there can be, in fact, a very good reason for preserving parity. 7.

The Four Horsemen by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett

3D printing, Andrew Wiles, cognitive dissonance, cosmological constant, dark matter, Desert Island Discs, en.wikipedia.org, phenotype, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

Or anyone willing to place their reputation and, as it were, their life on the idea that it would be. DAWKINS: I was once asked at a public meeting, ‘Don’t you think that the mysteriousness of quantum theory is just the same as the mysteriousness of the Trinity or transubstantiation?’ And the answer of course is, [it] can be answered, in two quotes from Richard Feynman. One, Richard Feynman said, ‘If you think you understand quantum theory, you don’t understand quantum theory.’ He was admitting that it’s highly mysterious. The other thing is that the predictions in quantum theory experimentally are verified to the equivalent of predicting the width of North America to the width of one human hair.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

What is so threatening about reason? Mysteries do not lose their poetry when solved. Quite the contrary; the solution often turns out more beautiful than the puzzle and, in any case, when you have solved one mystery you uncover others, perhaps to inspire greater poetry. The distinguished theoretical physicist Richard Feynman was charged by a friend that a scientist misses the beauty of a flower by studying it. Feynman responded: The beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others. I can see the complicated interactions of the flower.

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The color of the flower is red Does the fact that the plant has color mean that it evolved to attract insects? This adds a further question. Can insects see color? Do they have an aesthetic sense? And so on. I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds. from 'Remembering Richard Feynman', The Skeptical Inquirer (1988) Newton's dissection of the rainbow into light of different wavelengths led on to Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and thence to Einstein's theory of special relativity. If you think the rainbow has poetic mystery, you should try relativity. Einstein himself openly made aesthetic judgements in science, and perhaps went too far.

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Sometimes I imagine that I have some appreciation of the poetry of quantum theory, but I have yet to achieve an understanding deep enough to explain it to others. Actually, it may be that nobody really understands quantum theory, possibly because natural selection shaped our brains to survive in a world of large, slow things, where quantum effects are smothered. This point is well made by Richard Feynman, who is also supposed to have said, 'If you think you understand quantum theory—you don't understand quantum theory!' I think I have been brought closest to understanding by Feynman's published lectures, and by David Deutsch's astonishing and disturbing book, The Fabric of Reality (1997). (I find it additionally disturbing because I cannot tell when I am reading generally accepted physics, versus the author's own daring speculations).

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, desegregation, disinformation, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, fear of failure, housing crisis, index card, industrial research laboratory, John von Neumann, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, strikebreaker, traveling salesman, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment

In these early years he was also able to achieve breakthroughs in the calculation of the absorption coefficient of X rays and the elastic and inelastic scattering of electrons. And what could any of this mean, in a practical sense, for humanity? However weirdly unintelligible—today as much as then—to the average citizen, quantum physics nevertheless explains our physical world. As the physicist Richard Feynman once observed, “[Quantum mechanics] describes nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it fully agrees with experiment. So I hope you can accept nature as She is— absurd.” Quantum mechanics seems to study that which doesn’t exist—but nevertheless proves true. It works. In the decades to come, quantum physics would open the door to a host of practical inventions that now define the digital age, including the modern personal computer, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and laser technology (from which we get such consumer products as the CD player and the bar-code reader commonly used in supermarkets).

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When Rabi warned him that “morale is sinking” among the group of physicists working in Princeton, Oppenheimer decided to import the entire Princeton team of twenty scientists to Los Alamos. This turned out to be a particularly serendipitous decision, as the Princeton group included not only Robert Wilson but a brilliant and cheerfully mischievous twenty-four-year-old physicist named Richard Feynman. Oppenheimer had immediately recognized the genius in Feynman and knew he wanted him at Los Alamos. However, Feynman’s wife, Arline, was battling tuberculosis and Feynman made it clear he could not move to Los Alamos without her. Feynman thought that had ended the matter, but one day in the winter of early 1943 he received a long-distance phone call from Chicago.

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“Talk as if you had too many drinks. . . . I don’t care how you manage it, say we are building an electric rocket.” Accompanied by John Manley and Priscilla Greene, Bob and Charlotte Serber soon drove down to Santa Fe and tried to spread the rumor. But no one was interested, and G-2 never picked up any talk about electric rockets. Richard Feynman, an incorrigible practical joker, had his own way of dealing with security regulations. When the censors complained that his wife, Arline, now a patient at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, was sending him letters in code and asked for the code, Feynman explained that he didn’t have the key to it—it was a game he played with his wife to practice his code-breaking.

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

Time, March 16, 1998. 3 Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 108. 4 Ralph Merkle’s comments on nanotechnology can be found in an overview at his web site at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center <http://sandbox.xerox.com/nano>. His site contains links to important publications on nanotechnology, such as Richard Feynman’s 1959 talk and Eric Drexler’s dissertation, as well as links to various research centers that focus on nanotechnology. 5 Richard Feynman presented these ideas on December 29, 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society at the California Institute of Technology (Cal Tech). His talk was first published in the February 1960 issue of Cal Tech’s Engineering and Science.

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To rein-vent our cells, we look to one of the twenty-first century’s primary technologies: nanotechnology. NANOTECHNOLOGY: REBUILDING THE WORLD, ATOM BY ATOM The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if... doing things on an atomic level is ultimately developed—a development which I think cannot be avoided. —Richard Feynman, 1959 Suppose someone claimed to have a microscopically exact replica (in marble, even) of Michelangelo’s David in his home. When you go to see this marvel, you find a twenty-foot-tall, roughly rectilinear hunk of pure white marble standing in his living room. “I haven’t gotten around to unpacking it yet,” he says, “but I know it’s in there.”

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Just as our human-created computational technology will ultimately exceed the capacity of natural computation (electronic circuits are already millions of times faster than human neural circuits), our twenty-first-century physical technology will also greatly exceed the capabilities of the amino acid—based nanotechnology of the natural world. The concept of building machines atom by atom was first described in a 1959 talk at Cal Tech titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” by physicist Richard Feynman, the same guy who first suggested the possibility of quantum computing.5 The idea was developed in some detail by Eric Drexler twenty years later in his book Engines of Creation.6 The book actually inspired the cryonics movement of the 1980s, in which people had their heads (with or without bodies) frozen in the hope that a future time would possess the molecule-scale technology to overcome their mortal diseases, as well as undo the effects of freezing and defrosting.

How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

He and his mom passed buildings 10 and 11 and stopped at building 8, the physics department. Created in the nineteenth century by MIT founder William Barton Rogers, the department had among its faculty and graduates a dazzling array of Nobel Prize winners and some of the field’s greatest minds, from Richard Feynman (quantum electrodynamics), Murray Gell-Mann (elementary particles), Samuel Ting and Burton Richter (subatomic particles), to Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel), Bill Shockley (field-effect transistors), George Smoot (cosmic microwave background radiation), and Philip Morrison (Manhattan Project, science educator).

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The space shuttle Challenger had disintegrated seventy-three seconds after liftoff on January 28, 1986, killing the seven astronauts, including a high school teacher, on board. The accident was found to be part mechanical failure, part management failure. Members of the Rogers Commission, appointed to determine the causes of the disaster, found among other things that NASA managers had not accurately calculated the flight risks. Commissioner Richard Feynman, the Caltech physicist and Nobel laureate, concluded, “The management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.” Burt had followed the commission’s findings only from afar. One of the more memorable things to come out of it was something he heard from test pilot Chuck Yeager, who would swing by to visit on occasion.

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Where no government filled the need and no immediate profit could fill the bill, the Orteig Prize stimulated multiple different attempts. Where $25,000 was offered, nearly $400,000 was spent to win the prize—because it was there to be won. Peter wanted to do for space what Orteig—through Lindbergh—did for aviation. He now had everyone’s attention. Peter told the cautionary story of Richard Feynman giving a Caltech lecture to the American Physical Society entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” where he spoke of building atomic- and molecular-size machinery. To promote the idea, Feynman offered $1,000 to the first person who could build a working electric motor no larger than one sixty-fourth of an inch on each side.

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

As I try to divide my dice more and more, at some point I run up against a barrier beyond which I cannot pass, as my next Edge reveals. THIRD EDGE: THE POT OF URANIUM 5 It is absolutely necessary, for progress in science, to have uncertainty as a fundamental part of your inner nature. Richard Feynman It’s extraordinary what you can buy over the Internet. Today a small pot of radioactive uranium-238 arrived in the post. ‘Useful for performing nuclear experiments,’ the advert assured me. I rather enjoyed the comments from other people who purchased a pot: ‘So glad I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.’

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Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland I must admit that I am having real trouble with the counterintuitive nature of the quantum world. Apparently, this is a good sign. The quantum physicist Niels Bohr once declared: ‘If quantum physics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.’ Richard Feynman went even further, declaring that ‘no one understands quantum physics’. During a keynote address he made in his sixties he admitted: ‘Might I say immediately that we have always had (secret, secret, close the doors!) we have always had a great deal of difficulty in understanding the world view that quantum mechanics represents.

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If I was going to get anywhere in my attempts to understand whether a God could hide in the equations of quantum physics, I needed to talk to someone who was as much at home in a laboratory as in a cathedral. So I made a trip to Cambridge. THE VEGETARIAN BUTCHER John Polkinghorne learned his physics at the feet of Paul Dirac in Cambridge and then with Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech. You can’t ask for better teachers than that. His research has, among other things, helped to confirm the existence of the quarks that many believe are the last step as I zoom in on my casino dice. Polkinghorne is back at his alma mater, so I arranged to meet him at his home in Cambridge.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business climate, Cal Newport, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, follow your passion, Frank Gehry, Hacker News, Higgs boson, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, popular electronics, power law, remote working, Richard Feynman, Ruby on Rails, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, statistical model, the medium is the message, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , zero-sum game

“To do real good physics work”: comes around the 28:20 mark in a 1981 TV interview with Richard Feynman for the BBC Horizon program (the interview aired in the United States as an episode of NOVA). The YouTube video of this interview that I watched when researching this book has since been removed due to a copyright complaint by the BBC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgaw9qe7DEE). Transcripts of the relevant quote, however, can be found at http://articles.latimes.com/1988-02-16/news/mn-42968_1_nobel-prize/2 and http://calnewport.com/blog/2014/04/20/richard-feynman-didnt-win-a-nobel-by-responding-promptly-to-e-mails/ and http://www.worldcat.org/wcpa/servlet/DCARead?

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Google Scholar, a tool popular among academics for finding research papers, even calculates your h-index automatically so you can be reminded, multiple times per week, precisely where you stand. (In case you’re wondering, as of the morning when I’m writing this chapter, I’m a 21.) This clarity simplifies decisions about what work habits a professor adopts or abandons. Here, for example, is the late Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman explaining in an interview one of his less orthodox productivity strategies: To do real good physics work, you do need absolute solid lengths of time… it needs a lot of concentration… if you have a job administrating anything, you don’t have the time. So I have invented another myth for myself: that I’m irresponsible.

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Born in London in 1959, Wolfram had been a child prodigy and had published an important paper on quarks at the age of seventeen. Three years later he had a PhD in particle physics from Caltech. In the 1980s, Wolfram received a MacArthur grant, worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, and collaborated with Richard Feynman. In 1987 he cofounded Wolfram Research to market Mathematica, the globally used calculating program for scientists and engineers. It took Wolfram just a single line of Mathematica code to solve the billboard’s puzzle. Let me explain what the billboard was asking. Start inside the brackets with the italicized lowercase letter e.

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You have N companies and want to merge them into one big company. How many different ways are there to do it? ? What is the most beautiful equation you have ever seen? Explain. Five Engineers and How Not to Think Like Them The Value of Keeping Things Simple The great physicist Richard Feynman once applied for a job at Microsoft (so runs the guaranteed-apocryphal story). “Well, well, Dr. Feynman,” the interviewer began. “We don’t get many Nobel Prize winners, even at Microsoft! But before we can hire you, there’s a slight formality. We need to ask you a question to test your creative reasoning ability.

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Dirac was notoriously eccentric and socially awkward, partly the result of autism. As a theoretical physicist, he saw the world as a puzzle to which beautiful equations were the key. To a remarkable degree, contemporary science (and many job interviewers) accept Dirac’s view of the world. For an amusing rebuttal, see Richard Feynman in the second volume of The Feynman Lectures on Physics, in which he makes the amazing claim that all of physics can be reduced to a single equation. The equation is U = 0 That’s it! That’s everything about the universe! Feynman was half-serious. Take an equation like E = mc2. It is said to be deep.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Astronomia nova, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dunbar number, Edmond Halley, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, hypertext link, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Johannes Kepler, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, PageRank, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, six sigma, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, tulip mania, Wall-E, wikimedia commons, yield management

Those of modest fortunes, in their younger and more aggressive years, may travel widely in the pursuit of fame, wealth, and glory. Let’s call that force “entropy.” Those of greater fortune, in their older and gentler years, want to settle down with a partner. They seek family, stability, and cable TV. Let’s call that force “binding energy.” The physicist Richard Feynman once said, “Learn by trying to understand simple things in terms of other ideas—always honestly and directly.” His disciple Lenny Susskind, my former graduate advisor, took that advice seriously. Lenny once explained to me a complex idea in topology, the study of surfaces, by saying, “Imagine an elephant, then take its trunk and shove it up its a—.

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And we have seen how these ideas have come together, in a handful of examples, to win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries. So now, to close, let’s turn to another small topic: the history of our species. PART THREE THE MOTHER OF ALL LOONSHOTS When you have learned to explain simpler things, so you have learned what an explanation really is, you can then go on to more subtle questions. —Richard Feynman 9 Why the World Speaks English THE NEEDHAM QUESTION On a sunny day in August 1937, on the campus of Cambridge University in England, an attractive 33-year-old visitor knocked on the door of a renowned biochemist. Joseph Needham’s three-volume study of how embryos form and grow had been compared by reviewers to Darwin’s Origin of Species.

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Reprinted with permission from AAAS. Tug-of-war: Antar Dayal, AntarWorks LLC. Launch of Sputnik: By permission of the Marcus family. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ds-04944. The DARPA team prepares: DARPA. Shredding the Dead Sea Scrolls: Antar Dayal, AntarWorks LLC. Richard Feynman: Tamiko Thiel, via Wikimedia Commons. Einstein and Kepler: Antar Dayal, AntarWorks LLC. Shen Kuo: Antar Dayal, AntarWorks LLC. Hooke, Boyle, and air pump: Rita Greer, via Wikimedia Commons. Papin’s discovery: Public domain. SOURCE NOTES Because sources mostly do not overlap between chapters, a bibliography is provided for each chapter, to make it easier for the reader to browse related subjects.

When Einstein Walked With Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought by Jim Holt

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, computer age, CRISPR, dark matter, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, George Santayana, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Large Hadron Collider, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, luminiferous ether, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Monty Hall problem, Murray Gell-Mann, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paradox of Choice, Paul Erdős, Peter Singer: altruism, Plato's cave, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum entanglement, random walk, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, Skype, stakhanovite, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, wage slave

Behind this triumph of human reason, however, lay an idea that still struck many as occult and untrustworthy. Newton himself was more than a little qualmish. In presenting his proof of the law of ellipses in the Principia, he purged it insofar as possible of the infinitesimal calculus; the resulting exposition, cast in a Euclidean mold, is impossible to follow. (Even the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman lost his way in the middle of Newton’s argument when presenting it in a lecture to his students at Caltech.) In his later writings, Newton was careful never to consider infinitesimals in isolation but only in ratios, which were always finite. By the end of his life, he had renounced the idea of the infinitely small altogether.

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So which is it: the best of times or the worst of times? This is, after all, theoretical physics, not a Victorian novel. If you are a casual reader of science articles in the newspaper, you are probably more familiar with the optimistic view. But string theory has always had a few vocal skeptics. Almost three decades ago, Richard Feynman dismissed it as “crazy,” “nonsense,” and “the wrong direction” for physics. Sheldon Glashow, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for making one of the last great advances in physics before the beginning of the string-theory era, has likened string theory to a “new version of medieval theology” and campaigned to keep string theorists out of his own department at Harvard.

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Similarly, if the theory is symmetric under time translation, that implies the law of conservation of energy. Symmetry under shifts in orientation implies the law of conservation of angular momentum. Other, more subtle symmetries imply still more subtle conservation laws. The intimate connection between symmetry and conservation is “a most profound and beautiful thing,” in the words of Richard Feynman, one that “most physicists still find somewhat staggering.” Laws that were once thought to be brute facts about the natural world—like the first law of thermodynamics, which says that energy can be neither created nor destroyed—turn out to be, in effect, preconditions of the possibility of objective knowledge.

The Man From the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrew Wiles, Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, cloud computing, Conway's Game of Life, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, DeepMind, deferred acceptance, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Georg Cantor, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jean Tirole, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, P = NP, Paul Samuelson, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, second-price auction, side project, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological singularity, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

Envious Princetonians dubbed the moneyed academy a stone’s throw away ‘the Institute for Advanced Salaries’ and ‘the Institute for Advanced Lunch’. Unused to the gilded existence, some professors would lapse into somnolence. ‘These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK?’ wrote one critic, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. ‘They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas … Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!’3 Einstein would spend his Princeton years in unfruitful attempts to merge his theory of gravity with the laws of electromagnetism.

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He loved the camaraderie, the poker games and the glorious booze- and cigarette-fuelled discussions, which could go on until all hours.32 The Hungarian contingent was there in force, along, now, with his good friend Stanisław Ulam. That was no coincidence: von Neumann had recruited his fellow mathematician shortly after he had joined the project himself. Von Neumann at Los Alamos in 1949. Here with Richard Feynman (middle) and Stanisław Ulam (right). Photograph by Nicholas Metropolis; Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. In between the fun and games, von Neumann was helping to perfect the implosion bomb. The theorists assigned to the programme purchased ten electrical punch-card machines from IBM to help solve the hydrodynamic equations that would reveal whether the explosive lenses would compress the plutonium core quickly enough to detonate the bomb.

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Much like the wooden replicators Penrose designed link up in precise configurations when shaken together, the protein parts of a complex structure like the outer shell of a virus bounce off each other until complementary chemical forces pull them together and make them stick. These soft biological machines will then serve as a stepping stone to second-generation nanomachines made of tougher stuff, such as ceramics, metals and diamond. Drexler had come across the transcript of a provocative talk entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’ given by Richard Feynman in 1959. ‘What would happen’, Feynman asks, ‘if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them?’ Fired up by the idea, which was consistent with his own thinking at the time, Drexler wanted to realize Feynman’s vision. In Engines of Creation, he proposes an ‘assembler’ a few billionths of a metre long that is able to both replicate itself and make other machines, atom by atom.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

., Science and Ultimate Reality (Cambridge University Press, 2003) David Deutsch, ‘Quantum Theory of Probability and Decisions’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A455 (1999) David Deutsch, ‘The Structure of the Multiverse’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A458 (2002) Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (BBC Publications, 1965) Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All (Allen Lane, 1998) Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979) William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop (Basic Books, 2007) Bryan Magee, Popper (Fontana, 1973) Pericles, ‘Funeral Oration’ Plato, Euthyphro Karl Popper, In Search of a Better World (Routledge, 1995) Karl Popper, The World of Parmenides (Routledge, 1998) Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Allen Lane, 2000) Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (Basic Books, 2001) Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind, 59, 236 (October 1950) Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (Faber, 2002) Vernor Vinge, ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’, Whole Earth Review, winter 1993 *The term was coined by the philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson.

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But it does not matter what terminology you use, so long as it does not lead you to conclude that there is something worthwhile about the Persephone myth, or the prophet’s apocalyptic theory or the gambler’s delusion, just because it is testable. Nor is a person capable of making progress merely by virtue of being willing to drop a theory when it is refuted: one must also be seeking a better explanation of the relevant phenomena. That is the scientific frame of mind. As the physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.’ By adopting easily variable explanations, the gambler and prophet are ensuring that they will be able to continue fooling themselves no matter what happens. Just as thoroughly as if they had adopted untestable theories, they are insulating themselves from facing evidence that they are mistaken about what is really there in the physical world.

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In quantum physics, variables are typically discrete, and how they change from one value to another is a multiversal process involving interference and fungibility. 12 A Physicist’s History of Bad Philosophy With Some Comments on Bad Science By the way, what I have just outlined is what I call a ‘physicist’s history of physics’, which is never correct… Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985) READER: So, I am an emergent, quasi-autonomous flow of information in the multiverse. DAVID: You are. READER: And I exist in multiple instances, some of them different from each other, some not. And those are the least weird things about the world according to quantum theory.

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, gravity well, Henri Poincaré, invention of radio, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, period drama, Richard Feynman, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia

Interview with Lew Kowarski by Charles Weiner, 3 May 1970, AIP. 3 The typed manuscript of Dirac’s talk is in the Mudd Library, PRINCETON. 4 In Feynman’s theory, the probability that a quantum such as an electron will make a transition from one point in space-time to another can be calculated from a mathematical expression related to the action involved in moving between the two points, summed over all possible routes between them. 5 Interview by Charles Weiner of Richard Feynman, 27 June 1966 (CALTECH). See also Feynman’s Nobel Lecture and Gleick (1992: 226) and its references. 6 Interview with Freeman Dyson, 27 June 2005. Dyson noted that Feynman made the point repeatedly. 7 Quoted by Oppenheimer in Smith and Weiner (1980: 269). Wigner was one of the examiners of Feynman’s Ph.

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Dirac looked rather more resolute in the two chalk drawings by Howard Morgan in 1980, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery. 50 Feynman’s drawing is reproduced in the frontispiece of Kursunoglu and Wigner (1987). An example of Feynman’s ‘I’m no Dirac’ is in interview by Charles Weiner of Richard Feynman, 28 June 1966, p. 187 (CALTECH). 51 Lord Waldegrave points out that ‘the award was largely the result of the intervention of Victor Rothschild, the late Lord Rothschild, who was well placed at that time as a Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office as Head of the Central Policy Review Staff of Prime Minister Edward Heath’ (interview with Lord Waldegrave, 2 June 2004). 52 Letter from Manci to Barbara Gamow, 1 May 1973, LC. 53 Salaman and Salaman (1986: 70).

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Extract from a letter from Dirac to his friend Manci Balazs, 9 May 1935 Dirac and Manci on their honeymoon, Brighton, January 1937 The Dirac family in the garden of their Cambridge home, c.1946. Left to right: Dirac, Monica, Manci, Gabriel, Mary and Judy. Dirac and Manci (on the far left) with a party during a crossing of the Atlantic on the SS America, 2 April 1963 Dirac and Richard Feynman at a conference on relativity, Warsaw, July 1962 Dirac at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, c.1958 The Diracs’ home in Tallahasse, 223 Chapel Drive Kapitza and Dirac at the Hotel Bad Schachen, Lindau, summer 1982 One of the last photographs taken of Dirac, Tallahassee, c.1983 Abbreviations in Notes AHQP Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, multiple locations, provided by Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland., USA (http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/guides/ahqp/).

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

As Abraham Maslow, a leading psychologist, has noted: ‘I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat every problem as if it were a nail.’88 However, real-life problems do not always arise neatly labelled as the province of one professional or another. Everyday problems are messier than this—the life events that incline people to seek professional help might, ideally, call for the input of many experts, and not just one. Physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman makes an analogous point, relating to the way we chunk up the world around us: if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. … If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts—physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on—remember that nature does not know it!

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They often work with informal, approximations of fields of knowledge. The purist may find these untenable (and they may be theoretically flawed), but they do seem to work in practice. For a stimulating related discussion, see David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (1991). 88 Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science (1966), 15. 89 Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 1 (1964), ch. 3.7 <http://www. feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html> (accessed 27 March 2015). 90 Discussed in Alex Frame, Salmond: Southern Jurist (1995), 30. 2 From the Vanguard In this chapter we change pace. We run through a group of different professions and offer a glimpse of the many ways in which they are changing, largely because of technology.

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Now it costs a few thousand dollars.48 Companies like 23andMe, Navigenics, and deCODE offer commercial testing services from $99.49 In the field of ‘genome editing’, scientists search for problematic genes and actively intervene to change or remove them. Nanomedicine, the use of nanotechnology in a medical setting, is another field. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman’s seventy-year-old prediction that we might one day ‘swallow the surgeon’50 has come true—there are already small nanobots that are able to swim through our bodies, relaying images, delivering targeted drugs, and attacking particular cells with a precision that makes even the finest of surgeons’ blades look blunt.

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, four colour theorem, Gerolamo Cardano, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, linear programming, new economy, NP-complete, Occam's razor, P = NP, Paul Erdős, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, smart grid, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William of Occam

A hacker might damage part of the system, such as by sticking a smart card in a microwave, and hope the resulting damaged computation may no longer keep secrets. We may have unbreakable codes, but building systems that will always keep secrets a secret may never come to be. Chapter 9 QUANTUM IN 1982, THE NOBEL PRIZE–WINNING PHYSICIST Richard Feynman noticed there was no simple way of simulating quantum physical systems using digital computers. He turned this problem into an opportunity—perhaps a computational device based on quantum mechanics could solve problems more efficiently than more traditional computers. In the decades that followed, computer scientists and physicists, often working together, showed in theory that quantum computers can solve certain problems, such as factoring numbers, much faster.

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Craig Gentry, “Fully Homomorphic Encryption Using Ideal Lattices,” in Proceedings of the 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (New York: ACM, 1979), 169–78. Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems,” Communications of the ACM 21, no. 2 (February 1978): 120–26. Chapter 9 My account of Richard Feynman’s role in quantum computing draws on David Deutsch’s work, “Quantum Computation,” Physics World, January 6, 1992. Works Cited Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, “Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computers, Systems, and Signal Processing (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1984), 175–79.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Druin Burch, Taking the Medicine: A Short History of Medicine’s Beautiful Idea, and Our Difficulty Swallowing It (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 4. 5. Ibid., p. 37. 6. Ira Rutkow, Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America (New York: Scribner, 2010), p. 98. 7. Ibid., p. 94. 8. Burch, Taking the Medicine, p. 158. 9. Richard Feynman, commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 1974. 10. Richard Feynman, The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist (New York: Basic Books, 2005), p. 28. 11. Ibid., p. 27. 12. Cochrane with Blythe, One Man’s Medicine, pp. 46, 157, 211, 190. 13. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 209. 14.

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True, it had occasionally reaped the fruits of science like the germ theory of disease and the X-ray. And it dressed up as a science. There were educated men with impressive titles who conducted case studies and reported results in Latin-laden lectures at august universities. But it wasn’t scientific. It was cargo cult science, a term of mockery coined much later by the physicist Richard Feynman to describe what happened after American airbases from World War II were removed from remote South Pacific islands, ending the islanders’ only contact with the outside world. The planes had brought wondrous goods. The islanders wanted more. So they “arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the planes to land.”9 But the planes never returned.

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation

The equation Gμν = 8πTμν (which can be written in various ways) is considered one of Einstein’s most important contributions, along with E = mc2 and the equation for the photoelectric effect. All three equations are carved into the Einstein Memorial in Washington, D.C., as testimony to his brilliance. An anecdote once told by acclaimed physicist Richard Feynman illustrates the ubiquity of Einstein’s field equations in modern discussions of gravitation. Feynman was invited to the first American conference on general relativity, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1957. When he arrived at the airport and was about to take a taxi to the conference, he didn’t know whether it was being held at the University of North 59 Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat Carolina or North Carolina State.

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(He didn’t respond to the O’Nolan piece, which he probably didn’t even hear about.) However, it would be three more years until he resumed his correspondence with his old friend. Milestones In 1948, Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who lived near Einstein and often visited him, brought him exciting news. Wheeler’s brilliant student Richard Feynman had developed a unique approach to quantum mechanics, called “sum over histories,” that generalized Hamilton’s least-action principle to the study of how photons transfer between electrons and other charged particles to generate the electromagnetic force. In creating a force, the photon acts as what is called an “exchange particle.”

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Don Howard, trans. Anna Beck (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), Doc. 421. 7. Carl Seelig, Albert Einstein: A Documentary Biography, trans. Mervyn Savill (London: Staples Press, 1956), 108. 8. Albert Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, January 1916, in Seelig, Albert Einstein, 156. 9. Richard Feynman, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: Norton, 2010), 58. 10. Walter Moore, Schrödinger: Life and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 105. 11. Erwin Schrödinger, translated and quoted in Alex Harvey, “How Einstein Discovered Dark Energy,” 2012, http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6338. 12.

The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atul Gawande, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, fudge factor, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Peace of Westphalia, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, William of Occam

Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of quarks, called quantum mechanics a “mysterious, confusing discipline.” According to Roger Penrose, one of the late twentieth century’s foremost mathematical physicists, quantum mechanics “makes absolutely no sense.” “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,” remarked Richard Feynman. How can a theory be widely regarded both as incomprehensible and also as the best explanation we have of the physical world we live in? The answer lies in the shallow conception of causal explanation, in which it is derivation rather than comprehension that is paramount. To inspect that answer more closely, let me take you wading in the shallows of quantum explanation.

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CHAPTER 8 The Supremacy of Observation How the iron rule ejects everything from scientific debate but a theory’s ability to explain observable phenomena—and how that came to be (the iron rule’s fourth innovation) ONLY EMPIRICAL TESTING COUNTS. Across the world of science, this thought is expressed over and over in some form or other. “Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth” (physicist Richard Feynman). “Take nobody’s word for it” (motto of the Royal Society). “To experience we refer, as the only ground of all physical enquiry” (nineteenth-century man of science John Herschel). “Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery” (biologist Peter Medawar). “All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements” (physicist Stephen Hawking).

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III WHY SCIENCE TOOK SO LONG CHAPTER 9 Science’s Strategic Irrationality Why did science take so long to invent? Because the iron rule looks like a terrible idea. “CREDIT MUST BE GIVEN . . . to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts.” That sounds as scientific as anything said by Isaac Newton or Richard Feynman. It was written by Aristotle in the fourth century BCE. Aristotle was a systematic observer, an innovative theorist, and a first-rate intellect. He put the highest priority on a theory’s ability to explain the phenomena. What stopped him from inventing modern science two thousand years before the Scientific Revolution?

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Despite all the overcomplication of the systems we vitally depend on, I’m ultimately hopeful that humanity can handle what we have built. This book is why. Chapter 1 WELCOME TO THE ENTANGLEMENT On a winter day early in 1986, less than a month after the Challenger disaster, the famous physicist Richard Feynman spoke during a hearing of the commission investigating what went wrong. Tasked with determining what had caused the space shuttle Challenger to break apart soon after takeoff, and who was to blame, Feynman pulled no punches. He demonstrated how plunging an O-ring—a small piece of rubber used to seal the joints between segments of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters—into a glass of ice water would cause it to lose its resilience.

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because of its creation by some perfect, infinite mind: “The worship of the algorithm” is discussed further in Ian Bogost, “The Cathedral of Computation,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/. CHAPTER 1: WELCOME TO THE ENTANGLEMENT the Challenger disaster: James Gleick, “Richard Feynman Dead at 69; Leading Theoretical Physicist,” The New York Times, February 17, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/feynman-obit.html. car began accelerating uncontrollably: For further information on “unintended acceleration” in Toyota vehicles, see Ken Bensinger and Jerry Hirsch, “Jury Hits Toyota with $3-million Verdict in Sudden Acceleration Death Case,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/oct/24/autos/la-fi-hy-toyota-sudden-acceleration-verdict-20131024; Ralph Vartabedian and Ken Bensinger, “Runaway Toyota Cases Ignored,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 2009, http://www.latimes.com/local/la-fi-toyota-recall8-2009nov08-story.html#page=1; Margaret Cronin Fisk, “Toyota Settles Oklahoma Acceleration Case After Verdict,” Bloomberg Business, October 25, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-10-25/toyota-settles-oklahoma-acceleration-case-after-jury-verdict; Associated Press, “Jury Finds Toyota Liable in Fatal Wreck in Oklahoma,” New York Times, October 25, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/business/jury-finds-toyota-liable-in-fatal-wreck-in-oklahoma.html.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Inside the refrigerator, entropy decreases as the temperature drops. But to lower the entropy, you have to have a motor, which increases the heat generated behind the refrigerator, increasing the entropy outside the machine. That is why refrigerators are always hot in the back. As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once said, “There is nothing in biology yet found that indicates the inevitability of death. This suggests to me that it is not at all inevitable and that it is only a matter of time before biologists discover what it is that is causing us the trouble and that this terrible universal disease or temporariness of the human’s body will be cured.”

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All the arguments mentioned in this chapter, as we have seen, involved the manipulation of genes, proteins, and molecules. Then the next question naturally arises: How far can we manipulate individual atoms? The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. —RICHARD FEYNMAN, NOBEL LAUREATE Nanotechnology has given us the tools to play with the ultimate toy box of nature—atoms and molecules. Everything is made from these, and the possibilities to create new things appear limitless. —HORST STORMER, NOBEL LAUREATE The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large.

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The solution to the problem may come from nanotechnology. Nanotechnology might also, perhaps by the end of this century, create a machine that only the gods can wield, a machine that can create anything out of almost nothing. THE QUANTUM WORLD The first to call attention to this new realm of physics was Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who asked a deceptively simple question: How small can you make a machine? This was not an academic question. Computers were gradually becoming smaller, changing the face of industry, so it was becoming apparent that the answer to this question could have an enormous impact on society and the economy.

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

The baton was being passed to a new generation of theorists. The gurus would be the two youngest members of the audience at Shelter Island: Still under thirty, and already veterans of the scientific war just ended, they were Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman. Only later would it become known that in Japan, completely independently, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga had already solved the puzzle. schwinger and feynman Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman were exact contemporaries. Born in 1918, in New York City, both were brilliant theorists, but there the comparisons end. Schwinger, from Upper Manhattan, was a small, heavy man, a natty dresser who spoke eloquently without notes, filling the board with equations written deftly with both hands.

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In Cambridge, England, in the 1930s, astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, seduced by this numerology, inspired a Pythagorean cult.23 There have been spoofs connecting 137 to the biblical book of Revelation;24 one of the fathers of Quantum Electrodynamics—Julian Schwinger—had 137 as the vanity license plate on his sports car;25 and eighty years on, many of us continue to receive unsolicited papers from people who believe that they have found the true path to enlightenment with an explanation of this number. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli collaborated with Carl Jung, the psychologist, in a fruitless attempt to find deep significance in its value.26 The Point of Infinity 27 Richard Feynman himself described it as “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man,” adding that if the “hand of God” wrote that number, “we don’t know how He pushed his pencil.”27 This glimpse of the “hand of God” has tantalized physicists, and mystics, for eighty years.

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The experiments claiming S or T turned out to be flawed, and new experiments favored a combination of V and A. Marshak discussed the matter with several colleagues, including Murray Gell-Mann, a young theorist who would almost single-handedly redefine the frontiers of particle physics. However, that would come later, as we shall see. Meanwhile, unaware of these developments, Richard Feynman had been traveling in Brazil that summer and also had realized that V – A offered a mathematically tantalizing, though apparently empirically useless, possibility. On his return he asked some of his Cal Tech experimental colleagues to brief him on developments in the weak interaction, and they told him that Gell-Mann thought that the evidence for the S interpretation looked doubtful and that the data pointed more toward the correct classification being V.

Quantum Computing for Everyone by Chris Bernhardt

Albert Einstein, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, discrete time, John von Neumann, low earth orbit, P = NP, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, selection bias, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

The chapter concludes with Fredkin’s billiard-ball computer. This is not really needed for the rest of our story, but its sheer ingenuity demands that it be included. This computer consists of balls colliding with one another and off various walls. It conjures up images of particles interacting. This is one of the ideas that inspired Richard Feynman to become interested in the idea of quantum computing. Feynman wrote some of the earliest papers on the subject. Chapter 7. This chapter begins the study of quantum computing using quantum circuits. Quantum gates are defined. We see how a quantum gate acts on a qubit and realize that we have been considering these ideas all along.

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We will begin by studying boolean functions in terms of logic; then we will show how to translate everything into circuits and gates. The material, up to this point, is now considered standard and is contained in every introductory computer science text. But after this we look at some ideas that are usually not part of the standard introduction. In the 1970s, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman became interested in computing and, for a few years in the early 1980s, he gave a course on computation at the California Institute of Technology. These lectures were eventually written up as Feynman Lectures on Computation. Feynman’s interest in computation was partly due to his interaction with Edward Fredkin and Fredkin’s idiosyncratic views of physics and computation.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Then there’s what we do with the information we have. The core of a scientific lifestyle is to change your mind when faced with information that disagrees with your views, avoiding intellectual inertia, yet many of us praise leaders who stubbornly stick to their views as “strong.” The great physicist Richard Feynman hailed “distrust of experts” as a cornerstone of science, yet herd mentality and blind faith in authority figures is widespread. Logic forms the basis of scientific reasoning, yet wishful thinking, irrational fears, and other cognitive biases often dominate decisions. What can we do to promote a scientific lifestyle?

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A better understanding of the meaning of “probability”—and especially realizing that we don’t need (and never possess) “scientifically proved” facts but only a sufficiently high degree of probability in order to make decisions—would improve everybody’s conceptual toolkit. Uncertainty Lawrence Krauss Physicist, Foundation Professor, and director, Origins Project, Arizona State University; author, Quantum Man: Richard Feynman’s Life in Science The notion of uncertainty is perhaps the least well understood concept in science. In the public parlance, uncertainty is a bad thing, implying a lack of rigor and predictability. The fact that global warming estimates are uncertain, for example, has been used by many to argue against any action at the present time.

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The person who has access to his unconscious processes and mines them without getting mired in them can try new approaches, can begin to see things in new ways, and, perhaps, can achieve mastery of his pursuits. In a word: Relax. It was ARISE that allowed Friedrich August Kekulé to use a daydream about a snake eating its tail as inspiration for his formulation of the structure of the benzene ring. It’s what allowed Richard Feynman to simply drop an O-ring into a glass of ice water, show that when cold the ring loses pliability, and thereby explain the cause of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Sometimes it takes a genius to see that a fifth-grade science experiment is all that is needed to solve a problem. In another word: Play.

Einstein's Fridge: How the Difference Between Hot and Cold Explains the Universe by Paul Sen

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, heat death of the universe, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, traveling salesman, Turing complete, Turing test

Boltzmann’s explanation for the original low-entropy state of our universe therefore leads to the solipsistic conclusion that all that exists is one brain, which holds the entire cosmos as a figment of its imagination. Scientists now refer to this hypothetical entity as a Boltzmann brain. Few favor such an explanation, although no one has yet come up with a definitive explanation for why the universe did begin in such an unlikely low-entropy state. As the great American physicist Richard Feynman, speaking in the 1950s during his now-famous lectures on physics, put it: “For some reason, the universe at one time had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. So that is the way toward the future. That is the origin of all irreversibility, that is what makes the processes of growth and decay.”

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When Einstein read Noether’s work, he wrote to Hilbert, “I’m impressed that such things can be understood in such a general way. The old guard at Göttingen should take some lessons from Miss Noether. She seems to know her stuff.” Since 1915, Noether’s discovery has become a guiding principle for physicists. When the American physicist Richard Feynman gave his now-famous public lectures on science in 1963, he declared the link between symmetry and conserved quantities to be “a fact that most physicists still find somewhat staggering, a most profound and beautiful thing.” Unfortunately, he didn’t credit Noether for her discovery, wasting an opportunity to raises awareness of her work with the wider public.

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For many common purposes, the conveniences of this method more than compensate for any inconsistencies. generates in units called PUFFs: For the purposes of this illustration, the value of a PUFF is unimportant. It could be, say, the work required to raise a weight of one kilogram by one meter. This engine can operate as a thermometer: For a more technical explanation see Richard Feynman’s lecture “The Laws of Thermodynamics,” https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_44.html. Clausius remained hard at work: Clausius was the first chair in physics at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, which was founded in 1855. Albert Einstein was a student there from 1896 to 1900.

Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

Boyle was here recommending that theories should make predictions (‘forshow The Events’) that could be checked in ‘welmade Tryals’, that is, in experiments. These criteria are the touchstone by which most scientific theories are usually judged to stand or fall today. As the twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman insisted, ‘it doesn’t matter how beautiful, or even how simple, your theory is, if it doesn’t make correct predictions, it’s wrong.’ Although they are essential to it, these principles are not confined to science nor do they define it. Defendants in the dock are found innocent or guilty based on evidence.

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For example, considering the motion of classical objects such as arrows or cannonballs, minimising action delivers precisely the trajectories predicted by Newton’s three laws of motion. When applied to quantities such as energy, momentum or angular momentum, then it uncovers the classical conservation laws as well as Noether’s theorem and the gauge theories of particle physics. For quantum particles, such as photons, the principle of least action delivers Richard Feynman’s path integral method of calculating particle motion.i When light rays bend between a submerged stick and your eye, they do so along the path of least action. The same law ensures that stars, planets or even black holes follow their paths of least action through gravitational fields, the same as those predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

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Smolin points out that the nineteenth-century American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), who was profoundly influenced by Darwinism, proposed that the laws of physics might, like living organisms, evolve. The English mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford (1845–79) made a similar claim. Even medieval theologians, such as William of Occam, argued that God might have created worlds different from our own. The physicists John Archibald Wheeler, Richard Feynman and Seth Lloyd have all proposed that the laws of physics may be subject to change10 both in space and time. Yet the case for changing laws within our own universe is weak because, as far as we can tell, precisely the same laws operate, both at its earliest moments and the furthest edges of our universe.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

Zero Banished: String Theory The problem is, when we try to calculate all the way down to zero distance, the equation blows up in our face and gives us meaningless answers—things like infinity. This caused a lot of trouble when the theory of quantum electrodynamics first came out. People were getting infinity for every problem they tried to calculate! —RICHARD FEYNMAN General relativity and quantum mechanics were bound to be incompatible. The universe of general relativity is a smooth rubber sheet. It is continuous and flowing, never sharp, never pointy. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, describes a jerky and discontinuous universe. What the two theories have in common—and what they clash over—is zero.

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They don’t go all the way to zero distance from the electron when they calculate the electron’s true mass and charge; they stop short of zero at an arbitrary distance. Once a scientist chooses a suitably close distance, all the calculations using the “true” mass and charge agree with one another. This is a process called renormalization. “It is what I would call a dippy process,” wrote physicist Richard Feynman, even though Feynman won his Nobel Prize for perfecting the art of renormalization. Just as zero punches a hole in the smooth sheet of general relativity, zero smooths and spreads out the sharp point charge of the electron, covering it in a fog. However, since quantum mechanics deals with zero-dimensional particle-points such as the electron, technically all particle-particle interactions in quantum theory deal with infinities: they are singularities.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

The Pythagoreans discovered irrational numbers, and are said to have been so unsettled by them that they prescribed the death penalty to any of their sect who revealed their existence to the untutored multitudes. Hippasus was banished for defying the ban. He drowned at sea, a fate that the Pythagoreans ascribed to divine retribution. *Richard Feynman, Gell-Mann’s chief competitor for the title of World’s Smartest Man but a stranger to pretension, once encountered Gell-Mann in the hall outside their offices at Caltech and asked him where he had been on a recent trip; “Moon-TRW-ALGH!” Gell-Mann responded, in a French accent so thick that he sounded as if he were strangling.

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As quantum physics sees it, every “real” particle is surrounded by a corona of virtual particles and antiparticles that bubble up out of the vacuum, interact with one another, and then vanish, having lived on borrowed, Heisenberg time. (“Created and annihilated, created and annihilated—what a waste of time,” mused Richard Feynman.)3 A free proton, say, is not alone in its travels, but is surrounded by a corona of virtual protons, the existence of which influences its behavior in ways that are not only observable but are, indeed, fundamental to the interactions of the proton as we know it. One example of the reality of virtual particles resides in the fact that the stars shine: To revisit the Coulomb barrier one last time, it is the structure of the virtual particle clouds surrounding protons that makes it possible for protons at the centers of stars to tunnel through one another’s electrical fields often enough for nuclear fusion to be maintained.

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In his postdoctoral days Hawking and his colleague Roger Penrose demonstrated that general relativity implies that the universe began in a “singularity,” a state of infinitely curved space in which the laws of relativity break down; this proved, as Hawking put it, that “relativity predicts its own downfall.”10 But quantum theory might function where relativity did not, and in later years Hawking began to explore the prospect of understanding the origin of the universe in terms of quantum probabilities. His tools included “imaginary time”—a kind of time measured in terms of imaginary numbers—and Richard Feynman’s “sum over histories” method of doing quantum mechanics. Imaginary numbers make no sense when handled by customary mathematical rules. An example is the square root of —1, which will produce an “error” message if demanded of an electronic calculator. They work quite well, however, according to their own rules; imaginary numbers have been employed to excellent effect, for instance, in hydrodynamics.

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

“He was in the right place at the right time with the right connections with the right idea,” remembers Willis Ware, fourth to be hired to join the engineering team, “setting aside the hassle that will probably never be resolved as to whose ideas they really were.”1 As World War II drew to a close, the scientists who had built the atomic bomb at Los Alamos wondered, “What’s next?” Some, including Richard Feynman, vowed never to have anything to do with nuclear weapons or military secrecy again. Others, including Edward Teller and John von Neumann, were eager to develop more advanced nuclear weapons, especially the “Super,” or hydrogen bomb. Just before dawn on the morning of July 16, 1945, the New Mexico desert was illuminated by an explosion “brighter than a thousand suns.”

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Abraham Flexner (1866–1959): American schoolteacher, educational reformer, and founding director of the IAS, 1930–1939. Simon Flexner (1863–1946): American philanthropist, Rockefeller Foundation officer, and older brother of Abraham Flexner. Stanley P. Frankel (1919–1978): American physicist, student of Robert Oppenheimer, and Los Alamos colleague of Richard Feynman; member of the original ENIAC and IAS thermonuclear calculation team; minicomputer design pioneer. Kurt Gödel (1906–1978): Moravian-born Austrian logician; arrived at the IAS in 1933. Herman Heine Goldstine (1913–2004): American mathematician, U.S. Army officer, ENIAC administrator, and associate director of the IAS ECP during 1946–1956.

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IBM was asked for the name of their best technician who had been drafted into the army, who was immediately given a security clearance and reassigned to Los Alamos, but this took time. In the interim, Stanley Frankel, a Berkeley graduate student of Oppenheimer’s who had been put in charge of the hand computing group, and Richard Feynman, a graduate student (and amateur safecracker) from Princeton who was game for any unauthorized challenge, managed to uncrate the machines and get them to work. Feynman and Frankel were hooked. “Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about,” Feynman later explained.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

As with his contemporary, Pasteur, it's difficult to imagine any individual or team, perhaps even any institution, having a proportionate impact today: not just one big idea, but reams of them, again and again entirely reorienting disciplines and worldviews. Even giants of mid-to-late twentieth century physics, field-shapers like Richard Feynman or Murray Gell-Mann, couldn't have such universal impact. Will it ever again be possible for one researcher to alter the nature and trajectory of their field so profoundly, as Darwin, Pasteur, and later Freud, Poincaré, Turing or Einstein did? So far it looks like yet another example of the breakthrough problem.

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Just as goldfish aren't equipped to understand the germ theory of disease, Maxwell's equations or the novels of James Joyce, perhaps we aren't equipped to solve ancient and apparently intractable philosophical conundrums like the mind/body problem or the fundamentals of the universe. After a point, we may neither be able to find new theories, nor even if we get close, really understand how they work. Some questions are ‘cognitively closed’. Richard Feynman said that ‘nobody really understands quantum mechanics.’ 40 What if that is the norm in future? If we scrape against the ceiling of our limitations? Although the notion is controversial, if there are limits to what the brain can know or do, we are surely getting closer to those limits. Similarly, given the complexity of our built systems or the detail of found systems, it's not hard to imagine that, should such limits exist, they are getting closer.

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Far from inhibiting research, done correctly it would create the necessary societal space and institutional foundation. Get it right and we secure the future – and set the ground for the last recommendation. Go bolder It's notable how many scientists with major discoveries to their name are also musicians, writers, philosophers, activists and communicators. Physicists like Einstein, Richard Feynman and Werner Heisenberg were accomplished musicians; Marie Curie, Fritz Haber and Erwin Schrödinger wrote poetry; biological and medical researchers from Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister to Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Dorothy Hodgkin were artists. Is there a connection? Looking at hundreds of discoveries and significant scientists from the UK, France, Germany and the US over the twentieth century gave J.

Symmetry and the Monster by Ronan, Mark

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, conceptual framework, Everything should be made as simple as possible, G4S, Henri Poincaré, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, New Journalism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, V2 rocket

Mathematicians are very careful about this. An important result, one that will be used elsewhere, has to be proved to everyone’s satisfaction. Theorems are essential, and this is how mathematics makes progress. It is rather different from theoretical physics in this sense. As the famous physicist Richard Feynman said, ‘The whole purpose in physics is to work out a number, with decimal points, etc.! Otherwise you haven’t done anything.’* Well, in mathematics, the whole point is to state and prove a theorem. Some theorems, of course, are more important than others, and most are rather specialized results that map out the mathematical landscape.

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You can never get only part of an electron. Quantum theory is a mysterious business, and as Niels Bohr himself said, ‘Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.’ With the passing of time one might expect that the subject would become easier to comprehend, but as the late Richard Feynman said in a comment in 1967, ‘I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.’* The wave nature of an electron means that as it orbits the nucleus of an atom, it is not at all like a planet orbiting the sun. It has to be treated as a wave encircling the nucleus, and that brings Lie groups into the picture.

The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 13, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, cognitive dissonance, Donald Knuth, Erdős number, Georg Cantor, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, John Nash: game theory, Kickstarter, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, P = NP, Paul Erdős, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Wolfskehl Prize, women in the workforce

Keats believes that rational analysis will “unweave a rainbow,” thereby destroying its inherent beauty. By contrast, Lisa Simpson would argue that such analysis turns the sight of a rainbow into an even more exhilarating experience. Perhaps Lisa’s worldview was best articulated by the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman: I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says—“you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.”

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Moreover, I also appear to have a Sabbath number, which is generated as a result of musical collaborations linking me to a member of the rock band Black Sabbath. Indeed, according to the Erdős Bacon Sabbath Project (http://ebs.rosschurchley.com), I have an Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number of 10, giving me the world’s eighth-lowest Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath number, on a par with Richard Feynman, among others! 9. Remember, Poindexter was the boy genius from Felix the Cat who inspired the name poindextrose, given to the pheromone discovered by Lisa in the episode “Bye, Bye, Nerdie” (2010). 10. Incidentally, when Lisa is in Moe’s Tavern talking to Professor Frink, he uses his laptop to show her an online video of Bill James, voiced by the real Bill James. 11.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Recent immigrants from Africa walking in the land of cars, purchases from electronics stores balanced on their heads, looking as out of place as I was. Cynthia, my obsession, turned out to be the daughter of the head of the physics department at Caltech. So that’s where we would hang out. She was the darling of the marvelous minds who huddled there, like Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann. I was never a student at Caltech, but rather the weird boyfriend of the department head’s charming daughter. It’s a kind of status. Feynman was generous with me, showing me how to form geometrical designs with one’s fingers to think about chirality; things like that. He was also a fun drummer and we’d play.

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I remember experiences in terms of ideas; how a story I lived through illuminated a deeper question. My experiences become allegories. I recall minutiae about conversations with people from decades ago that turned out to be important to me. The eccentric heiress, the Mexican general: all colorful, but also characters in the allegories that make up my personal cosmos. I remember Richard Feynman teaching me to make a tetrahedron with my fingers, Steve Jobs demonstrating how to amass the mysterious quality we call power by humiliating a hardware engineer while I shriveled at the spectacle, Marvin Minsky showing me how to predict when a technology would become cheap and mature (he used genomics as an example).

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I was a pretty freaky and psychedelic guy, I suppose. Tim Leary had a nickname for me: “the control group.” I was the only person around the scene who had not taken drugs, so maybe I was the baseline. Maybe drugs made people straighter. Someone needed to be the control group. Many years later, when Richard Feynman knew his cancer was starting to overtake him, he decided it was time to experiment with LSD. The plan was to hang out with some hippie women in a hot tub at the edge of an unfenced cliff high above the waves in Big Sur.4 He asked the control group to be there, keeping a discreet distance to make sure he didn’t fall to the rocks.

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

Once there, the system basically has nowhere else to go; it’s in the kind of configuration that is most natural for it to be in. Such a system has no arrow of time, as the entropy is not increasing (or decreasing). To a macroscopic observer, a system in equilibrium appears static, not changing at all. Richard Feynman, in The Character of Physical Law, tells a story that illustrates the concept of equilibrium.129 Imagine you are sitting on a beach when you are suddenly hit with a tremendous downpour of rain. You’ve brought along a towel, but that also gets wet as you dash to cover. Once you’ve reached some cover, you start to dry yourself with your towel.

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Strictly speaking, that certainly is possible, but it’s cognitively unstable in the same sense that we discussed in the last chapter. There is no sensible way to live and think and behave if that is the case, so there is no warrant for believing it. Better to accept the universe around us as it appears (for the most part) to be. This point was put with characteristic clarity by Richard Feynman, in his famous Lectures on Physics: [F]rom the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all of the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we have never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we just looked at. If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it . . .

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In addition to Bekenstein, Wheeler was the Ph.D. supervisor for an impressive fraction of the scientists who are now leading researchers in gravitational physics, including Kip Thorne, Charles Misner, Robert Wald, and William Unruh—not to mention Hugh Everett, as well as Wheeler’s first student, one Richard Feynman. So Princeton in the early 1970s was a fruitful environment to be thinking about black holes, and Bekenstein was in the thick of it. In his Ph.D. thesis, he made a simple but dramatic suggestion: The relationship between black-hole mechanics and thermodynamics isn’t simply an analogy; it’s an identity.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today's Computers by John MacCormick, Chris Bishop

Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, fault tolerance, information retrieval, Menlo Park, PageRank, pattern recognition, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush

Data could still be exchanged securely using cryptography, but it would be far more difficult to verify the source of any data received. This combination of a profound idea with such wide practical impact means that digital signatures are, without doubt, one of the most spectacular achievements of computer science. 10 What Is Computable? Let me remind you of some of the problems of computing machines. —RICHARD FEYNMAN (1965 Nobel Prize in physics) We've now seen quite a number of clever, powerful, and beautiful algorithms—algorithms that turn the bare metal of a computer into a genius at your fingertips. In fact, it would be natural to wonder, based on the rhapsodic rhetoric in the preceding chapters, if there is anything that computers cannot do for us.

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Digital signatures (chapter 9). Gail Grant's Understanding Digital Signatures provides a great deal of information about digital signatures and is reasonably accessible to those without a computer science background. Computability (chapter 10). The chapter's opening quotation is from a talk given by Richard Feynman at Caltech on December 29,1959. The title of the talk is “There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” and it was later published in Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine (February 1960). One unconventional, but very interesting, presentation of the concepts surrounding computability and undecidability is in the form of a (fictional) novel: Turing (A Novel about Computation), by Christos Papadimitriou.

How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, food miles, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Skype, sustainable-tourism, two and twenty, University of East Anglia

That is about as efficient as hydrogen generation ever gets, and frankly I would be surprised if energy efficiency was NASA’s number one priority. I would be even more surprised if the manufacturing of the solid fuel was that efficient. Much more significantly, it might have been reasonable to add on a large chunk of footprint of NASA itself. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who helped to investigate the Challenger disaster, describes the shuttle project as NASA’s somewhat unjustifiable raison d’être after the lunar landings.10 My third major omission is that I haven’t included any kind of weighting factor to take account of the high altitude at which the emissions are released.

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Other figures in my calculations were: 31 MJ per kg (14 MJ per lb.) for the solid fuel, 143 MJ per kg (65 MJ per lb.) for the hydrogen. I used 70 g CO2e per MJ as a general figure for emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and added 10 percent for their supply chains up to the point of combustion. 10. “What do you care what other people think?” (Richard Feynman, 1989) is a fascinating and entertaining account of the technical and management failures behind the disaster. Also recommended for anyone who is trying to get some clear thinking into a bureaucracy. 11. 4.6 tons per return trip if you live in Hong Kong. Flying London to Hong Kong is about the same as Los Angeles to Barcelona, see Flying from Los Angeles to Barcelona return. 1 million tons and beyond 1.

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

And the relationship between art and science can go the other way too; scientists can use art to understand math. The physicist Richard Feynman revolutionized his field in the 1940s when he devised a simple way to diagram quantum effects: A straight, solid line represented particles of matter or antimatter, which traveled through space and time. Wavy or dashed lines represented force-carrying particles. When an electron moving in a straight line emitted a photon in a wavy line, the straight line recoiled to the right. Equations that took months to calculate could suddenly be understood, through diagrams, in a matter of hours. Richard Feynman taught physicists a new way to “see” quantum effects simply by deploying straight lines and wavy lines.

Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time by Brigid Schulte

8-hour work day, affirmative action, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deliberate practice, desegregation, DevOps, East Village, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, game design, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, machine readable, meta-analysis, new economy, profit maximization, Results Only Work Environment, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Zipcar, éminence grise

Once managers at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab discovered that the best engineers had the richest play experiences—building soapbox derby racers, taking apart clocks, working with their hands—they began to include questions about a candidate’s play history in standard interviews.20 The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman was a master of “serious play,” Brown says, who approached his work with a playful attitude. “I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment,” Feynman wrote in his autobiography. In the same spirit, he watched students in the cafeteria goof off by spinning plates. “For the fun of it,” he began to make calculations of the wobbles—“piddling around,” he said, which led to developing the “Feynman diagrams” to explain quantum electrodynamics and ultimately resulted in his Nobel Prize.21 In animal studies, life without play is bleak.

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And what he finds in those who do not make time for play—in either attitude or activity—is often joylessness, rigidity, addiction, workaholism, diminished curiosity, and, at the core, depression. To help people reclaim their playful natures, he takes them back to their earliest memories of play, to remember what they loved doing as children so they can begin to build on it and figure out how to use it as adults—to bring creativity and passion to their work, like Richard Feynman, to foster intimacy, connection, and playfulness in their relationships at home with their partners and children and to make time to just have lighthearted fun for the soul. That’s what Brown saw Barbara Brannen, a woman he met in Colorado, do. Brannen was a successful executive in Denver with two kids and a busy life who, over time, found herself feeling increasingly overwhelmed, unsatisfied, sad, and so stressed-out from working all the time that she lost the use of her left arm.

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Sergio Pellis,” University of Lethbridge, Research & Innovation Services (biography), www.uleth.ca/research/research_profiles/dr-sergio-pellis. Brown, Play, 33–42. 20. Brown, Play, 9–11. 21. Rebecca Abrams, The Playful Self: Why Women Need Play in Their Lives (London: Fourth Estate, 1997), 190–91. A hilarious video of Feynman playing the bongos with abandon will make you smile: “Richard Feynman Playing Bongos,” YouTube. 22. Stuart Brown, interview with author, March 9, 2012. Brown also referred to the experiment in his talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2010, “The Neuroscience of Play: What Play Does for You and Your Brain, and What Happens to You if You Don’t Play,” www.aspenideas.org/session/neuroscience-play-what-play-does-you-and-your-brain-and-what-happens-you-if-you-dont-play.

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

Laboratory experiments are of course a pillar of the physical sciences and have been since Galileo Galilei rolled a bronze ball down a length of wooden molding to test his theory of acceleration. Galileo believed—correctly, as it turned out—that a small creation like his could lead to a better understanding of the greatest creations known to humankind: the earth’s forces, the order of the skies, the workings of human life itself. More than three centuries later, the physicist Richard Feynman reasserted the primacy of this belief. “The test of all knowledge is experiment,” he said. “Experiment is the sole judge of scientific ‘truth.’” The electricity you use, the cholesterol drug you swallow, the page or screen or speaker from which you are consuming these very words—they are all the product of a great deal of experimentation.

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Minty, “Media Coverage and Charitable Giving After the 2004 Tsunami,” Southern Economic Journal 75, no. 1 (2008). THE VALUE OF LAB EXPERIMENTS: Galileo’s acceleration experiment is related in Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, trans. Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, 1914. Richard Feynman’s point about the primacy of experimentation comes from his Lectures on Physics, ed. Matthew Linzee Sands (Addison-Wesley, 1963). ULTIMATUM AND DICTATOR: The first paper on Ultimatum as it is commonly known is Werner Guth, Rolf Schmittberger, and Bernd Schwarze, “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3, no. 4 (1982).

Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, Brownian motion, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lateral thinking, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, trade route, upwardly mobile

Historically, the work of both men is of equal importance; but I shall concentrate on one key experiment, carried out by Young, because it later played a crucial part in the development of an understanding of quantum physics. It is called, for reasons that will become obvious, the “double slit experiment” or, more colloquially, “the experiment with two holes.” Much later, the great American physicist Richard Feynman (1918–88) said that the experiment with two holes encapsulates the “central mystery” of quantum physics. We will see why later. In Young’s experiment, a beam of light (ideally, a single pure colour) is shone through a narrow slit in a thin sheet of card in a dark room, to produce a narrow beam.

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I have described Cramer’s “transactional interpretation” of quantum mechanics fully in my book Schrödinger’s Kittens, but it is worth going into a little detail here since it shows just how deep Schrödinger’s insight was. Although Cramer was unaware of this particular insight, one of the ideas that had set him thinking about waves travelling backwards in time was nearly as old. In 1940, Richard Feynman was a graduate student at Princeton University, working under the supervision of John Wheeler (1911–2008). He became interested in a problem known as radiation resistance, which in simple language means that it is hard to push charged particles like electrons around—they resist, more strongly than uncharged particles resist, and at the same time they radiate electromagnetic waves.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

Perhaps the greatest irony of quantum mechanics is that if the MWI is correct, then the situation is quite analogous if once you feel ready to die, you repeatedly attempt quantum suicide: you will experimentally convince yourself that the MWI is correct, but you can never convince anyone else! Mallah says that the “total amount of consciousness” diminishes along with amplitude. Perhaps the message is that we shouldn’t care so much about super-improbable worlds, nor stand too much on the distinction between zero probability and a vanishingly small probability. 1/137 Richard Feynman once suggested that physicists ought to post a sign with the number “1/137” in their offices. It would be a reminder of how much they don’t know. A physicist will recognize 1/137 as the approximate value of the fine-structure constant—in Feynman’s words, “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics.”

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The fine-structure constant is a measure of how strong electromagnetic forces are. It is important because electromagnetic forces govern atoms, chemistry, and life. If the constant were much different from its observed value, there would be no atoms. That would mean no stars, no planets, no life, and no Richard Feynmans to contemplate it all. The fine-structure constant remains a mystery, though, because our physical theories have so far been unable to account for its value. This seems to cry out for an explanation. Several twentieth-century thinkers sacrificed their reputations on that altar, most notoriously Arthur Eddington.

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means by John Lanchester

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, asset allocation, Basel III, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Swan, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, forward guidance, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, High speed trading, hindsight bias, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kodak vs Instagram, Kondratiev cycle, Large Hadron Collider, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, McJob, means of production, microcredit, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working poor, yield curve

Many fields of thought have ideas that are far more difficult to understand, but that don’t have the same sense of a linguistic perimeter around them. In physics, for instance, there are an enormous number of ideas of a complexity so great that they can’t really be grasped at all in ordinary language, but are available only to someone with an advanced level of math. Even then they are very hard to understand. The great physicist Richard Feynman, who knew his subject as well as anyone who’s ever lived, and who explained it better than anyone who ever lived, said in The Character of Physical Law, “I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.” But you can still get a sense of what these fields of thought are about.

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There’s a permanent invitation to take them apart and put them together again in a form that works better. People in the business know this perfectly well. They’re not stupid. But there is an inbuilt tendency for that definition creep, for Lego models to start turning into equations that have, in the great phrase of Richard Feynman, “the character of physical law.” There’s a visual metaphor for the process in the form of an amazing device called the Phillips machine, the creation of a remarkable New Zealander called Bill Phillips. After a roundabout route to the world of economics via a spell in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Phillips set up a workshop in a south London garage.

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

Solar and cosmic radiation will be a concern for plants, but as we warm the planet and the atmosphere becomes denser—albeit with carbon dioxide—radiation damage will be greatly reduced. As noted in the previous chapter, although the massive amount of CO2 on Mars is a huge disadvantage to humans, it can be a boon to plants. Plants consume CO2 and expel oxygen. The late physicist Richard Feynman was fond of saying that trees aren’t really land plants—they grow from the air. They rely mostly on sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow, although most also need water from the ground. Plants should thrive in the Martian CO2 environment, and our genetic engineering abilities should allow us to re-create plants that grow far better and faster on Mars than anywhere else.

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Compare the consequences to experience. If it disagrees with experience, the guess is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your guess is or how smart you are or what your name is. If it disagrees with experience, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it. RICHARD FEYNMAN There were now two dominant theories fighting for control of the universe. In one corner was the Big Bang model, which had evolved out of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, thanks to Lemaître and Friedmann. It proposed a unique moment of creation followed by a rapid expansion, and sure enough Hubble had observed that the universe was expanding and the galaxies were receding.

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JOHN DEWEY (1859-1952), American philosopher Four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense, ii) this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) this is true, but quite unimportant, iv) I always said so. J.B.S. HALDANE (1892-1964), English geneticist Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. RICHARD FEYNMAN (1918-88), American physicist A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life. ROBIN G. COLLINGWOOD (1889-1943), English philosopher GLOSSARY Terms in italics have their own entry in the glossary.

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Even if I stopped writing for a decade, I could begin to explore some of these other interests. And many of these interests still relate to communicating science and mathematics, so to a large extent my answer to the previous question still holds true. TOP TEN Simon Singh’s Top Ten Favourite Books: Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! Richard Feynman The Making of the Atomic Bomb Richard Rhodes Chaos James Gleick Flatland Edwin A. Abbott A Mathematician’s Apology G.H. Hardy Our Final Century Martin Rees The Surgeon of Crowthorne Simon Winchester Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation Olivia Judson Interpreter of Maladies Jhumpa Lahiri The Phantom Tollbooth Norton Juster LIFE at a Glance Simon Singh was born in Somerset in 1964.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

More often than not, his writings addressed the behavior of matter and energy at the tiny, molecular—that is, quantum—level. Quantum mechanics, as it was beginning to be called, was a science of deep surprises, where theory had largely outpaced the proof of experimentation. Some years later the physicist Richard Feynman would elegantly explain that “it was discovered that things on a small scale behave nothing like things on a large scale.” In the quantum world, for instance, you could no longer say that a particle has a certain location or speed. Nor was it possible, Feynman would point out, “to predict exactly what will happen in any circumstance.”

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The precise reasons for the shift remained ambiguous, though some Labs members later reflected that by 1940 the specter of war had trumped the Bell System’s ugly traditions of bigotry. A slightly different explanation was that a meritocratic organization such as the Labs could perceive a competitive disadvantage of passing over the best scientists on religious grounds, an error they might have already made with the young Richard Feynman, a former colleague of Shockley’s at MIT who would eventually be drafted into the Manhattan Project.9 Whatever the explanation, some of the older and most hidebound scientists at the Labs found discomfort in this aspect of the Labs’ evolution, as well as in Kelly’s war mobilization effort. Lloyd Espenschied, for example, an inventor of the thick coaxial cables that carried phone conversations between major cities and a senior advisor to Oliver Buckley, was an avowed isolationist.

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Nuclear Regulatory Commission, http://www.nrc.gov/materials/fuel-cycle-fac/ur-enrichment.html. 5 Interview of James Fisk by Lillian Hoddeson, June 24, 1976, Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, MD; www.aip.org/history/ohilist. 6 Charles Townes, How the Laser Happened (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 39. 7 Though Mervin Kelly used the words “scramble” and “unscramble” in his description of multiplexing and quartz filters, Bob Lucky points out that those terms erroneously suggest encrypted transmissions. It might be more precise to think of the telephone conversations of the era as “stacked” atop one another during the transmission process. 8 “Artificial Quartz Is Produced Here,” New York Times, September 19, 1947. 9 James Gleick, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 85. 10 Lloyd Espenschied, “Memo: Visit by a Young Investigator of the War Department,” January 25, 1944, 4:50 p.m. AT&T archives. 11 Buckley and Jewett traded memos on the Espenschied incident between late January 1944 and November 1944. 12 There is no evidence as to Mervin Kelly’s personal feelings, yet Kelly was the first Bell Labs executive to hire Jews—for the Labs’ efforts in radar and wartime development.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

After limited success with open monitoring or mindfulness meditation, he was introduced to Transcendental Meditation by a friend, Dan Loeb, billionaire and founder of Third Point LLC, a $17 billion asset management firm. ✸ Most-gifted or recommended books Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. The latter is a book about cognitive dissonance that looks at common weaknesses and biases in human thinking. Peter wants to ensure he goes through life without being too sure of himself, and this book helps him to recalibrate

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and it’s interesting, because a lot of them will take a step back and they’ll fumble, because they’re so indoctrinated into the algorithm of ‘All I really need to do is identify high cholesterol and treat it’ versus understanding what purpose it serves in the human body.” TF: There is a big difference between understanding something (what you want in a physician) and simply knowing its name or labeling it. This is also one of the lessons that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman’s father taught him. The story is contained in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the most-gifted book of several people in this book, as well as in a wonderful short documentary called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. “The rule is: The basics are the basics, and you can’t beat the basics.”

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In zoology, you can predict the mood and behavior patterns of any chimp by which five chimps they hang out with the most. Choose your five chimps carefully.” Lessons From Physics and the Russian Mob “I learned [the importance of honesty] from a couple of different places. One is, when I grew up, I wanted to be a physicist and I idolized Richard Feynman. I read everything by him, technical and non-technical, that I could get my hands on. He said: ‘You must never, ever fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.’ “So the physics grounding is very important because in physics, you have to speak truth. You don’t compromise, you don’t negotiate with people, you don’t try and make them feel better.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, British Empire, computer age, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, desegregation, financial independence, Grace Hopper, Isaac Newton, labor-force participation, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operation paperclip, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, space junk, Steve Jobs, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra

JANUARY 1958 Launch Day The young woman’s heart was pounding. Her palms were sweaty as she gripped the pencil. She quickly scribbled down the numbers coming across the Teletype. She had been awake for more than sixteen hours but felt no fatigue. Instead, the experience seemed to be heightening her senses. Behind her she could sense Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, peeking at her graph paper. He stood looking over her shoulder, occasionally sighing. She knew that her every move was being carefully watched, her calculations closely studied. Her work would inform mission control if the first American satellite would be a success or a crushing failure.

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The rocket was out of their hands, and they could only hope it would be a success. Success or failure would be ascertained by those at JPL. Back in Pasadena, data began to come across the Teletype. Barbara started her calculations, her pencil moving furiously across the paper. Sitting at the light table, she could sense three very intimidating men towering over her: Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, now at Caltech; Feynman’s former PhD student Al Hibbs, now director of Space Science at JPL; and Lee DuBridge, the president of Caltech. Feynman stood behind her and peeked over her shoulder as she calculated the satellite’s velocity leaving Earth. He was unnaturally calm, a departure from his usually jumpy behavior.

Ten Billion Tomorrows: How Science Fiction Technology Became Reality and Shapes the Future by Brian Clegg

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Brownian motion, call centre, Carrington event, Charles Babbage, combinatorial explosion, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Future Shock, game design, gravity well, Higgs boson, hive mind, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine translation, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Turing test

As well as the nanoparticles in sunscreens, we are starting to use nanotubes and nanofibers, which can be incredibly strong and electrically conductive, and sheets of materials a single atom thick like graphene, which have amazing properties that are quite different from more familiar bulky materials. If we were to build actual devices on this scale, we have to be able to undertake something far more complex. In fact, the only thing that is likely to be able to build a nanoscale machine is another such machine. The physicist Richard Feynman, one of the earliest to think about nanotechnology in a fascinating talk called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” suggested we could manage this by producing very small machines, which we could then use to make even smaller machines, which could then make smaller still, and so on. But even if this is the case we do have to be wary of the issues that face natural replication on this scale.

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For more on the science fiction portrayal of the nanotechnology threat, see Michael Crichton, Prey (New York: Harper Collins, 2002). For more on nanotechnology, nanobots, and assemblers, see K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation (New York, Bantam, 1986). A transcript of Feynman’s talk is available at Richard Feynman (1959), Plenty of Room at the Bottom [online] MSU Department of Physics and Astronomy. Available at www.pa.msu.edu/~yang/RFeynman_plentySpace.pdf, accessed February 12, 2015. 6. DINOSAUR CONSTRUCTION The quote on grinding dinosaur bones is from Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park (London: Random House, 1993), p. 63.

The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Timothy Noah

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, Branko Milanovic, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, lump of labour, manufacturing employment, moral hazard, oil shock, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, positional goods, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, rent control, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, upwardly mobile, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War

The earliest radios required home installation, and purchasers needed to be shown how to use them. Radio sales clerks doubled as yesterday’s equivalent to the Geek Squad, competing with radio hobbyists who hired themselves out for installation and repair work. As a boy growing up in Far Rockaway, Queens, the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman earned money during the Depression by fixing radios—tinkering with vacuum tubes, removing a burned-out resister, climbing onto neighbors’ roofs and fixing their antennae.22 Simple work for a budding genius, it required from mere mortals a high school education. High school education was better than vocational training because the general knowledge it imparted allowed for more flexibility.

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But as production processes streamlined further, machines replaced the unskilled workers and higher-skilled workers were sought to manipulate the machines (Goldin and Katz, Education and Technology, 122). 19. Goldin and Katz, Education and Technology, 140, 161, 185. 20. Ibid., 198. 21. Ibid., 113, 177. 22. Ibid., 114, 118; Richard Feynman, quoted in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character, ed. Edward Hutchings (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997; originally published in 1985), 18–21. 23. Goldin and Katz, Education and Technology, 178–80, 248–49, 264. 24. Albert Parker Fitch, The College Course and the Preparation for Life: Eight Talks on Familiar Undergraduate Problems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 177–78. 25.

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

If I had escorted you into one of the cavernous rooms filled with “computers” during World War II’s Manhattan Project, you would have found scores of women toiling away with rudimentary calculators, being handed sheets of instructions and handing back other sheets with the results. (The person developing those instructions and devising the method for compiling the results was none other than the famed physicist Richard Feynman.) The women were like clerks, and were called computers because that is what they did. They did not need to know the nature of the underlying task; they simply had to execute a set of instructions without error. Hilbert argued for a large-scale mathematical initiative to devise mechanical procedures that they could follow by rote, that in the end could lead to the proof of any mathematical proposition, giving a decided yes or no to the question.

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Eric Beinhocker, the executive director of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, opines that the error of economics is not “in trying to be too much like the other sciences” but rather that “it has made too little effort.” Economics has “developed an axiomatic internally consistent self-contained theory” that is “more like theology than science.” Crises are messy and complex. The physicist Richard Feynman understood this; looking back at the 1987 crash, he reflected on how difficult physics would be if we had to worry about what the electrons were thinking. To understand and manage crises, economists must give up the myth that the economy is a simple mechanical equilibrium system. So what do we make of today’s standard neoclassical approach?

The Science and Technology of Growing Young: An Insider's Guide to the Breakthroughs That Will Dramatically Extend Our Lifespan . . . And What You Can Do Right Now by Sergey Young

23andMe, 3D printing, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, brain emulation, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Easter island, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, European colonialism, game design, Gavin Belson, George Floyd, global pandemic, hockey-stick growth, impulse control, Internet of things, late capitalism, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, moral hazard, mouse model, natural language processing, personalized medicine, plant based meat, precision agriculture, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, TED Talk, uber lyft, ultra-processed food, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, X Prize

Likewise, cochlear implants will give you superhuman hearing and allow you to understand, record, and store conversations in any language. Microchips embedded under your skin will record vital health statistics and administer drugs, automatically, and out of sight. But perhaps the most significant physical union of man and machine will be even less obvious. That, of course, is the idea that Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman dreamed of back in 1959, and which I alluded to early in this book. In a now-famous lecture called “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” Feynman envisioned a world where “you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and ‘looks’ around . . .

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With the help of quantum computing and AGI, it could become so accurate that the emulated you would be indistinguishable from the original you. Using advanced scanning technology, microscopes, and mathematics, Anders believes this is entirely possible. These whole-brain emulations could be deployed anywhere—even in multiple places simultaneously. Want to understand quantum physics? Summon up Richard Feynman or Albert Einstein for a chat. Need a visionary business genius to help your company through its next transformation? Download Steve Jobs or Tony Robbins. Throwing a big bash for your 150th birthday party? The members of Aerosmith are at your service, indistinguishable in looks and performance from the originals!

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution by T. R. Reid

Albert Einstein, Bob Noyce, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, George Gilder, Guggenheim Bilbao, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, popular electronics, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Turing machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

There are just as many basic tools of modern life—the electric light, the telephone, vitamin pills, the Internet—that resulted from a clearly focused effort to solve a particular problem. In a sense, this distinction between basic and directed research encompasses the difference between science and engineering. Scientists, on the whole, are driven by the thirst for knowledge; their motivation, as the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman put it, is “the joy of finding things out.” Engineers, in contrast, are solution-driven. Their joy is making things work. The monolithic idea was an engineering solution. It worked around the tyranny of numbers by reducing the numbers to one: a complete circuit would consist of just one part—a single (“monolithic”) block of semiconductor material containing all the components and all the interconnections of the most complex circuit designs.

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.”: Interview with Robert Noyce. “It was a situation . . .”: Ibid. “The things that . . .”: Interview with Kilby. “A large segment . . .”: Noyce, in Scientific American, September 1977, p. 64. “There was just . . .”: Interview with Kilby. “It was clear . . .”: Scientific American, September 1977, p. 64. Richard Feynman put it: Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 1999), chap. 1. “Second Industrial Revolution”: National Academy of Sciences, Microstructure Science, Engineering & Technology, 1979, p. 1. “the most remarkable . . .”: In Tom Forester, ed., The Microelectronics Revolution, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), p. 1.

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery by Christie Aschwanden

An Inconvenient Truth, fake news, gamification, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, Nate Silver, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

It’s human nature to want your work to succeed, and I’ll admit, I not-so-secretly hoped that our study would prove that running and beer were a good mix. In other words, I was primed to believe in (and overstate) our result. My enthusiasm for our study created a credulous spirit that, left unchecked, could have easily overridden any doubt. As the late Nobel Laureate physicist Richard Feynman once said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”3 Once you’ve got your sexy result, it’s really easy to come up with a story to explain it. In our case, we came up with some possible reasons having to do with sex hormones and glycogen replenishment rates.

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Martin Pöchmüller, Lukas Schwingshackl, Paolo C. Colombani, and Georg Hoffmann, “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Carbohydrate Benefits Associated with Randomized Controlled Competition-Based Performance Trials,” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition 14 (2016): 1–12, https://doi.10.1186/s12970-016-0139-6. 3. Richard Feynman made his famous comment about how easily people fool themselves in a 1974 commencement address at Caltech. 4. John P. A. Ioannidis, “Why Most Discovered True Associations Are Inflated,” Epidemiology 19, no. 5 (2008): 640–48, https://doi.10.1097/EDE.0b013e31818131e7. 5. Marjan Bakker, Annette van Dijk, and Jelte M.

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, British Empire, Charles Babbage, Copley Medal, Dava Sobel, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, Etonian, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Harrison: Longitude, music of the spheres, placebo effect, polynesian navigation, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade route, unbiased observer, University of East Anglia, éminence grise

Against this, it is interesting to read the defence of the necessary and dynamic notion of ‘mystery’ by Humphry Davy in his lectures (see my Prologue), or by the great twentieth-century American physicist Richard Feynman in The Meaning of it All (posthumously published in 1999). Though not a religious man, Feynman believed that science was driven by a continual dialogue between sceptical enquiry and the sense of inexplicable mystery, and that if either got the upper hand true science would be destroyed. See James Gleick, Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (1992). ♣ This is possibly the first scientific identification of the famous ‘placebo effect’, although it would not be properly tested and defined until the 1950s.

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Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, 1968/2001 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation, Danube edition, 1969 Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1973 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, Penguin, 1992 Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber, 1992 James Gleick, Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, Pantheon Books, 1992 Michael J. Crowe, Modern Theories of the Universe from Herschel to Hubble, Chicago UP, 1994 Gale Christianson, Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995 Peter Whitfield, The Mapping of the Heavens, The British Library, 1995 John Carey (editor), The Faber Book of Science, Faber, 1995 Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Volume I: Voyaging, and Volume 2: The Power of Place, Pimlico, 1995 and 2000 Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, Telling Lives in Science: Essays in Scientific Biography, CUP, 1996 Dava Sobel, Longitude, Fourth Estate, 1996 Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, HarperCollins, 1997 John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire, CUP, 1998 Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1998 Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, Little, Brown, 1999 Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth, Picador, 2000 Ludmilla Jordanova, Defining Features: Scientific and Medical Portraits 1660-2000, National Portrait Gallery, London, 2000 Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius, Macmillan, 2000 Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routledge, 2001 Thomas Crump, A Brief History of Science as Seen Through the Development of Scientific Instruments, Constable, 2001 Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Picador, 2001 Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann, Oxygen (a play in 2 acts), Wiley, New York, 2001 Anne Thwaite, Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of P.H.

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.): Romanticism and Science, 249n Furneaux, Captain Tobias, 49 Fuseli, Henry, 105-6 galaxies see nebulae Galignani, Giovanni Antonio, 385 Galileo Galilei, 77, 86n, 171, 428 Galvani, Luigi, 296, 314, 444 Galvanic Society, 317 galvanism, 273, 285-6, 328-9 Gambia, river, 214-16, 221 Garland, Private William, 224 Garnerin, Jacques, 159 Garnett, Thomas, 292 gas lighting, 382 gases: in medical treatment, 251, 257, 272 Gay-Lussac, Joseph, 159, 297, 299, 345, 353-4, 398, 403n Geneva: Davy in, 433; see also Diodati, Villa Gentleman’s Magazine, 136, 408, 460 Geological Society, foundation, xix, 393 geology: Davy lectures on, 294; Davy on limits of knowledge in, 356; and religious belief, 451, 459; Lyell on deep time and, 454-5, 459 George II, King, 65, 68 George III, King: Banks meets on return from Tahiti, 42-3; Banks advises at Kew, 49; Omai presented to, 50; sends condolences to Banks for gout, 57; interest in astronomy, 99, 168; summons Herschel to court, 109-10; appoints Herschel King’s Personal Astronomer, 110-11; remark on Herschel, 110, 409; buys Herschel telescopes as royal gifts, 114; proposes sponsoring ballooning, 133; sees Lunardi’s balloon flight, 138; meets Lunardi, 139; finances Herschel’s forty-foot telescope project, 164, 176, 178, 180, 190; visits Herschel’s telescope project at The Grove, 177-8; mental decline, 180-1; praises Herschels to Lalande, 188; death, 395; bequeathes books to British Museum library, 404 George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV): interest in ballooning, 137-8; gives watch to Lunardi, 139; grants and honours to Herschel, 181; confers knighthood on Davy, 342; awards baronetcy to Davy, 369; accession to throne, 395 Gerard, John: Herbal, 8 Germany: as inspiration for Frankenstein, 328-30 Gibbon, Edward, 110 Giddy, Davies: letters from Davy, 199, 259, 274, 277; lends books to Davy, 251; Beddoes writes to on Davy, 252; Anna Beddoes runs away to, 280, 286; as guardian of Anna Beddoes’s children, 302; marries and changes name to Davies Gilbert, 302; supports Davy’s candidature for presidency of Royal Society, 397; supports Faraday’s election to Royal Society Fellowship, 402 Gilbert, Davies see Giddy, Davies Gillman, Dr John, 308, 321 Gillray, James, 277, 292 Gleick, James: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics, 313n Godwin, William: on property, 16n; published by Johnson, 106, 271; and Davy, 267-8; and authorship of Frankenstein, 325 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: on solitary scientific genius, xvii; essays on meteorology, 160; on nature of science, 247; in Jena circle, 315; on Newton’s Optics, 319; Jane Davy meets, 412; Humboldt praises, 440; ‘Empirical Observation and Science’, 249n, 443n; Treatise on Colour, 443n Goree (island), West Africa, 223 Gosse, Sir Edmund: Father and Son, 451n Göttingen: acquires Herschel telescope, 114, 168 Gray, Robert (later Bishop of Bristol), 351, 361, 365 Great Barrier Reef (Australia), 38n, 39 Great Reform Bill (1832), 437 Green, Joseph Henry, 306-7, 321-3; Spiritual Philosophy, 322 Green, William, 5-6, 10, 40 Grove, The (house), Slough, 165-6, 174-5, 188, 194 Guiccioli, Teresa, 380 Hachette, Pierre, 401 Haiti, 386-7 Hale-Bopp comet, 172n Hallam, Arthur, 451n Halley, Edmund: comet, 171-2 Hamblyn, Richard: The Invention of Clouds, 160n Hamilton, Sir William, 46n, 55, 221 Hamilton, Sir William Rowan, 447 Handel, George Frederic, 69 Hanover: Herschel family in, 65-9, 75; Caroline returns to, 409 Hardy, Thomas: Two on a Tower, 118n Harrington, Robert, 413; ‘The Death Warrant of the French Theory of Chemistry’, 273 Harrison, John, 47, 77, 109, 373n, 438n Hastenbeck, battle of (1757), 69 Hatchett, Charles, 339, 374 Hawkesworth, John: Account of Voyages Undertaken…for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere…by…Captain Cook, 44 Hawking, Stephen: images, 465n; A Brief History of Time, 88n Haydn, Joseph: The Creation, 107, 199 Haydon, Benjamin Robert: hosts ‘Immortal Dinner’, 318-19, 321n, 327; Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, 318-19 Hayes, Charlotte, 54 Hazlitt, William, 209 Heaton, James, 372 Heaven’s Gate cult, 172n Hebburn colliery, 368 Hecla, HMS, 396 Hector, Edmund, 145 Henderson, Thomas, 90n Henslow, John, 460-1 Hepworth, Dame Barbara, 237n Herapath, William, 284 Herculaneum: Davy investigates calcinated papyri rolls from, 376, 378, 380 Herodotus, 217 Heron, Ralph, 143, 155 Herschel, Alexander (William’s brother): home life in Hanover, 71, 75; moves to England, 80; moves to Datchet, 111, 114; accompanies William to Göttingen, 168; wife irritates Caroline, 169; and construction of William’s giant telescope, 177; wife’s death, 183; unhappy pre-marital love affairs, 195 Herschel, Anna (née Moritzen; William’s mother), 65-6, 68-71, 80, 89 Herschel, Caroline (William’s sister): passion for astronomy, 60, 63-4, 66, 82; keeps journal, 64, 71-2; upbringing, 65-7, 70-1; feels Lisbon earthquake, 68, 383; on William’s return to Hanover from England, 69, 75-6; stunted and disfigured by ill health, 71, 75, 80-1; joins William in England, 80-2; singing lessons, 80-2, 89; relations with William, 82-3, 86, 89, 174, 176, 196, 403n; as William’s assistant and helpmeet, 85-6, 89, 95, 117-18; millinery business in Bath, 89, 95; solo singing, 90; on Watson’s meeting with Herschel, 93; and William’s discovery of Uranus, 95-8, 104; and successful trial of William’s telescope at Greenwich, 109-10; moves to Datchet with William, 111, 114; keeps visitors’ book at Datchet, 114; describes astronomical observations, 115-17; compiles index of William’s remarks on practical observation, 116-17; William trains for independent observation, 117; on hazards of astronomical observation, 119-20; injures leg, 120-1; William credits with discovering small ‘associate nebula’, 124; and construction of William’s forty-foot telescope, 163, 175; moves house to The Grove, Slough, 165, 165-6; and visitors to The Grove, 168-9; and William’s absence in Göttingen, 168-9; concentrates on astronomical work, 169-70; operates Newtonian reflector (’small sweeper’), 169-70; Observation Book, 170, 173; discovers and observes new comets, 171-4, 176, 188, 193; published in Philosophical Transactions, 173; Fanny Burney visits, 175; large Newtonian sweeper telescope, 175; Maskelyne’s correspondence and friendship with, 175, 189, 193-5; reputation, 176, 193; on William’s single-mindedness, 176-7; secures royal stipend, 178-80, 384; and George III’s financial stipulations for telescope project, 180-1; affected by William’s courtship and marriage to Mary Pitt, 182-8; celebrates mounting of giant telescope, 182; destroys ten years of journals, 186-7; leaves Grove apartment for rooms in Slough, 188, 194-5; Lalande’s correspondence with, 189, 196; and dangers from forty-foot telescope, 191; astronomical achievements, 193; and birth of William’s son, 193; depicted in cartoon, 193; rides to visit Maskelyne in Greenwich, 193-4; confesses to loneliness, 195; on nebulae and galaxies, 196-7, 205, 208; Lalande praises, 201n; affection for nephew John, 202-3; imagination, 276; and nephew John’s career, 387, 389-90; assists nephew John in astronomical work, 406-7; cares for William in old age, 406-8; health problems, 407; returns to Hanover after William’s death, 409-11; awarded Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal, 410-11; recalculates new Star Catalogue, 410; writes to nephew John, 410; fantasy on comet travelling, 426; lack of religious expression, 450; correspondence with John and family in South Africa, 462-4; public relations in old age, 463-4; ‘Book of Work Done’, 168, 171; Memoirs, 64 & n, 68, 121, 195, 410; Star Catalogue, 193-5 Herschel, Dietrich (William’s brother), 68, 71-2, 80 Herschel, Isaac (William’s father), 64-6, 68-71, 75-6 Herschel, Jacob (William’s brother), 65-71, 75-7, 79-80, 89, 166-7 Herschel, Sir John (William’s son): names Uranus’s moons, 102n; birth, 193; on solar system and nebulae theory, 198; in Paris as boy, 201; aunt Caroline’s devotion to, 202-3; Brighton holiday with father, 209; excels at Cambridge, 381-2; and founding of Astronomical Society, 384; career, 387-90; misgivings over Davy’s character, 397-8, 402; supports Wollaston for presidency of Royal Society, 397-8; awarded Copley Medals, 399-400, 464; Davy acknowledges in presidential speech to Royal Society, 399; Continental tour with Babbage, 405-6; Davy recommends for Athenaeum club, 405; favours women in science, 407; composes epitaph to father, 408; and Caroline’s return to Hanover, 409-11; Caroline sends Memoirs to in instalments, 410; contributes papers to Royal Society, 410; correspondence with Caroline, 410, 462-5; Davy appoints Secretary at Royal Society, 413; refers to Davy’s Consolations in Travel, 430, 455; candidacy for presidency of Royal Society (1829), 436-7; marriage and family, 436, 461; knighted, 437; investigates Fraunhofer’s lines on spectrum, 440; in debate on state of British science, 441-5; literary qualities, 442; attends British Association meetings, 447; Mary Somerville writes on, 458; search for unifying laws, 458; astronomical expedition to southern hemisphere (Cape Town), 461-5; Charles Darwin studies, 461; wealth from inheritances, 462; busy life, 463; reportedly discovers life on moon, 464-6; baronetcy and election to presidency of Royal Society, 465; portrait photograph, 465; achievements, 468; A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, 441-5, 448, 461 Herschel, Margaret Brodie, Lady (née Stewart; John’s wife), 46n, 64n, 186-7, 436, 447, 462-5 Herschel, Mary, Lady (earlier Pitt; née Baldwin), 165, 182-6, 389, 409, 462 Herschel, Sophie (William’s sister), 65-6, 76 Herschel, Sir William: discoveries and theories, xx, 63-4, 88, 90-1, 93; in Bath, 60, 75-7, 80, 95; constructs own telescopes, 60, 63, 83-7, 94; musicianship, 60, 67 & n, 72, 75-7, 89-90, 115, 188; self-taught astronomy, 60-1, 74, 77; Watson meets, 60-1, 92-3; background and family, 61, 63-7; studies and speculations on moon, 61-3, 87, 92-5; character and temperament, 65, 209-10; practical skills, 66, 87; serves in Hanoverian army, 67-70; moves to England, 68-70, 72-4; discharged from army, 71; linguistic skills, 72, 75; revisits Hanover, 72, 75-6; philosophical and religious reflections, 73; appearance, 75; Astronomical Observation Journal, 77, 87-8, 94, 96-7; brings Caroline to England, 80-2; relations with Caroline, 82-3, 86, 89, 120, 174, 196, 403n; Caroline assists, 85-6, 117-18; and double stars, 87, 90, 95; on nebulae and galaxies, 88, 123, 192-3, 196-8, 205, 208-9; membership of Bath Philosophical Society, 93; reading of night sky, 95, 115-16; discovers new planet (Uranus), 96-103, 208; meets British astronomers in London, 101-2; elected to Royal Society and awarded Copley Gold Medal, 102-3, 105; denies accidental discovery of Uranus, 103-4, 108, 367; correspondence with European astronomers about metal specula, 107-8; power of telescopes doubted, 108-9; summoned to meet George III, 109-10; telescope tried and proved at Greenwich, 109-10; appointed King’s Personal Astronomer, 111; commercial manufacture of reflector telescopes, 114; on physics and psychology of night observation, 115-16; ‘sweeping’ method, 115, 118, 120; and hazards of observation, 119-20; writes on celestial system and universe, 121-4, 191-2, 197-8, 204-5, 209-10, 391; catalogue of nebulae, 123, 176; interest in balloons, 135-6; proposes and builds forty- foot telescope, 163, 175-7, 181-2; moves to The Grove, Slough, 165-7; absence installing telescope in Göttingen, 167-8; and Caroline’s celebrity for discovering comet, 174; publishes papers with Royal Society, 176; single-mindedness, 176-7; requests and secures royal stipend for Caroline, 178-9; account book for telescope project, 180; and George III’s financial stipulations for telescope project, 180-1; knighthood, 181; personal finances, 181; courtship and marriage to Mary Pitt, 182-7; and operation of forty-foot telescope, 190; theoretical work, 191, 208; birth of son John, 193; domestic and married life, 193; discovers infra-red light, 199, 328; interest in extraterrestrial life, 199; studies sun, 199, 391; commissioned by War Office to provide spy telescope, 200; meets Napoleon in Paris, 200-1; on philosophical significance of astronomy, 203; on Time, 203-5; on objective observation, 249n; Davy cites, 288; in Walker’s composite portrait, 303; Keats on, 306-8, 323; Jane Apreece dines with, 340; isolation from Banks, 381; disagreement with son over career, 387-90; influence on Shelley, 390-1; reputation, 390, 399, 438; decline and death, 405, 407-8, 435; obituaries, 408-9; Davy writes on ideas of ever-evolving universe, 430; religious scepticism, 450; Brewster summarises work in life of Newton, 456; Mary Somerville writes on, 458; will and bequests to son, 462; ‘An Account of a Comet’, 100; ‘Astronomic Observations Relating to the Sidereal Path of the Heavens’, 208, 407; ‘Astronomical Observations Relating to the Construction of the Heavens’, 204; ‘Catalogue of Second Thousand Nebulae with Remarks on the Construction of the Heavens’, 191, 204; ‘The Description of a Forty Foot Reflecting Telescope’, 196; ‘An Investigation of the Construction of the Heavens’, 122; ‘Observations tending to investigate the Nature of the Sun’, 204; ‘On the Construction of the Heavens’, 122, 191, 197, 204; ‘On the Nature and Construction of the Sun’, 199; ‘On Nebulae Stars, Properly So-called’, 196-7; ‘On the Proper Motion of the Solar System’, 204; ‘One Thousand New Nebulae’, 118; Scientific Papers, 64n; ‘A Series of Observations on the Georgian Planet’, 191; ‘A Third Catalogue of the Comparative Brightness of Stars’, 196 Herschel-Shorland, John, 64n Hicks, Zachary, 40 Hodgson, Revd John, 351 Holmes, J.H., 372 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 190 Holmes, Richard: lectures at Royal Institution, 467; Shelley: The Pursuit, 121n Home, Sir Everard, 7-8 Homer: Iliad, 206-7 Hooke, Robert: Micrographia, 249n Hornemann, Friedrich, 212, 233 horse-dung: used for casting metal mirrors, 84 & n Hoskin, Michael, 94n; Caroline Herschel’s Autobiographies, 64n Houghton, Major Daniel, 212, 216 Household Words (magazine), 454 Houssa (mythical city), 220 Houssa (West African people), 228 Howard, Luke: Barometrographia, 160; On the Modification of Clouds, 159 Hubble, Edwin, 84n, 88, 90, 119n, 403n; The Realm of the Nebulae, 205n Hubble Telescope, 135 Humboldt, Alexander von, 43n, 232n, 310, 324, 370, 406, 439-40, 447, 458; Personal Narrative, 406, 445, 461 Hunt, Leigh, 353, 404 Hunter, John, 51, 308-9, 316, 320 Hunterian Collection, 307; Hunterian Museum, London, 309 Hunterian Orations, 308 Hutton, James, 104, 208, 294, 356, 455 Huygens, Christiaan, 77, 83, 93, 167, 200, 324 hydrogen: discovered, 127-8; in balloons, 131, 144, 146, 158; cheap production method, 156 Hypatia of Alexandria, 201n, 248 Iceland: Banks visits, 47, 54, 121n Illyria, 377-8, 419, 421, 428, 432 Inchbald, Elizabeth: A Magical Tale, or the Descent of the Balloon (play), 143 infra-red light, 199, 328 inoculation, 50 Institut de France: awards Prix Napoléon to Davy, 352 iodine, 354, 373 Ireland: attempted balloon crossing to England from, 157-8 Italy: Davy visits with Jane, 355, 377-8; Romantic wanderers in, 425 J, Miss (of Bristol), 263 Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 144 James, Frank A.J.L.: ‘How Big is a Hole?’

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

Wolfram postulates that the universe itself is a giant cellular-automaton computer. In his hypothesis there is a digital basic for apparently analog phenomena (such as motion and time) and for formulas in physics, and we can model our understanding of physics as the simple transformation of a cellular automaton. Others have proposed this possibility. Richard Feynman wondered about it in considering the relationship of information to matter and energy. Norbert Wiener heralded a fundamental change in focus from energy to information in his 1948 book Cybernetic and suggested that the transformation of information, not energy, was the fundamental building block of the universe.60 Perhaps the first to postulate that the universe is being computed on a digital computer was Konrad Zuse in 1967.61 Zuse is best known as the inventor of the first working programmable computer, which he developed from 1935 to 1941.

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Nanotechnology: The Intersection of Information and the Physical World The role of the infinitely small is infinitely large. —LOUIS PASTEUR But I am not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately, in the great future, we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down! —RICHARD FEYNMAN Nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance]. —NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION NANOTECHNOLOGY REPORT Nanotechnology promises the tools to rebuild the physical world—our bodies and brains included—molecular fragment by molecular fragment, potentially atom by atom.

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The revolution in nanotechnology, however, will ultimately enable us to redesign and rebuild, molecule by molecule, our bodies and brains and the world with which we interact.70 These two revolutions are overlapping, but the full realization of nanotechnology lags behind the biotechnology revolution by about one decade. Most nanotechnology historians date the conceptual birth of nanotechnology to physicist Richard Feynman's seminal speech in 1959, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom," in which he described the inevitability and profound implications of engineering machines at the level of atoms: The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

It is precisely this training in how to look at the world directly, not simply to reshuffle the maps, that is at the heart of original work in science—and as I try to make the case in this book, in business and technology. As recounted in his autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, fabled physicist Richard Feynman was appalled by how many students in a class he visited during his sabbatical in Brazil couldn’t apply what they had been taught. Immediately after a lecture about the polarization of light, with demonstrations using strips of polarizing film, he asked a question whose answer could be determined by looking through the film at the light reflected off the bay outside.

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Stuart Firestein, in his book Ignorance, makes the case that science is not the collection of what we know. It is the practice of investigating what we don’t know. Ignorance, not knowledge, drives science. There’s also an essential element of play in both science and learning. In his autobiography, physicist Richard Feynman described the origin of the breakthrough that led to his Nobel Prize. He was burned-out and found himself unable to concentrate on work. Physics was no longer fun. But he remembered how it used to be. “When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve,” he wrote.

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For Gibson’s account of its origin, see “The future has arrived,” Quote Investigator, retrieved March 30, 2017, http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/. 21 a tin of biscuits wrapped in brown paper: I believe I first heard this story from George Simon. It is also recounted in “Alfred Korzybski,” Wikipedia, retrieved March 30, 2017, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski#cite_note-4. 22 sufficiently to use them in real life: Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (New York: Norton, 1984), 212. 22 “Their knowledge is so fragile!”: Ibid., 36. CHAPTER 2: TOWARD A GLOBAL BRAIN 23 “The Open Source Paradigm Shift”: Tim O’Reilly, “The Open Source Paradigm Shift,” in Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, ed. J. Feller, B.

Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain by Werner Loewenstein

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, complexity theory, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, informal economy, information trail, Isaac Newton, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, Richard Feynman, stem cell, trade route, Turing machine

However, we are still not quite home free. Missing from the definition is an objective measure. But how does one measure something ethereal like meaning? This question has preoccupied generations of philosophers, but for a scientist there isn’t much to take home from their musings in that regard. The physicist Richard Feynman liked to say—and did so with only the slightest twinkle in his eye—that the philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds. To be fair, classical information theory isn’t of much help either, and if you expect an answer from its books, you will be disappointed.

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But if we cut across the morphological trivia, we can rustle up a definition in a few words: a quantum computer is a device that extracts information from quantum waves in superposition. So those haunting poltergeists in Ψ have their use after all, But I doubt that Schrödinger would have thought it would ever be that way. But so it goes. Eventually, once quantum theory had gotten over its long birth pangs, in the 1980s Richard Feynman, Paul Benioff, and David Deutsch advanced the notion that those superposed quantum states might be harnessed to store bits of information. Just as in a standard digital computer a set of capacitors obeying the rules of classical physics can store information, so in principle could a set of atoms—say, a string of hydrogen atoms—obeying the rules of quantum mechanics.

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

Faced with the urbane, powerful eighty-one-year-old founder of the largest radio and TV network in America, Danny jumped right into a passionate introduction of his ideas about connection and networks. Paley, coolly: “I didn’t understand a word you said.” Then he wrote Hillis a check for $4 million. Or there was the time that Danny asked the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman to tip him off about smart young scientists Thinking Machines might hire. Feynman, sixty-five years old, volunteered himself. For the next few years, he passed his summer vacations working alongside Hillis and his team. When it came time to test the first Connection Machine, it was some of Feynman’s data that helped reveal just how well the black box was doing its job.

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Chris Turner (London: Verso Books, 2000), 141. “Someday, perhaps”: William Daniel Hillis, “The Connection Machine” (PhD diss., MIT, 1985), 2. Adding, in case: Ibid., 19. He drove: Po Bronson, “The Long Now: Time-Traveling with Danny Hillis,” Wired, May 1, 1998. Feynman, sixty-five: W. Daniel Hillis, “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine,” Physics Today 42, no. 2 (February 1989): 78. “At times”: Michael J. Black, review of The Connection Machine, by W. Daniel Hillis, AI Magazine 7, no. 3 (1986): 169. You can solve: Adam Beberg, “Distributed Systems: Computation with a Million Friends” (lecture, Stanford University Computer Systems Colloquium, April 30, 2008), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Meanwhile, even for those who perform the outsourced tasks that require minimal training, these mechanisms make it increasingly possible to concentrate on a certain type of work, develop real strength at it, and become known for mastery of some very specialized work—thus, to excel by stepping narrowly—because demand for it can be aggregated from all around the world. In short, it’s possible to think of narrow-stepping as taking the filet of work—it’s the satisfying stuff situated in the middle, with boring project management process above it and boring paperwork and other ancillary tasks below it. Richard Feynman, in his time one of the world’s best-known physicists, was capable of slicing out this filet back in his days at MIT. He simply refused to participate in all the usual housekeeping of a university academic department—the committee memberships, the candidate interviewing, the grant application writing, and so forth.

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This allows them to keep seeing problems and opportunities in new ways. Reflecting on findings in personality psychology, he reports that three basic traits are key. Original thinkers are “low self-monitors,” so they don’t pick up on social cues dictating how they should act. Second, they avoid contact with coworkers. (Richard Feynman is a favorite example of Sutton’s.) And third, they have very high self-esteem. We suspect most people who choose to step narrowly today would match these criteria pretty closely. And while the technology and communications enablers we’ve described will swell their ranks and include many more people, probably those people will have more than just a touch of these tendencies, as well.

The Zenith Angle by Bruce Sterling

airport security, Burning Man, cuban missile crisis, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, information security, Iridium satellite, Larry Ellison, market bubble, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, packet switching, pirate software, profit motive, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, space junk, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, thinkpad, Y2K

Realistically speaking, how could one computer-science professor cure an ailing multibillion-dollar spacecraft? But Van also knew that the job was not hopeless. Such things sometimes happened in real life. For instance: Richard Feynman was just a physicist. But Feynman had dropped a chunk of rubber O-ring into a glass of ice water, and he had shown the whole world, on TV, how a space shuttle could blow up. If Van somehow solved Hickok’s zillion-dollar problem, that would prove that he, Derek Vandeveer, had a top-notch, Richard Feynman kind of class. Van had sacrificed a lot to get his role in public service. He’d given up his happy home, his family life, his civilian career, his peace of mind, and a whole, whole lot of his money.

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb by William Poundstone

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Frank Gehry, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Herman Kahn, Jacquard loom, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, statistical model, the market place, zero-sum game

Archives): “Neumann is one of the two or three top mathematicians in the world, is totally without national or race prejudice, and has an enormously great gift for inspiring younger men and getting them to do research.... The Neumanns rather like to hit the high spots socially. You know Princeton life is a bit fast and ‘cocktail partyish.’ On the other hand, Neumann is not high-hat in any way, and is most accessible to young students.” A flip and rather puzzling comment on von Neumann occurs in physicist Richard Feynman’s popular book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985). Feynman says that “Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don’t have to be responsible for the world that you’re in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann’s advice. It’s made me a very happy man ever since.

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He was an expert on isotope diffusion, the process by which radioactive elements are purified for use in the bomb. Fuchs was formally accused of transmitting atomic secrets to the Soviets four times between 1943 and 1947. For this he received only token payment, the largest amount being $400. As spies must be, Fuchs was pleasant and did not stand out in a crowd. He once lent his car to Richard Feynman so he could visit his wife in the hospital. In The Legacy of Hiroshima (1962) Teller wrote of Fuchs, “He was by no means an introvert, but he was a quiet man. I rather liked him.... Fuchs was popular at Los Alamos because he was kind, helpful and much interested in the work of others.” History has downplayed the military significance of Fuchs’s spying.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

The frontier of telepresence is its merger with artificial intelligence, a development foreseen by computer science pioneer Marvin Minsky in 1980.7 A robot doesn’t need to be just a remote extension of a human; it can process information and make its own decisions. This will be exciting, but it will raise fascinating moral and ethical questions, especially if these semiautonomous robots come into contact with each other. Here Come the Bots Richard Feynman was an iconic physicist who won a Nobel Prize for his work in quantum theory. His delight in understanding how nature worked was infectious. In 1959, he wrote an influential essay titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he argued that miniaturization of computers still had a long way to go.

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Kennedy Space Center, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, the California Science Center, and the Intrepid Sea-Air-Space Museum in New York City were the lucky recipients. 18. After the Challenger disaster, President Reagan formed the Rogers Commission to investigate. In their televised hearings, physicist Richard Feynman had a memorable moment when he dipped an O-ring into a cup of ice water to show how it became less resilient at the low temperatures at the time of launch. He was scathing about the wildly unrealistic estimates of reliability from NASA engineers and the stark failures of NASA management: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Pauling may have been widely acknowledged as the world’s leading chemist, but other chemists could see just as surely as Watson and Crick that Pauling’s structure was simply wrong. This strong shared praxis makes science well suited to collective intelligence. This strong shared praxis doesn’t mean that science is a clean and simple process. The actual day-to-day process of doing science is messy and speculative and filled with error and argument. The scientist Richard Feynman was so full of irrepressible brainwaves and “great” ideas, most of which later proved to be wrong, that according to his biographer James Gleick his cannier colleagues developed a rule of thumb: “If Feynman says it three times, it’s right.” The same could be said for many scientists. Often a scientist begins an investigation with little more than a whiff of an idea, a suspicion that some hypothesis is true.

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Nature, 445:347, February 1, 2007. [71] Jeremy Ginsberg, Matthew H. Mohebbi, Rajan S. Patel, Lynnette Brammer, Mark S. Smolinski, and Larry Brilliant. Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. Nature, 457:1012–1015, February 19, 2009. [72] James Gleick. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1993. [73] Sharad Goel, Jake M. Hofman, Sébastien Lahaie, David M. Pennock, and Duncan J. Watts. What can search predict? http://www.cam.cornell.edu/~sharad/papers/searchpreds.pdf, 2009. [74] Ben Goldacre. An intrepid, ragged band of bloggers. Guardian, July 29, 2009. http://www.badscience.net/2009/07/we-are-more-possible-than-you-can-powerfully-imagine/

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, clean water, cotton gin, Dava Sobel, decarbonisation, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, global village, Haber-Bosch Process, invention of movable type, invention of radio, invention of writing, iterative process, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kim Stanley Robinson, lone genius, low earth orbit, mass immigration, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, nuclear winter, off grid, Oklahoma City bombing, Richard Feynman, safety bicycle, tacit knowledge, technology bubble, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route

Moreover, a hard copy would be unfeasibly large—and how could you ensure post-apocalyptic survivors would be able to get hold of a copy? In fact, I believe you can help society recover much better by taking a slightly more elegant approach. The solution can be found in a remark made by physicist Richard Feynman. In hypothesizing about the potential destruction of all scientific knowledge and what might be done about it, he allowed himself a single statement, to be transmitted securely to whichever intelligent creatures emerged after the cataclysm: What sentence holds the most information in the fewest words?

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Also see the rebuttal to Lovelock’s proposal, “How Not to Save Science,” in Greer (2006), as well as more recent proposals for collating and preserving crucial knowledge in Kelly (2006), Raford (2009), Rose (2010), and Kelly (2011), and the humorous essential T-shirt for time travelers at http://www.topatoco.com/bestshirtever. the encyclopedia as a safe repository of human knowledge: Yeo (2001). Apollo program: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Apollo.html. 100 million man-hours devoted to Wikipedia: Shirky (2010). Richard Feynman quote: “Atoms in Motion,” Chapter 1 in The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964), now available free at http://feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_01.html. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”: T. S. Eliot (1922), The Waste Land. fantasy of starting from scratch: In addition to the novels Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson already mentioned, a number of other fiction books explore the theme of using crucial knowledge to start over.

Thinking with Data by Max Shron

business intelligence, Carmen Reinhart, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Growth in a Time of Debt, iterative process, Kenneth Rogoff, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, statistical model, The Design of Experiments, the scientific method

The ideas we will be able to come up with will mostly be variations on things that we have seen before. It is tremendously useful to acquire a good mental library of examples by reading widely and experimenting with new ideas. We can expand our library by talking to people about the problems they’ve solved, reading books on data science or reading classics (like Edward Tufte and Richard Feynman), following blogs, attending conferences and meetups, and experimenting with new ideas all the time. There is no shortcut to gaining experience, but there is a fast way to learn from your mistakes, and that is to try to make as many of them as you can. Especially if you are just getting started, creating things in quantity is more important than creating things of quality.

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

These devices, theoretically, could be packed densely on a chip and would require much less energy than today’s transistors—about ten times less power.4 Taking a longer view, there’s great potential in applying the principles of quantum mechanics to create a new kind of computational device. Quantum computing has been a Holy Grail for researchers ever since Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman challenged the scientific community in 1981 to build computers based on quantum mechanics. A classical von Neumann–type computer makes use of bits, where each bit represents either a one or a zero. In contrast, a quantum bit, or qubit, can represent a one, a zero, or both at once. Therefore, two qubits can be in the states 00, 01, 10, and 11 at the same time.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

It has been subject to an extraordinary degree of hype, controversy, and even outright dread, and has been the focus of multibillion-dollar political battles, as well as a war of words and ideas between some of the top luminaries in the field. The fundamental ideas that underlie nanotechnology trace their origin back at least to December 1959, when the legendary Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman addressed an audience at the California Institute of Technology. Feynman’s lecture was entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” and in it he set out to expound on “the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale.” And by “small” he meant really small. Feynman declared that he was “not afraid to consider the final question as to whether, ultimately—in the great future—we can arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!”

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Gary Marcus, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence,” New Yorker (Elements blog), October 24, 2013, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/why-we-should-think-about-the-threat-of-artificial-intelligence.html. 13. P. Z. Myers, “Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand the Brain,” Pharyngula Science Blog, August 17, 2010, http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/17/ray-kurzweil-does-not-understa/. 14. Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, pp. 7–21. 15. Richard Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” lecture at CalTech, December 29, 1959, full text available at http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html. 16. On federal research funding for nanotechnology, see John F. Sargent Jr., “The National Nanotechnology Initiative: Overview, Reauthorization, and Appropriations Issues,” Congressional Research Service, December 17, 2013, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34401.pdf. 17.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

Asperger Syndrome, classic study, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, disinformation, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, food desert, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, offshore financial centre, p-value, placebo effect, public intellectual, publication bias, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sugar pill, systematic bias, the scientific method, urban planning

A statement that is referenced to the second issue of a magazine called Earthletter. Fair enough, if that’s what you want to read—I’m bending over to be reasonable here—but it’s clearly not a suitable source to reference that claim. This is her PhD, remember. To me this is cargo-cult science, as Professor Richard Feynman described it over thirty years ago, in reference to the similarities between pseudoscientists and the religious activities on a few small Melanesian islands in the 1950s: During the war they saw aeroplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head as headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the aeroplanes to land.

…

I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won’t believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing… Richard Feynman It is possible to be very unlucky indeed. A nurse called Lucia de Berk has been in prison for six years in Holland, convicted of seven counts of murder and three of attempted murder. An unusually large number of people died when she was on shift, and that, essentially, along with some very weak circumstantial evidence, is the substance of the case against her.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Some not unrealistic possibilities: friendlier high-temperature superconductors that would enable lossless power transmission, levitated supertrains, and computers that aren’t limited by the heat they generate; superefficient photovoltaics and batteries that would enable cheap capture and flexible use of solar energy and wean us off carbon burning; superstrong materials that could support elevators running directly from Earth to space. The prospects we can presently foresee, exciting as they are, could be overmatched by discoveries not yet imagined. Beyond technological targets, we can aspire to a comprehensive survey of physical reality’s potential. In 1964, Richard Feynman posed this challenge: “Today, we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality—or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.” How far can we see today?

…

Using the Internet, I was able to find raw data on electron interference, which I used to test the many-worlds formula. Most theorists can tell a similar story. But I sometimes wonder if later generations of theorists will be able to tell such a story. Discoveries can be made by analyzing raw data posted online today, but will this always be true? The great physicist Richard Feynman often claimed that “there will be no more great physicists.” Feynman believed that the great physicists were those who looked at reality from a point of view different from that of other scientists. He argued, in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, that all of his own achievements were due not to an IQ higher than other physicists’ but to his having a “different bag of tricks.”

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford

Abraham Wald, access to a mobile phone, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, algorithmic bias, Automated Insights, banking crisis, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, Diane Coyle, disinformation, Donald Trump, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, experimental subject, fake news, financial innovation, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kickstarter, life extension, meta-analysis, microcredit, Milgram experiment, moral panic, Netflix Prize, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, publication bias, publish or perish, random walk, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, sorting algorithm, sparse data, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, When a measure becomes a target

Historians of science argue about the seriousness of this cherry-picking, ethically and practically. What seems clear is that if the scientific world had seen all of Millikan’s results, it would have had less confidence that his answer was right. That would have been no bad thing, because it wasn’t. Millikan’s answer was too low.6 The charismatic Nobel laureate Richard Feynman pointed out in the early 1970s that the process of fixing Millikan’s error with better measurements was a strange one: “One is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

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Mark Thornton, The Economics of Prohibition (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991). 6. Esther Ingliss-Arkell, “Did a Case of Scientific Misconduct Win the Nobel Prize for Physics?,” Gizmodo, April 22, 2014, https://io9.gizmodo.com/did-a-case-of-scientific-misconduct-win-the-nobel-prize-1565949589. 7. Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science,” transcript of speech at Caltech, 1974, http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. 8. M. Henrion and B. Fischhoff, “Assessing Uncertainty in Physical Constants,” American Journal of Physics 54 (1986), 791–98, https://doi.org/10.1119/1.14447. 9. Author interview with Jonas Olofsson, January 22, 2020. 10.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

They met via a second (unnamed) group of connectionists that convened once a year, at various places across the country, to discuss many of the same ideas percolating in San Diego. Backpropagation was one of them. The Boltzmann Machine was another. Years later, when asked to explain the Boltzmann Machine for the benefit of an ordinary person who knew little about math or science, Hinton declined to do so. This, he said, would be like Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist, explaining his work in quantum electrodynamics. When anyone asked Feynman to explain the work that won him the Nobel Prize in terms the layperson could understand, he, too, would decline. “If I could explain it to the average person,” he would say, “it wouldn’t have been worth the Nobel Prize.”

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In the paper he published on the idea, he called them “generative adversarial networks,” or GANs. Across the worldwide community of AI researchers, he became “the GANfather.” By the time he joined Google in the summer of 2014, he was promoting GANs as a way of accelerating the progress of artificial intelligence. In describing the idea, he often pointed to Richard Feynman. The blackboard in Feyman’s classroom once read: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” This was what Yoshua Bengio, Goodfellow’s advisor at the University of Montreal, had argued in a café near the university when wooed by the traveling contingent from Microsoft. Like Hinton, Bengio and Goodfellow believed Feyman’s adage applied to machines as well as people: What artificial intelligence cannot create, it cannot understand.

The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era by Craig Nelson

Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, El Camino Real, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, music of the spheres, mutually assured destruction, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, Project Plowshare, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, TED Talk, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, William Langewiesche, éminence grise

Emilio Segrè sent a letter to his wife back in California and included a strand of his hair. She opened the letter, the hair was missing, and that was how the physicists discovered their mail was being read. A number of the émigrés were additionally unhappy to be surrounded by a razor-wire fence, which reminded them of Nazi prison camps. Junior physicist Richard Feynman discovered, however, that workers had put a hole in the Los Alamos fence as a shortcut, and he enjoyed exiting the property through that hole and then coming in through the security entrance, so the guards would always see him arriving, but never departing. The kids, too, discovered every hole the fence had to offer, as well as a treasure pile of toys to play with—lab equipment left out in the trash.

…

He found that the Tennessee reactor employees thought they could use a small amount of water to contain the extract, having no idea the water would then become lethally radiant. They also didn’t realize that storing fuel in adjacent rooms against a shared wall could start a chain reaction. Segrè was horrified, and Oppenheimer sent in Richard Feynman to do a follow-up inspection. Feynman was told by his boss that, if the army refused to listen to the physicist, he should say, “Los Alamos cannot accept the responsibility for the Oak Ridge plant.” That suitably alarmed the army bureaucrats, and the physicists’ recommendations were followed.

…

Oppenheimer’s assistant Anne Wilson: “Feynman got his bongo drums out and led a snake dance through the whole Tech Area.” But a number woke up the following morning with hangovers, from both liquor and remorse. When Robert Wilson asked Oppenheimer why he seemed distressed, he replied, “I just keep thinking about all those poor little people.” Richard Feynman: “One man I remember, Bob Wilson, was just sitting there moping.” Bob Wilson told Feynman, “It’s a terrible thing that we made.” 8 My God, What Have We Done? ON May 25, 1945—two weeks after Germany’s surrender—Leo Szilard had an appointment to discuss the future of nuclear weapons with President Harry Truman at the White House.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

But any virtue can become a vice when taken to an extreme, and the mathematization of finance was no exception. Finance isn’t physics, despite the similarities between the physics of heat conduction and the mathematics of derivative securities, for example. The difference is human behavior and the role of evolution in its development. The great physicist Richard Feynman, speaking at a Caltech graduation ceremony, once said, “Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.” The financial crisis showed us that investors, portfolio managers, and regulators do have feelings, even if those feelings were mostly disappointment and regret during the last few years.

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Perhaps the cause was a leak in a liquid oxygen line, or an explosive bolt misfiring, or a flame burning through one of the solid booster rockets … Rumors abounded for weeks before NASA released more data.3 Six days after the disaster, President Reagan signed Executive Order 12546 establishing the Rogers Commission, an impressive fourteen-member panel of experts that included Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon; Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman; Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; and legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager. On June 6, 1986, a little over five months after the disaster, after conducting scores of interviews, analyzing all the telemetry data from the shuttle’s flight, sifting through the physical wreckage recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, and holding several public hearings, the Rogers Commission concluded that the explosion was caused by the failure of the Shuttle’s now-infamous O-rings on the right solid fuel booster rocket.4 The O-rings were large rubber seals around the joints of the booster rocket, rather like the gasket on a faucet.

…

On June 6, 1986, a little over five months after the disaster, after conducting scores of interviews, analyzing all the telemetry data from the shuttle’s flight, sifting through the physical wreckage recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, and holding several public hearings, the Rogers Commission concluded that the explosion was caused by the failure of the Shuttle’s now-infamous O-rings on the right solid fuel booster rocket.4 The O-rings were large rubber seals around the joints of the booster rocket, rather like the gasket on a faucet. However, when exposed to cold temperatures, rubber becomes more rigid, and it no longer provides an effective seal. Richard Feynman demonstrated this in a simple but unforgettable way at a press conference. He dipped a perfectly flexible O-ring in ice water for a few minutes, took it out, and squeezed it. The O-ring broke apart. The Challenger launched on an unseasonably cold day in Florida—it was so cold that ice had built up on the Kennedy Space Center launch pads the night before—and the O-rings had apparently become stiff.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

A theoretical model is the quantum Turing machine, also known as the universal quantum computer. Quantum computers share theoretical similarities with non-deterministic and probabilistic computers, like the ability to be in more than one state simultaneously. The field of quantum computing was first introduced by Richard Feynman in 1982. Although quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits (quantum bits). Both practical and theoretical research continues, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

These are my homage to the idea that we can benefit from understanding how the world works and applying that understanding to keep us out of trouble. The ideas in these volumes are not my own, nor do I deserve any credit for them. They come from the likes of Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb, Charles Darwin, Peter Kaufman, Peter Bevelin, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, and so many others. As the Roman poet Publius Terentius wrote: “Nothing has yet been said that’s not been said before.” I’ve only curated, edited, and shaped the work of others before me. The timeless, broad ideas in these volumes are for my children and their children and their children’s children.

Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight by Margaret Lazarus Dean

affirmative action, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, company town, Elon Musk, helicopter parent, index card, Joan Didion, Jon Ronson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, private spaceflight, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, sensible shoes

Months later, the presidential commission tasked with investigating Challenger issued its report. The cause of the explosion had been the solid rocket boosters, whose faulty design combined with the unseasonably cold weather in Florida to create a catastrophic failure. A picture in the paper showed Richard Feynman, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project, smirking and holding up a piece of O-ring he’d been soaking in ice water to show that it became brittle. Sally Ride, also on the commission along with Neil Armstrong, sat a few seats away, looking pissed. She’d trusted her life to Challenger twice.

…

As was expected, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB, pronounced “cabe” by insiders) found that the immediate cause of the disaster was a chunk of foam falling onto the tiles and that the organizational cause was a pattern of dismissing problems too easily, the “normalization of deviance” as Diane Vaughan put it so memorably in her study of Challenger. When a shuttle flew with a known issue and came back safely, the tendency among managers was to assume that the issue was not in fact a risk, using the previous success as “evidence.” “Try playing Russian roulette that way,” Richard Feynman remarked after Challenger. CAIB found that after a short period of vigilance, the same error of thinking had crept back into NASA decision making. The board stated in the report that “the causes of the institutional failure responsible for Challenger have not been fixed.” The return-to-flight mission after Columbia was on Discovery, as the return-to-flight mission had been after Challenger.

Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Benoit Mandelbrot, business cycle, butterfly effect, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, discrete time, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, experimental subject, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herbert Marcuse, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, power law, Richard Feynman, scientific management, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, trade route

Renormalization had entered physics in the 1940s as a part of quantum theory that made it possible to calculate interactions of electrons and photons. A problem with such calculations, as with the calculations Kadanoff and Wilson worried about, was that some items seemed to require treatment as infinite quantities, a messy and unpleasant business. Renormalizing the system, in ways devised by Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Freeman Dyson, and other physicists, got rid of the infinities. Only much later, in the 1960s, did Wilson dig down to the underlying basis for renormalization’s success. Like Kadanoff, he thought about scaling principles. Certain quantities, such as the mass of a particle, had always been considered fixed—as the mass of any object in everyday experience is fixed.

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“There are rational numbers to mine, fractal sets, and all kinds of truly beautiful consequences,” she says. “So on the one hand, people are horrified, on the other they’re mesmerized.” She does chaos in curved space-time. Einstein would be proud. AS FOR ME, I never returned to chaos, but readers might spot seeds of all my later books in this one. I knew hardly anything about Richard Feynman, but he has a cameo here (see here). Isaac Newton has more than a cameo: he seems to be the antihero of chaos, or the god to be overthrown. I discovered only later, reading his notebooks and letters, how wrong I’d been about him. And for twenty years I’ve been pursuing a thread that began with something Rob Shaw told me, about chaos and information theory, as invented by Claude Shannon.

Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, Astronomia nova, Bernie Sanders, clockwork universe, complexity theory, cosmological principle, Dava Sobel, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, four colour theorem, fudge factor, Henri Poincaré, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Khan Academy, Laplace demon, lone genius, music of the spheres, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, the rule of 72, the scientific method