heat death of the universe

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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

In the final publication, he removed the biblical reference but was no less bleak about the future: “Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come, the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man as at present constituted.” This idea that the universe will wind down and die as all the heat in it dissipates became known as the heat death of the universe. Thomson’s contemporaries noted the audacity with which he had drawn a grand cosmological conclusion from his everyday observations of a cooling iron bar. As Hermann Helmholtz wrote in 1854, “We must admire the sagacity of Thomson, who in the letters of little known mathematical formulae, which speaks only of the heat, volume, and pressure of bodies, was able to discern consequences which threatened the universe, though certainly after an infinite period of time, with eternal death.”

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When a wave arrives, that meaning is lost as the sand particles become jumbled and are rearranged into more likely but less meaningful configurations—a high-entropy state. However we choose to record information, the relentless increase of entropy will erase it as surely as a wave wipes away a name drawn in the sand. William Thomson’s prediction of the heat death of the universe includes thoughts, words, and memories. Everything will end up at the same temperature, everything will be forgotten. * * * In July 1948, when Shannon published his paper, no one predicted the scales at which his ideas would be applied. Nor did anyone question whether the similarities between thermodynamic and information entropy are coincidental, or if they are two faces of the same phenomenon.

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., 104–5, 106 Gibbs free energy cycle of life with, 123 photosynthesis with, 121–23 vitalism debate and, 123–24 Gibbs’s law, 118–20 glaciers, movement of, 39 Glasgow, Thomson family in, 59 Glasgow University, 33, 34, 35–36 Goldschmidt, Rudolf, 162 Google, 167 grand unified theory, 236 gravity anthropic principle and, 129 Einstein’s thought experiment on general relativity and, 220–22, 224, 225 Newton’s theory of, 86, 156, 220, 221–22, 225 Green, Jeremy, 206, 216 Greenbaum, Franz, 213–14 greenhouse gases, 243–44 Grossmann, Marcel, 144 Harrison, James, 110 Hawking, Stephen, xi background and education of, 229 Bekenstein’s paper on black hole entropy and, 234, 236 black hole research of, 229–30, 235–36, 237 event horizons and, 234 on understanding the universe, 240 Hawking radiation, 235, 236 hearing aid, Einstein’s invention of, 162 Hearst, Phoebe, 131 heat black holes and, 230, 232, 234, 235–36 caloric theory of, in early nineteenth century, 9–10 Carnot’s Reflections on, 11–12, 21, 33 Carnot’s research on, 9–10, 40, 52, 73 chemical processes in animal release of, 46 Clément’s approach to quantifying, 10–11 Fourier’s research on behavior of, 33–34 Helmholtz’s research on animal generation of, 44–46 Joule’s quantification of unit of work in, 27–28 Joule’s research on electricity as a source of, 24–29 respiration and release of, 44–45 thermodynamic maps on changes in, 106–9 Thompson’s absolute temperature scale measuring, 63–66, 88–89 Thompson’s paper on friction as source of, 10 transistor use and generation of, 184–85, 195, 196 heat death of the universe, 60–61, 127, 183 heat dissipation Boltzmann’s research on, 102–3, 116–17 Clausius’s research on, 66–67, 75 entropy increases related to, 68–69 information erasure and, 195–96 Thomson’s analysis of the age of the earth related to, 71–72 Thompson’s paper on, 59–61 Turing’s morphogens and, 206 heat flow Carnot’s theory of an ideal engine using, 15–19, 73, 247–52 Planck’s research on, 133–34, 137–38 three ways of, 133–34 heating systems, thermostat in, 207 Heisenberg, Werner, 160 Helmholtz, Hermann, xi, 43–49 background and education of, 42, 43–44 Boltzmann’s visit to, 104 Clausius’s study of works of, 52 Gibbs’s work and, 106, 123–24 heat generation by animals and, 44–46 “On the Conservation of ‘Kraft’ ” by, 47–49, 51–52, 154 potential energy concept of, 48, 52 scientific community’s response to work of, 49, 51–52 Thomson’s view of the universe and, 61 vitalism research of, 43–46, 123–24 Herschel, John, 86 Hilbert, David, 156–57, 158, 159, 166, 201 Hydrodynamica (Bernoulli), 77 IBM Research Laboratory, 192–94 ice harvesting, 110 ideal heat engine concept Carnot’s theory of motive power of steam engines using, 15–19, 195, 247–52 Clausius’s thought experiment on conservation of energy using, 55–58, 253 as perpetual motion machine, 18, 46 Thomson’s temperature measurement using, 65–66 “Illustrations of the Dynamical Theory of Gases” (Maxwell), 89 Imperial Physical Technical Institute, 138 Industrial Revolution, xi, 96, 110, 243 inertia, in laws of mechanics, 158 information change in the physical universe when using, 183 importance of digital processing of, 185 letter-frequency patterns in, 177–79 letter-pair patterns in, 179 link between thermodynamics and, 167–68, 183 Shannon’s ideas on, 174–80, 183 spoken word statistical patterns in, 180 Szilard’s thought experiment (demon) on thermodynamics and, 192 thermodynamic cost of, 192, 194–97 transistor invention and, 183–85 information age, energy enabling, 167–68 information entropy, 180, 182, 183 information processing E. coli example of, 197 Landauer and Bennett’s search for laws governing, 192–93 thermodynamic cost of a bit in, 192, 194–97 information theory, 237 entropy of everything in a black hole and, 237–38 expansion of universe and, 238–39 infrared radiation, 136 heat transfer by radiation and, 134 kiln heat and generation of, 136–37 Planck’s equations on amount of, 138, 141 solar generation of, 137, 243 temperature and emission of, 136 Tyndall’s research on atmospheric behavior of, 243–44 Institute for Advanced Study, 172, 230, 231 intelligence, and computers, Turing’s paper on, 204–5 internal combustion engines, 20 invariance Noether’s research in, 156, 157 symmetry and, 157 Jastrow, Ignaz, 166 Jewish academics, migration of, 165, 166, 172, 193 Jewish refugee children, Turing’s work with, 202 Joule, James, xi, 23–31 background and education of, 23–24 Carnot’s heat theory and, 24, 40 Clausius’s study of works of, 52, 58, 256 Helmholtz’s work and, 49 paddle-wheel dynamo experiment of, 29–30 research on electricity as a source of heat by, 24–29, 154 scientific community’s reaction to work of, 25, 28–29, 30–31, 49 thermodynamics research and, 106, 187 thermometers for temperature measurement used by, 29–30 Thomson’s critiques of research of, 30–31, 36, 37, 58 Thomson’s ice experiment on freezing water and, 39–40 “Journey of a German Professor to Eldorado” (Boltzmann), 131 Kelvin, Lord.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

Since the advent of the Nuclear Age, one apocalyptic threat after another, natural and man-made, has been added to the menu of ways that human history could end, from environmental destruction and weapons of mass destruction, to plague and asteroid strikes (Halpern, 2001; Leslie, 1998; Rees, 2004). In a sense, long-term apocalypticism is also now the dominant scientific worldview, insofar as most scientists see no possibility for intelligent life to continue after the Heat Death of the Universe (2002, Ellis; see also the Chapter 2 in this volume) . Millennia/ tendencies in responses to apocalyptic threats 79 4.5 Contemporary techno-millennialism 4. 5 . 1 The s i n gu l a rity a n d tech n o - m i llen n ia l i s m Joel Garreau's (2006) recent book on the psychoculture of accelerating change, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies - and What It Means to Be Human, is structured in three parts: Heaven, Hell and Prevail.

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Preparing to prepare: Other drastic changes and challenges must be anticipated, even if we forego daring leaps. Such changes and challenges include exhaustion of energy supplies, possible asteroid or cometary impacts, orbital evolution and precessional instability of Earth, evolution of the Sun, and - in the very long run - some form of'heat death ofthe universe'. Many of these are long-term problems, but tough ones that, if neglected, will only loom larger. So we should prepare, or at least prepare to prepare, well in advance of crises. Wondering: Catastrophes might leave a mark on cosmic evolution, in both the physical and (exo)biological senses.

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Possible responses include moving (underground, underwater, Big troubles, imagined and real 359 or into space) , re-engineering our physiology to be more tolerant (either through bio-engineering, or through man-machine hybridization), or some combination thereof. Heat death: Over still longer time scales, some version of the 'heat death of the universe' seems inevitable. This exotic catastrophe is the ultimate challenge facing the mind in the universe. Stars will burn out, the material for making new ones will be exhausted, the universe will continue to expand - it now appears, at an accelerating rate and, in general, useful energy will become a scarce commodity.

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

back-to-the-land, clean water, Colonization of Mars, cryptocurrency, dark matter, friendly fire, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, independent contractor, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, megastructure, random walk, risk tolerance, time dilation, Vernor Vinge

And they did. Jorrus said, “The meaning of life—” “—differs from person to person,” said Veera. “For us it is simple. It is the pursuit of understanding, that we—” “—may find a way to contravene the heat death of the universe. For you—” “—we cannot say.” “I was afraid of that,” Kira said. Then, because she couldn’t help herself: “You take as fact a lot of things others would dispute. The heat death of the universe, for example.” Together they spoke: “If we are wrong, we are wrong, but our quest is a worthy one. Even if our belief is misplaced—” “—our success would benefit all,” said Jorrus. Kira inclined her head.

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If the Entropists figured out that the Soft Blade was alien tech, they weren’t likely to report her to the UMC, just pepper her with an endless series of questions. Kira remembered what her then research boss, Zubarev, had told her during their time on Serris: “If you ever get in a chin-wag with an Entropist, you’re best served not talking about the heat death of the universe, yah hear me? You’ll never get free after that. They’ll chew your ear off for half a day or more, so yah know. Just warning you, Navárez.” With that in mind, Kira stopped in front of the man and woman. “Excuse me,” she said. She felt as if she were seven again, when she’d been introduced to the Entropist who had visited Weyland.

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Originated as a statement of intent, later expanded to a philosophical treatise containing a summary of all known scientific knowledge, with primary emphasis on astronomy, physics, and mathematics. (See also Entropism.) ENTROPISM: stateless, pseudo-religion driven by a belief in the heat death of the universe and a desire to escape or postpone said death. Founded by mathematician Jalal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich in the mid-twenty-first century. Entropists devote considerable resources to scientific research and have contributed—directly or indirectly—to numerous important discoveries. Open adherents are noted for their gradient robes.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

The natural increase of entropy over time in a closed system is known as the second law of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is the study of heat. If you consider our universe as the biggest closed system, this law leads to a plausible end state of our universe as a homogenous gas, evenly distributed everywhere, commonly known as the heat death of the universe. On a more practical level, the second law serves as a reminder that orderliness needs to be maintained, lest it be slowly chipped away by disorder. This natural progression is based on the reality that most orderliness doesn’t happen naturally. Broken eggs don’t spontaneously mend themselves.

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., 16 Galton, Francis, 203 gambler’s fallacy, 144, 145 games, iterated, 214 game theory, 212–14, 230, 234, 238, 244 prisoner’s dilemma, 212–14, 226, 234–35, 244 garbage, 40–41 garbage in, garbage out, 185 Gates, Bill, 69, 128, 141 gateway drug theory, 236 Gelman, Andrew, 173 generalists, 252–53 generals always fight the last war, 240 genes, 156–57, 191, 249–50 George III, King, 221 Germany, 70, 145, 229, 237–39 germ theory, 26, 289 get on the same page, 225 get them up to speed, 279 getting more bang for your buck, 79 Getting Things Done (Allen), 76 Gibson, William, 289 Gilbert, Daniel, 27 Ginóbili, Manu, 247 give-and-take, 128 Gladwell, Malcolm, 261 GlaxoSmithKline, 63, 81, 257 globalization, 310 global optimum, 195–96 goals, 69, 87–89, 122, 242, 244 Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter), 89 Goldblum, Jeff, 121 golem effect, 267 Gondwanian bridges, 25 good cop, bad cop, 232 good enough, 90 Goodhart, Charles, 49 Goodhart’s law, 49, 51, 52, 54 Good Judgment Project, 206 Good to Great (Collins), 109, 254 Google, 18, 53, 104, 231, 305 Gordon, Peter, x Gosplan, 49 government, federal: budget of, 75–76 failure in, 47, 48 regulatory action by, 183–84, 231–32 graffiti, 40 Graham, Paul, 71, 277 grass-is-greener mentality, 176–77, 258 graphs, 146–48 bell curves in, 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 error bars in, 155, 156 histograms, 147–48, 150 gravity, center of, 112 gray thinking, 28 group membership, 127 groupthink, 201–3 Grove, Andy, 308 growth mindset, 266–67 Guardian, x guerrilla marketing, 240 guerrilla warfare, 239, 241–42 gun control, 235, 237 Gurley, Bill, 286 gut feeling, 30 hackers, 97 Hail Mary pass, 243–44 hammer, Maslow’s, xi, 177, 255, 297, 317 Hanlon’s razor, 20 harassment, 53 Harvard Business Review, 297 Hatchimals, 281, 284 hazard, 43–45, 47 head in the sand, 55 Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of, 48 healthcare, 41, 54–55 HealthCare.gov, 107 insurance, 42, 46, 47, 190 spending on, 80, 81 health information, 53 heart rhythms, 139 heat death of the universe, 124 heat-seeking missiles, 301 hedgehogs versus foxes, 254–55 Heen, Sheila, 19 Heifer International, 109 height, 150–51, 156, 191–92 Heilbroner, Robert, 49 helplessness, learned, 22–23 Heraclea, Battle of, 239 herd immunity, 39–40, 46 heroin, 36 heuristic, 94 Hick, William, 62 Hick’s law, 62, 63 hierarchical versus egalitarian, in organizational culture, 274 hierarchy of needs, 270–71 high-context communication, 273–74 high-leverage activities, 79–81, 83, 107, 113 hindsight bias, 271–72 hiring, 258 histogram, 147–48, 150 Hitler, Adolf, 237 HIV, 233 Hoffman, Reid, 7 Hofstadter, Douglas, 89 Hofstadter’s law, 89 hold the line, 236 hollow victory, 239 home: being locked into housing situation, 305 insurance on, 156 new-construction, 228 purchase of, 79, 178 repairs on, 56, 185–89 security services for, 229 Homebrew Computer Club, 289 Homeland Security, U.S.

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

Index A agriculturalists energy sources, 4 air conditioners, 12 Al-Qaeda, 308 Alcator C-Mod, 231, 280, 301, 361 Alpha Centauri, 348 aneutronic see p-B, 292 ARC, 248 Argentina see Ronald, 179 Arkhipov, Vasili, 305 arsenals by country nuclear weapons, 304 ASDEX-U, 129, 193, 277 Aston, Francis, 177 atmospheric pollution, 238 B B-59 submarine, 305 bald spot, 103 banana orbits see super-bananas, 118, 190 baseload sources, 46 bell curve, 39, 83 Bell Telephone Laboratory, 184 Beria, Lavrenti, 189 beryllium, 162, 224, 324 Bethe, Hans, 178 Big Bang, 12 binding energy, 70–71 biomass, 35 Boeing 747 airplane, 353 Boltzmann constant, 69 bootstrap current, 189 bootstrap multiplication see bootstrap current, 254 brains, 59 bravery, 59, 335 brawn, 59 breakeven, 135 Breakthrough Starshot, 353 breeder reactors, 26, 330 fuelling proliferation, 333 bremsstrahlung see p-B, 293 burning plasma see ignition, breakeven, triple product, Lawson criteria, 136, 214 C C-2U, 278 Californium, 316 CANDU reactors, 327 capital cost, 240 carbon capture and storage, 39 Carnot limit, 31 catalyzed D–D fuel cycle, 85, 355 central solenoid, 145, 283 chain reaction, 314 chemical propulsion, 352 Chernobyl, 24 Chicago Pile-1, 311 classical transport, 123 climate change, 238–239 CNO cycle see stars, Bethe, Hans, 178 cold fusion, 77 Commonwealth Fusion Systems, 301 confinement, 82 electrostatic, 112 empirical scaling laws, 251 energy confinement time, 90 toroidal magnetic, 109 volume to surface area ratio argument, 256 conservation of momentum, 349 frozen lake argument, 350 convective eddies, 32 conventional spacecraft, 350 Coriolis force, 32 cost of electricity, 239 critical mass, 315 cross-section, 77–78 Cuban Missile Crisis, 304 current drive, 144 electron cyclotron, 152 electromagnetic wave, 150 inductive, 145 neutral beam, 148 cusp geometry see Lockheed Martin, 288 D D–3He fusion, 85, 300, 354 D–D fusion, 20, 85, 202, 301, 354 D–T fusion, 20, 83, 161, 202, 269, 281, 287, 292, 337 Darwin, Charles, 175 Debye length, 99 dense plasma focus see Lawrenceville plasma physics, 297 deuterium abundance on Earth, 22 diagnostics, 164–165 diffusion see random walk diffusion, 123 DIII-D, 277 direct drive see indirect drive, inertial confinement fusion, 272 dirty bombs, 321 dispatchable sources, 46 disruptions, 153–154, 222, 244, 267 mitigating, 155 divertor, 157, 194, 220, 256 double-edged sword nuclear energy as blueprint, 345 nuclear physics, 310 technologies, 311 E early hominids, 3 Earth–Moon system, 16, 41 Eddington, Arthur, 178 edge localized modes see ELMs, 194 Edison, Thomas, 6 electric field, 94, 150 electromagnetic force, 74 electromagnetic induction, 5, 12 electromagnetic repulsion, 67 electromagnetic waves, 269 electromagnetism, 90 electromagnets, 93 electrons, 65 in light bulbs, 6 electrostatic, 95 ELMs, 194, 222 ELMO bumpy torus, 114 empirical scaling law, 130, 251 enrichment, 333 energy conservation of, 11 flows of, 13 energy hierarchy, 58 energy storage, 50 Enola Gay, 305 entropy, 11 EPED, 197 exhaust velocity, 350 expanding electrical grids, 54 external power, 249 F Faraday, Michael, 5 Fat Man, 305 fissiled percent, 322 fertile material, 330 field-reversed configuration, 290 first wall, 153, 222 fission proliferation, 333 fission reactors, 325 climate versus nuclear security tradeoff, 335 fission–fusion hybrids, 332 flow, 197, 245 Fokker–Planck simulations see gyrokinetics, 209 formation of fossil fuels, 37 Forrest, Michael, 188–189 fossil fuels, 37 Fukushima, 24 fusion, 13, 16, 19 enrichment in fusion blanket, 337 proliferation, 336 fusion fuels, 83 fusion power density, 243 fusion reactor design, 237 disabling a proliferator, 338 small fusion system, 339 smallest planned, 159 timescale for blanket proliferation ramp-up, 340 fusion thruster, 354 G gas centrifuges, 318 gaseous diffusion, 317 General Atomics, 198, 279 General Fusion, 284 geopolitics, 343 geothermal, 16, 27 global zero, 343 gravitational confinement, 89 gravity, 13, 89 gravity-assist, 351 Greenwald limit, 251 gun-type bomb, 323 gyrokinetic simulations, 252 gyrokinetics, 206, 252 scale separation, 207 gyroradius, 92 H H-mode, 130, 193, 206, 252 hairy ball theorem, 103 Halite-Centurion, 274 half-life, 20 Harwell, 187 heat death of the Universe, 12 heat flux, 221 heating, 14, 218 electron cyclotron, 152 ion cyclotron, 152 heavy element synthesis, 15 heavy elements, 16 heavy water reactors, 327 Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, 79 Helion Energy, 300 heliotron, 114 helium-3 abundance, 354 hex, 317 Hiroshima, 322, 336 hohlraum see inertial confinement fusion, 272 hydroelectric, 39 hydrogen bomb, 89, 304, 324 hydropower, 17 I IAEA, 334, 339 ignition, 131, 250, 269 MCF and ICF ignition differences, 274 implosion bomb, 323 inboard see torus terminology, 110 indirect drive see direct drive, inertial confinement fusion, 272 inductive heating, 147 Industrial Revolution, 4 inertial confinement fusion, 269 weaponization propspects, 271 intercontinental ballistic missiles see ICBM, 309 intercontinental electrical grids, 55 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 9 internal transport barriers see pedestal, 196 intermittency, 30, 46 INTOR, 225 IPA, 278 Iron Curtain, 181 isotopes, 20, 73 isotope effect, 204 isotopic semantics, 73 ITER, 137, 203, 211, 237, 248, 257, 273, 302, 353, 361 ignition, 214 Q, 213 strategy, 216 Ivy Mike, 304 J JET, 140, 155, 169, 198, 200, 260, 273, 277 jet engine, 349 JT-60, 260 JT-60SA, 140, 169, 361 JT-60U, 140, 277, 361 Juno spacecraft, 347 K K-DEMO, 361 Kelvin, Lord, 177 Khrushchev, Nikita, 187 kink limit, 246 Kremlin, 186 Kurchatov, Igor, 188 Kurchatov Institute, 185 L L-mode, 193, 252 Lamb, Horace, 127 Landau energy levels, 298 Landau damping, 151 Landau, Lev, 151 Langmuir, Irving, 165 Langmuir probes, 165 laser enrichment, 320 lattice structure, 156 Lavrentyev, Oleg, 186 Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, 296 Lawson criterion see triple product, 131, 324 Lawson, John, 131 levitated dipole, 114 limiter see divertor, 157, 194 linear magnetic, 100 lithium, 21, 242 lithium pebbles, 163 lithium-6, 84, 161 lithium-7, 161 lithium-ion batteries, 22, 51 Little Boy fissiled percent, 322 Lockheed Martin, 287 Lufthansa Flight 181, 199 M magnet(s), 139 permanent, 93 magnetic confinement fusion, 247 magnetic field, 91, 150, 247 magnetic islands, 117, 265 magnetic mirror, 100, 355 magnetic surfaces, 114, 144, 158, 191, 265 open versus closed, 158 magnetized target fusion see MTF, 284 magnetohydrodynamics see MHD, 121 Manhattan Project, 318 Mars, 347 mass–energy equivalence, 77 material survivability, 255 matter–antimatter annihilation, 352 mechanical stress, 142, 283 Mercury, 181 Mercury laser see NIF, 276 messy engineering endeavor, 259 MHD, 209, 246 MHD stability, 153 mini-golf, 68 Mini-Sphere, 278 MIT, 301 Model C stellarator, 189 moderator, 326 Moore’s Law see triple product, 136, 205 MRI machines, 140 MTF, 284, 300 Munich, 199 N Nagasaki, 305, 322 neoclassical transport, 126, 265 net electric power, 241–242 net electricity, 169 neutral beam, 220 negative ion acceleration, 220 neutral beams, 291 efficiency, 149 neutron capture cross-section, 331 neutron flux, 156 neutron multiplication, 224 neutron multiplication factor, 162 neutron multipliers, 162 neutron shielding, 292 New York Times, 180 NIF, 273, 336 niobium–titanium, 184 niobium–tin, 184, 248 Nixon, Richard, 224 Nobel Peace Prize, 186 Nobel Prize, 183 non-inductive see current drive; neutral beam, 149 non-renewable, 19 North Korea, 339 nucleons, 65 nuclear energy transition, 341 nuclear fission, 16, 23 nuclear proliferation, 238, 359 nuclear potential, 66 nuclear security, 336 nuclear weapon, 303 boosted implosion bomb, 323 defenses, 309 gun-type bomb, 322 hydrogen bomb, 323 implosion bomb, 322 inspectors, 340 neutron initiator, 324 proliferation with increased tritium availability, 342 significant quantity, 334 tamper, 322 Teller–Ulam design, 325 weapon designs, 321 yield, 303 nuclear winter, 308 O ocean waves, 44 Onnes, Heike, 181 outboard see torus terminology, 110 Oxford, 199 P p-B fusion, 290 particle drifts, 104 E × B drift, 106, 128 B drift, 106, 194 curvature drift, 106 Pauli exclusion principle, 183 pedestal, 193 Pelamis, 46 Perhapsatron, 114, 181, 285 photosynthesis, 35 plasma, 86 plasma current, 114, 264 maximization, 246 plasma flow, 197, 245 plasma gain, 169 plasma heating, 144 plasma power engineering multiplication factor, 170 plasma power multiplication factor, 135 plasma pressure, 244 plasma shaping, 198 Pluto, 321, 347 plutonium, 90 plutonium-239, 25 production, 320 reactor-grade, 329 weapons-grade, 321 poloidal field coils, 144 poloidal see torus terminology, 110 polonium-210, 162 power multiplication, 170 Princeton, 189, 198 Princeton University, 180 profits, 238 proliferation, 333 propellant, 349 proton–proton chain see CNO cycle, stars, Bethe, Hans, 179 proton–proton fusion, 28 public relations, 359 pure fission weapons, 325 Q quasineutrality, 97–98, 150 R radioactive waste, 167 random walk diffusion, 123 rate of energy consumption, 18 Rayleigh–Taylor instability, 271, 285 remote maintenance system, 204 renewable, 19, 57 resistivity, 141 Richter, Ronald, 179, 187 right-hand rule, 93 robotic maintenance, 169, 257 rocket equation, 351 role model effect of fusion technology, 344 S safety factor, 115 Sakharov, Andrei, 186 Saturn, 347 scattering collision, 67 scientific notation, 26 seasonal energy storage, 52 Seebeck effect, 6 seeds, 35 shaping, 198 D-shape, 198 shattered pellet injection see disruptions, 156 significant quantity, 340 solar, 16, 28 Solar System, 17, 348 energy flows, 15 space capsules see divertor, 160 space colonization, 349 SPARC, 301 spent fuel current world production, 334 spherical tokamaks, 281 spheromak, 114, 287 Spitzer, Lyman, 113, 180, 263 ST40, 278 Stalin, Joseph, 187 stars, 175 possible fusion reactions, 178 red giant phase, 15 steam engine, 4 steam turbine, 6 stellarator(s), 114, 263 ignited, 267 stochastic regions, 117, 265 strong nuclear force, 66 Sun, 347 lifetime of, 176 super-bananas see banana orbits, 118 super-duper H-mode, 259 supercomputers, 204 superconductivity, 141, 181, 248 Cooper pairs, 183 type I, 184 type II, 184 superconductor, 283 high-temperature, 185, 283, 301 REBCO, 186 materials, 182 problem with neutrons, 163 supernovae, 14–15 surface-to-air missiles, 309 Sword of Damocles, 306 Symmetric Tokamak, 189 T T-1, 188 T-3, 113, 189, 263, 278 T-7, 185 T4, 278 TAE Technologies, 280, 290 Tamm, Igor, 186 TCV, 201, 280 technetium, 24 temperature, 83 TFTR, 203, 277 tritium detection, 339 thermal equilibrium, 82 thermodynamic efficiency, 31 thermonuclear bomb see nuclear weapons — hydrogen bomb, 324 thermotron, 180 Thor, 110 Thomson scattering, 166 thorium, 321 Three Mile Island, 24 tidal, 16, 41 TNT, 304 toast making of, 7 tokamak, 113 Tokamak Energy Ltd., 281 Tore Supra, 141 toroidal torus terminology, 110 toroidal field, 140 toroidal field coils, 198 toroidal symmetry, 264 torsatron, 114 torus, 104 torus terminology, 110 trapped particles, 118 TRIAM-1M, 185 Trinity, 303, 344 triple product, 135, 267 tritium, 20, 161, 338 cost, 202 current reserves, 341 detecting use in fusion reactor, 339 increased availability proliferation risk, 342 tritium breeding, 215 tritium breeding blanket, 160, 247 Troyon limit, 243, 282 game of chicken, 244 violation, 245 Tsar Bomba, 304 Tuck, James, 181 tungsten, 224 turbulence, 206, 255 turbulent eddy, 128, 197 turbulent transport, 126 U U.S.S.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

Their theories describe an equilibrium state of perfect competition because that’s what’s easy to model, not because it represents the best of business. But it’s worth recalling that the long-run equilibrium predicted by 19th-century physics was a state in which all energy is evenly distributed and everything comes to rest—also known as the heat death of the universe. Whatever your views on thermodynamics, it’s a powerful metaphor: in business, equilibrium means stasis, and stasis means death. If your industry is in a competitive equilibrium, the death of your business won’t matter to the world; some other undifferentiated competitor will always be ready to take your place.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

In physics, order or organization can be measured in terms of heat differences between regions of space time; entropy is simply disorder, the opposite of order, and according to the Second Law, the entropy of any isolated system increases with time. In other words, things run down, inevitably. According to the {69} Second Law, the universe is unwinding out of a more ordered state into the ultimately disordered state known as the heat death of the universe.2 What, then, are living things? They are things that defy this crumbling into dust, at least for a while, by not being isolated — by taking in from their environment the wherewithal to keep life and limb together. The psychologist Richard Gregory summarizes the idea crisply: Time's arrow given by Entropy — the loss of organization, or loss of temperature differences — is statistical and it is subject to local small-scale reversals.

…

Only in this sense: if they were formed, they'd be stable. But whether or not any conspiracy of events could lead to their being formed is another matter, to be addressed in terms of accessibility from one location or another. Most of the genomes in this set of stable possibilities will never be formed, we can be sure, since the heat death of the universe will overtake the building process before it has made a sizable dent in the space. Two other objections to this proposal about biological possibility cry out to be heard. First, isn't it outrageously "gene-centered," in anchoring all considerations of biological possibility to the accessibility of one genome or another in the Library of Mendel?

…

In fact, as we shall see in more detail in chapter 15, we can be certain that there are realms of no doubt fascinating and important knowledge that our species, in its actual finitude, will never enter, not because we will butt our heads against some stone wall of utter incomprehension, but because the Heat Death of the universe will overtake us before we can get there. This is not, however, a limitation due to the frailty of our animal brains, a dictate of "naturalism." On the contrary, a proper application of Darwinian thinking suggests that if we survive our current self-induced environmental crises, our capacity to comprehend will continue to grow by increments that are now incomprehensible to us.

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

So, rather than the cumulative gravitational attraction of all the matter in the universe—both normal and dark matter—slowing down the expansion of the universe, something else was at work, making it expand more quickly now than it did in the past. This mysterious repulsive substance acting against gravity and stretching space ever more quickly became known as dark energy. According to our present understanding, dark energy may ultimately result in what is called the ‘heat death’ of the universe many billions of years from now as space continues to expand ever more rapidly and to cool as it settles towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. But until we truly understand the nature of dark energy, and indeed the properties of the very early universe (see the next section), we should not be too quick to conjecture about its final fate.

Forever Free by Joe Haldeman

Albert Einstein, heat death of the universe, Magellanic Cloud, Occam's razor, time dilation

But they'll all probably find some food before they're reduced to eating one another." It looked at Marygay and me. "You two are special, since nobody else remembers as far back as you do. It amused me to construct your situation. "But to me, time is like a table, or a floor. I can walk back to the Big Bang, or forward to the heat death of the universe. Life and death are reversible conditions. Trivial ones, to me. As you have seen here." I shouldn't have said it, but I did. "So now it amuses you to let us live?" "That's one way to put it. Or you could say I'm leaving the experiment to cook on its own. I'll walk forward a million years and see what happens."

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

airport security, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital nomad, Douglas Hofstadter, fake news, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Floyd, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, Inbox Zero, income inequality, invention of the steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kanban, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, New Journalism, Parkinson's law, profit motive, scientific management, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

In the contemporary version, Sisyphus would empty his inbox, lean back, and take a deep breath, before hearing a familiar ping: “You have new messages…” It gets worse, though, because here the goalpost-shifting effect kicks in: every time you reply to an email, there’s a good chance of provoking a reply to that email, which itself may require another reply, and so on and so on, until the heat death of the universe. At the same time, you’ll become known as someone who responds promptly to email, so more people will consider it worth their while to message you to begin with. (By contrast, negligent emailers frequently find that forgetting to reply ends up saving them time: people find alternative solutions to the problems they were nagging you to solve, or the looming crisis they were emailing about never materializes.)

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

This apparent breach of one of the fundamental laws of the Universe does not cause any problems for physics, because on a cosmological scale our existence is so brief, our physical dimensions so minute, that the iron reality of the second law does not flutter for an instant. Whether life exists or not, entropy increases inexorably. According to our current models, this will continue until the ultimate heat death of the Universe, when all matter will be evenly spaced and nothing happens, and it carries on not happening forever. Schrödinger encountered far greater difficulties when he came to discuss his second topic: the nature of heredity. Like Koltsov and Delbrück before him, Schrödinger was struck by the fact that the chromosomes are accurately duplicated during ordinary cell division (‘mitosis’ – this is the way in which an organism grows) and during the creation of the sex cells (‘meiosis’).

Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

Once the last remnants of the last stars have decayed away to nothing and everything reaches the same temperature, the story of our universe will finally come to an end. For the first time in its life the Universe will be permanent and unchanging. Entropy finally stops increasing because the cosmos cannot get any more disorganised. Nothing happens, and it keeps not happening forever. This is known as the heat death of the Universe, an era when the cosmos will remain vast, cold, desolate and unchanging for the rest of time. There’s no way of measuring the passing of time, because nothing in the cosmos changes. Nothing changes because there are no temperature differences, and therefore no way of moving energy around to make anything happen.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

Maybe atheists were created by God to bore us into accepting his love. I wish for a world in which the concept of religion doesn’t even exist. I think this is finite, your life, that’s all there is. That the human experience is finite, that everything will die, that there will be complete heat death of the universe and then nothing. It’s a hard thing to accept but when you do it makes every moment so much more vital to enjoy. I think it would be better to forget our civilised attempts to process death and embrace the brutal reality. I think people should accept death more, even the ultimate death of everything.

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

Here Carter was alluding to Dyson’s concept of “eternal intelligence.” In a speculative 1979 paper, “Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” Dyson outlined a way in which intelligent life might conceivably evade entropy and survive forever, past the last flickering of stars and the heat death of the universe. Technologically adept observers might be able to reengineer themselves so that they could experience a subjective eternity, even as the universe cooled off to absolute zero. The result would be “a universe growing without limit in richness and complexity, a universe of life surviving forever.”

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Freed from material shackles, the citizens of the Federation are able to elevate themselves, to enjoy the finer and nobler things in life, and indeed to boldly go where no man or woman has gone before.1 Humanity might eventually arrive at such a place, where abundance is nearly endless and only the heat death of the universe threatens our good-natured fun. Sadly, that is unlikely to be a concern for those of us alive now. As rapid as the pace of technological progress has been, we are still creatures bound firmly by scarcity. In our world, technology will often be freeing, but the allocation of resources will continue to matter, and in many cases technological progress will only be as liberating as the organization of society allows it to be.

Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

Later on, when I’m swimming, I think about that and whether laughing at something horrible just makes it bearable, and helps it continue. Maybe there is a laziness in laughing about stuff instead of doing something about it. I decide jokes should only be about things you canny change, only about disabilities and death and human fallibility and the eventual heat death of the universe. I’m in a Jacuzzi thinking this. Anyway, the wee prick is not getting on the PlayStation again. It’s fucking snakes and ladders from now on. Gary O’Donnell, Facebook assassin, has been texting me in the belief that I am Amanda H. I’ve been fending him off and also, let’s be honest, leading him on.

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

But if the universe has lost any sense of scale, then couldn’t the conditions at the end of our universe be the starting point for a new Big Bang, so that the universe that emerges has rescaled to concentrate the energy into a new beginning? These two scenarios – the universe ending in a boring heat death and the universe starting in an exciting Big Bang – can actually be seamlessly fused together, like two landscapes whose boundaries match up to create one continuous landscape. The sewing together of these scenarios requires that the end of one universe contracts and the beginning of the next expands, so that the two ends fit together, smoothly passing from one to the other.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

If, for example, one of Linus Pauling’s successors formulates a medical elixir that could stave off aging indefinitely, they would not thereby make us immune to death in all its forms. So-called medical immortals could always hope to live to the next year or decade or century, yet the Reaper’s scythe would still be hovering. Given all the things that could go wrong, from a piano falling on their head to the heat death of the universe, the medical immortals would not therefore be faced with a truly infinite future. They might have a challenging time planning their lives, not knowing if those lives would last fifty years or fifty thousand, but it would not be impossible. The situation of what we might call a “true immortal” who cannot die would be quite different.

Time Paradox by Philip G. Zimbardo, John Boyd

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, cognitive dissonance, Drosophila, endowment effect, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, impulse control, indoor plumbing, loss aversion, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Monty Hall problem, Necker cube, overconfidence effect, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, twin studies

In short, machines and invertebrates prove that it doesn’t take a smart, self-aware, conscious brain to make simple predictions about the future. The second thing to notice is that predictions such as these are not particularly far-reaching. They are not predictions in the same sense that we might predict the annual rate of inflation, the intellectual impact of postmodernism, the heat death of the universe, or Madonna’s next hair color. Rather, these are predictions about what will happen in precisely this spot, precisely next, to precisely me, and we call them predictions only because there is no better word for them in the English language. But the use of that term—with its inescapable connotations of calculated, thoughtful reflection about events that may occur anywhere, to anyone, at any time—risks obscuring the fact that brains are continuously making predictions about the immediate, local, personal future of their owners without their owners’ awareness.

Scratch Monkey by Stross, Charles

carbon-based life, defense in depth, fault tolerance, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Kuiper Belt, packet switching, phenotype, telepresence

The losers will be suspended, NP-static: the number of processors available to them drops below a critical level, they can't get enough connections, can't run in anything like real time, can't even complete a thought. The fate of an NP-static Dreamtime is to be sent on a one-way trip into the distant future, a long but subjectively rapid journey into the heat-death of the universe -- unless somebody physically reboots the world, consigning its frozen inhabitants to oblivion. The Ultrabrights collectively face this dilemma: they are confined to the systems at the centre of known space. They will die unless they can find a way to break out of the trap, side-step their confinement and establish a line of communication with the twilight zone beyond.

The Rapture of the Nerds by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, dematerialisation, Drosophila, epigenetics, Extropian, financial engineering, Future Shock, gravity well, greed is good, haute couture, heat death of the universe, hive mind, margin call, mirror neurons, negative equity, phenotype, plutocrats, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, telepresence, Turing machine, Turing test, union organizing

They want to destroy the Earth, and everyone’s relying on you to stop them. Personally, I think that’s a forlorn hope, but under the circumstances, extreme measures seemed justifiable in order to get your fucking attention. Now will you listen to me?” * * * Hyperspace bypasses, Vogon poetry, the heat death of the universe: none of these things feature in the extraordinary situation now pertaining to the end of the world as Huw knows it. “I’m going to take you to meet somebody,” her mum tells her, bossily overreaching as ever. “They’ll set you straight.” “Who?” Huw stubbornly clutches her ax. “The defense—the people who asked me to fetch you.

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

Thomson was a prodigy: born in Belfast in 1824, he published three scientific papers while still in school and at the age of 22 was appointed a professor at the University of Glasgow, where he remained his entire life. He made important discoveries in the new sciences of energy and heat and pioneered the notion of the heat death of the universe—the inevitable dispersion of energy that would result in the world’s becoming a quiet, dark, homogeneous, and lifeless place in which everything was at the same temperature and nothing more could happen. Turning to engineering and commerce, he joined the effort to lay an undersea telegraph cable between Britain and the United States; after years of accidents and false starts, the connection was made in 1866 and Thomson was knighted for his contributions.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology by Howard Rheingold

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Bletchley Park, card file, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Hacker Ethic, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, human-factors engineering, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pattern recognition, popular electronics, post-industrial society, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The Home Computer Revolution, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture

It is a universal tendency that is as true for the energy transactions of the stars in the sky as it is for the tea kettle on the stove. Because the universe is presumed to be a closed system, and since Clausius demonstrated that the entropy of such systems tends to increase with the passage of time, the gloomy prediction of a distant but inevitable "heat death of the universe" was a disturbing implication of the second law of thermodynamics. "Heat death" was what they called it because heat is the most entropic form of energy. But the gloomy news about the end of time wasn't the only implication of the entropy concept. When it was discovered that heat is a measure of the average motion of a population of molecules, the notion of entropy became linked to the measure of order or disorder in a system.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

And yet the algorithms deciding how to optimize the path of the USB charger to the consumer must make a decision quickly. They must, in the language of psychology, be satisficers rather than optimizers—choosing a good enough solution rather than the absolute best. Even in a hypothetical scenario in which we can stop time and run this computation until the heat death of the universe, the best solution for this item must be balanced against the operation of the entire system—every robot and machine in the warehouse can’t just drop everything to prioritize a single order. Any delivery or routing algorithm must also build some flexibility into the travel itinerary of an item, because there’s plenty it can’t predict about the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours.

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

“That’s not feasible,” Fabian replied. Impressed that the young American who contacted him out of the blue seemed “genuinely interested in the subject material,” Fabian confirmed what Michael suspected: without a trace of the ransomware, recovery was hopeless. The encryption key was too long. “It would have taken until the heat death of the universe,” Fabian told Michael. Brian’s sister never got her photos back. For Michael, the failure was a sobering lesson in how much he had to learn: “I hadn’t started my journey toward reverse engineering,” he said. “I was completely relying on Fabian.” But it also marked a turning point in Michael’s life and was his first taste of what lay ahead.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

Inevitably, some of this energy is wasted as heat – if it were not, we’d have a perpetual motion machine, which is (you can’t say it too often) impossible. Almost all the energy in the universe is steadily being degraded from forms that are capable of doing work to forms that are incapable of doing work. There is a levelling off, a mixing up, until eventually the entire universe will settle into a uniform, (literally) uneventful ‘heat death’. But while the universe as a whole is hurtling downhill towards its inevitable heat death, there is scope for small quantities of energy to drive little local systems in the opposite direction. Water from the sea is lifted into the air as clouds, which later deposit their water on mountaintops, from which it runs downhill in streams and rivers, which can drive water wheels or electric power stations.

Relevant Search: With Examples Using Elasticsearch and Solr by Doug Turnbull, John Berryman

business logic, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, domain-specific language, Dr. Strangelove, fail fast, finite state, fudge factor, full text search, heat death of the universe, information retrieval, machine readable, natural language processing, premature optimization, recommendation engine, sentiment analysis, the long tail

You directly placed the source data model into Elasticsearch. Shouldn’t you have done some signal modeling? If you use this data directly to create a search index, won’t you end up with relevance problems? Well, yes, but that’s for a good reason. Search is a place ripe for premature optimization. You’re likely to reach the heat death of the universe before achieving a perfect search solution in every direction. You know there will be relevance problems, but you don’t quite know what those are until you experiment with user searches. There are few areas that emphasize “fail fast” as much as search relevance. Load your data, get something basic working, find where it’s broken, reconfigure, reindex if need be, requery, rinse, and repeat.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

It is a mistake made by theologians when arguing that without a source external to our world to vouchsafe morality and meaning nothing really matters. One of the most prominent theologians of our time, William Lane Craig, committed Alvy’s Error in a 2009 debate at Columbia University with the Yale philosopher Shelly Kagan when he pronounced: On a naturalistic worldview everything is ultimately destined to destruction in the heat-death of the universe. As the universe expands it grows colder and colder as its energy is used up. Eventually all the stars will burn out, all matter will collapse into dead stars and black holes, there will be no life, no heat, no light, only the corpses of dead stars and galaxies expanding into endless darkness.

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

For all the fascinating theories and scenarios they spin out, practitioners of cosmic eschatology are in a position very much like that of Hollywood studio heads: nobody knows anything. Still, little Alvy Singer is in good company in being soul-sick over the fate of the cosmos, however vaguely it is descried. At the end of the nineteenth century, figures like Swinburne and Henry Adams expressed similar anguish at what then seemed to be the certain heat death of the universe from entropy. In 1903, Bertrand Russell described his “unyielding despair” at the thought that “all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”

Emotional Ignorance: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion by Dean Burnett

airport security, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, call centre, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, COVID-19, double empathy problem, emotional labour, experimental economics, fake it until you make it, fake news, fear of failure, heat death of the universe, impulse control, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mirror neurons, neurotypical, New Journalism, period drama, pre–internet, Snapchat, social distancing, theory of mind, TikTok, Wall-E

Emotions may play a part, but presumably those who plumb the depths of the cosmos for answers are far more reliant on cognition than emotion. But then Dr Mack said this: In the course of researching my own book, I spoke to a bunch of different cosmologists. And I always asked ‘How does the end of the universe make you feel?’ The idea that there will be a ‘heat death’ of the universe, that everything fades to black, many found that really depressing. Some even said ‘I just don’t believe it’s going to be like that’, and have since produced their own alternative theories and ideas now, because they simply do not like the idea that the universe is going to fade away and die.

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

His name was Eliezer Yudkowsky, and we spent the next four hours discussing the message he had for the world—a message that had brought me to that eatery and would end up dominating my subsequent work. THE FIRST MESSAGE: THE SOVIET OCCUPATION In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener looked at the world through the lens of communication. He saw a universe that was marching to the tune of the second law of thermodynamics toward its inevitable heat death. In such a universe, the only (meta)stable entities are messages—patterns of information that propagate through time, like waves propagating across the surface of a lake. Even we humans can be considered messages, because the atoms in our bodies are too fleeting to attach our identities to. Instead, we are the “message” that our bodily functions maintain.

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, complexity theory, Future Shock, gravity well, heat death of the universe, industrial robot, informal economy, life extension, plutocrats, the long tail, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, time dilation

Origins and destinies, predictions and memories, lives and deaths, I sidestep those. I’m too slick for time to grip, you get me, sundog?” “What do you want then, Presence?” “I want what I already have! Eternal wonder, eternally fulfilled.… Not the eternal, even, just the Indefinite, that’s where all beauty is.… I’ll wait out the heat-death of the Universe to see what happens next! And in the meantime, isn’t it something, all of it?” “Yes,” Lindsay said. His heart was hammering in his chest. His robot nurse reached for him with a needle-load of soothing chemicals; he turned it off, then laughed and stretched. “It’s all very much something.”

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

By taking roughly that many attempts, sooner or later we are bound to start with a shuffled deck that is in fact completely sorted by chance. At that point we can proudly enter Christian-Griffiths into The Guinness Book alongside a not-too-shabby sort time of 0m00s. To be fair, we’d almost certainly be trying until the heat death of the universe before we got our perfect record attempt. Nonetheless, this highlights the biggest fundamental difference between record keepers and computer scientists. The fine folks at Guinness care only about best-case performance (and beer). They’re hardly blameworthy, of course: all records in sports reflect the single best performance.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

A 65-bit key would take the same attacker twice the amount of time to break, or two days. And a 128-bit key—which is at most twice the work to use for encryption—would take the same attacker 264 times longer, or one million billion years to break. (For comparison, Earth is 4.5 billion years old.) This is why you hear statements like “This can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, even if you assume the attacker builds a giant computer using all the atoms of the planet.” The weird thing is that those are not exaggerations. They’re just effects of the mathematical imbalance between encrypting and breaking. At least, that’s the theory. The problem is that encryption is just a bunch of math, and math has no agency.

The Mission: A True Story by David W. Brown

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Columbine, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, transcontinental railway, urban planning, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

NASA as an institution seems criminally incapable of preserving its hyperlinks, and thus hell-bent on burying the extraordinary digital record of its missions and activities. Searching the website of the European Space Agency, on the other hand, is like strapping on a time machine. Its gloriously maintained hyperlinks will survive the heat death of the universe. 48.NASA, JHUAPL, and Carnegie Institution of Washington, Twins Image (spacecraft image), NASA Image and Video Library, last modified August 2, 2005, https://images.nasa.gov/details-PIA10122.html. 49.NASA, JHUAPL, and Carnegie Institution of Washington, Galapagos Islands (spacecraft image), NASA Image and Video Library, last modified August 2, 2005, https://images.nasa.gov/details-PIA10121.html. 50.L.

Animal Spirits by Jackson Lears

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Doomsday Clock, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, escalation ladder, feminist movement, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, George Santayana, heat death of the universe, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, short selling, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, the market place, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

While he prepared his influential paper on the dissipation of energy, in the 1850s, Thomson recorded his developing conception: I believe the tendency in the material world is for motion to become diffused, and that as a whole the reverse of concentration is gradually going on—I believe that no physical action can ever restore the heat emitted from the Sun, and that this source is not inexhaustible; also that the motions of the Earth and other planets are losing vis viva which is converted into heat; and that although some vis viva may be restored for instance to the earth by heat received from the sun, or by other means, that the loss cannot be precisely compensated and I think it probable that it is under-compensated. For Thomson, the dissipation of energy suggested the eventual “heat death” of the universe—a prospect consistent with his theological conviction that the universe had a beginning and an end. God set it in motion, and will allow it to run down. This was a far cry from his defense of a “vital principle” a half century later, after he had become Lord Kelvin, but the young Thomson still inhabited a world where orthodox Christianity depended on faith in divine creation.

Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe

gravity well, Great Leap Forward, heat death of the universe, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, side project

The Earth would die, eventually. It would be humanity’s choice if they happened to be bound to it when that happened. She would be prepared. Would know how to craft everything they’d ever need out of the dust between the stars. It wasn’t deforestation that kept Lex up at night. It was the heat death of the universe. “A refining team found it at the Elequatorial processing facility. They didn’t see it, mind you. Just noted an anomaly and sent it to us for further investigation.” Salvez was dodging. A word, a word she did not want to say, thickened the air in the hallway as they passed through layer upon onion layer of security.

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

His own legacy rested on his achievements of twenty years before, which was not the ending that he would have wanted—but he never ceased to believe in its importance. In a conversation a few months before his death, Campbell had stretched his arms wide: “This is science fiction. It takes in all time, from before the universe was born, through the formation of suns and planets, on through their destruction and forward to the heat death of the universe, and after.” Then he put his hands an inch apart. “This is English literature—the most microscopic fraction of the whole.” His final editorial, on quasars, appeared in the December 1971 issue. It ended, “You know—things can go into a black hole, but nothing ever comes out. All roads lead to it only.”

The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better by Will Storr

data science, David Brooks, Demis Hassabis, Gordon Gekko, heat death of the universe, meta-analysis, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Wall-E

1.1 Moments of change; the control-seeking brain 1.2 Curiosity 1.3 The model-making brain; how we read; grammar; filmic word order; simplicity; active versus passive language; specific detail; show-not-tell 1.4 World-making in fantasy and science fiction 1.5 The domesticated brain; theory of mind in animism and religion; how theory-of-mind mistakes create drama 1.6 Salience; creating tension with detail 1.7 Neural models; poetry; metaphor 1.8 Cause and effect; literary versus mass-market storytelling 1.9 Change is not enough CHAPTER TWO: THE FLAWED SELF 2.0 The flawed self; the theory of control 2.1 Personality and plot 2.2 Personality and setting 2.3 Personality and point of view 2.4 Culture and character; Western versus Eastern story 2.5 Anatomy of a flawed self; the ignition point 2.6 Fictional memories; moral delusions; antagonists and moral idealism; antagonists and toxic self-esteem; the hero-maker narrative 2.7 David and Goliath 2.8 How flawed characters create meaning CHAPTER THREE: THE DRAMATIC QUESTION 3.0 Confabulation and the deluded character; the dramatic question 3.1 Multiple selves; the three-dimensional character 3.2 The two levels of story; how subconscious character struggle creates plot 3.3 Modernist stories 3.4 Wanting and needing 3.5 Dialogue 3.6 The roots of the dramatic question; social emotions; heroes and villains; moral outrage 3.7 Status play 3.8 King Lear; humiliation 3.9 Stories as tribal propaganda 3.10 Antiheroes; empathy 3.11 Origin damage CHAPTER FOUR: PLOTS, ENDINGS AND MEANING 4.0 Goal directedness; video games; personal projects; eudaemonia; plots 4.1 Plot as recipe versus plot as symphony of change 4.2 The final battle 4.3 Endings; control; the God moment 4.4 Story as a simulacrum of consciousness; transportation 4.5 The power of story 4.6 The lesson of story 4.7 The consolation of story APPENDIX: THE SACRED FLAW APPROACH A NOTE ON THE TEXT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES AND SOURCES INDEX ABOUT THE AUTHOR ALSO BY WILL STORR ABOUT THE PUBLISHER INTRODUCTION We know how this ends. You’re going to die and so will everyone you love. And then there will be heat death. All the change in the universe will cease, the stars will die, and there’ll be nothing left of anything but infinite, dead, freezing void. Human life, in all its noise and hubris, will be rendered meaningless for eternity. But that’s not how we live our lives. Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it.

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

Our universe is a lively place because there is plenty of room for entropy to increase before we hit equilibrium and everything grinds to a halt. It’s not a foregone conclusion—entropy might be able to simply grow forever. Alternatively, entropy may reach a maximum value and stop. This scenario is known as the “heat death” of the universe and was contemplated as long ago as the 1850s, amidst all the exciting theoretical developments in thermodynamics. William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was a British physicist and engineer who played an important role in laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable. But in his more reflective moments, he mused on the future of the universe: The result would inevitably be a state of universal rest and death, if the universe were finite and left to obey existing laws.

Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind by Susan Schneider

artificial general intelligence, brain emulation, deep learning, Elon Musk, Extropian, heat death of the universe, hive mind, life extension, megastructure, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, silicon-based life, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Stephen Laberge PHD

Abraham Maslow, active measures, Albert Einstein, classic study, heat death of the universe, Howard Rheingold, Menlo Park, tacit knowledge, the map is not the territory

Haskell Programming: From First Principles by Christopher Allen, Julie Moronuki

book value, c2.com, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fizzbuzz, functional programming, heat death of the universe, higher-order functions, natural language processing, spaced repetition, tiling window manager, Turing complete, Turing machine, type inference, web application, Y Combinator

This is going to be vanishingly unlikely to happen unless you’ve suddenly become a very popular URI shortening service, but it’d prevent the loss of any data. Your exercise is to devise some means of making this less likely. The easiest way would be to simply make the short codes long enough that you’d need to run a computer until the heat death of the universe to get a collision, but you should try throwing an error in the first handler we showed you first. 19.7 That’s a wrap! We hope this chapter gave you some idea of how Haskellers use the typeclasses we’ve been talking about in real code, to handle various types of problems. In the next two chapters, we’ll be looking at Foldable and Traversable, two typeclasses with some interesting properties that rely on these four algebraic structures (monoid, functor, applicative, and monad), so we encourage you to take some time to explore some of the uses we’ve demonstrated here.

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

Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

As a general rule, diffusion alone is easily cracked (although double transposition ciphers hold up better than many other pencil-and-paper systems). 11.2 Complexity Theory Complexity theory provides a methodology for analyzing the computational complexity of different cryptographic techniques and algorithms. It compares cryptographic algorithms and techniques and determines their security. Information theory tells us that all cryptographic algorithms (except one-time pads) can be broken. Complexity theory tells us whether they can be broken before the heat death of the universe. Previous Table of Contents Next Products | Contact Us | About Us | Privacy | Ad Info | Home Use of this site is subject to certain Terms & Conditions, Copyright © 1996-2000 EarthWeb Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of EarthWeb is prohibited.

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois

augmented reality, Bletchley Park, carbon tax, clean water, computer age, cosmological constant, David Attenborough, Day of the Dead, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, financial independence, game design, gravity well, heat death of the universe, jitney, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, lolcat, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, stem cell, theory of mind, time dilation, Turing machine, Turing test, urban renewal, Wall-E

‘Every particle will be so far from everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own.’ ‘Like I said, it’s a theory. Yemoa, your parents . . .’ ‘You use this as a space drive.’ ‘Your matter/anti-matter system obeys the laws of Thermodynamics, and that’s the heat-death of the universe. We’re all getter older and colder and more and more distant. Come on, you have to come in. You must be uncomfortable in that suit.’ The Aeo Taea skinsuits looked like flimsy dance costumes to don in the empty cold of interstellar space but their hides were clever works of molecular technology, recycling and refreshing and repairing.

How the World Works by Noam Chomsky, Arthur Naiman, David Barsamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, capital controls, clean water, corporate governance, deindustrialization, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, glass ceiling, heat death of the universe, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, land reform, liberation theology, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, single-payer health, strikebreaker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, transfer pricing, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

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

Others, such as Eddington, detested this vision of a recycled universe: ‘I would feel more content that the universe should accomplish some great scheme of evolution and, having achieved whatever might be achieved, lapse back into chaotic changelessness, than that its purpose should be banalized by continual repetition.’ In other words, an ever-expanding universe will eventually become cold and barren because its stars will run out of hydrogen fuel and stop shining, and Eddington preferred this ‘Big Freeze’ (or ‘heat death’) scenario to an infinitely repetitive and tedious universe. In addition to Eddington’s subjective criticism, the rebounding Big Bang faces a range of practical problems. For example, no cosmologist has yet been able to give a full account of the forces that would be required to cause a cosmic rebound. In any case, the latest observations indicate that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, which reduces the likelihood of the current expansion turning into a contraction.

Excession by Iain M. Banks

continuous integration, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, place-making

You could choose the size and therefore age of the universe you wanted to remain within, and/or visit as many as you wanted. You could, for example, head on up through older universes and attempt to access technologies perhaps beyond even this one. But just as interesting is the point that because you wouldn't be tied to one universe, one time stream, you need be involved in no heat death when the time came in your original universe; or no evaporation, or no big crunch, depending. 'It's like being on an escalator. At the moment, confined to this universe, we're stuck to this stair, this level; the possibility this artifact appears to offer is that of being able to step from one stair to another, so that before your stair on the escalator comes to the end of its travel - heat-death, big crunch, whatever you just step off one level down to another.

The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication From Ancient Times to the Internet by David Kahn

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, end-to-end encryption, Fellow of the Royal Society, heat death of the universe, Honoré de Balzac, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Maui Hawaii, Norbert Wiener, out of africa, pattern recognition, place-making, planned obsolescence, Plato's cave, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, positional goods, Republic of Letters, Searching for Interstellar Communications, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, trade route, Turing machine, union organizing, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

This oneway flow has given entropy the epithet of “time’s arrow,” because an increase in entropy invariably means an increase in the age of an (isolated) physical system. If this process were to continue to its end within the universe, Sir James Jeans wrote, “there would be neither sunlight nor starlight, but only a cool glow of radiation uniformly diffused through space.” This state of ultimate maximum entropy has been called the “heat-death of the universe.” Since an increase in entropy means an increase in anarchy, the language with the most entropy is the language with the greatest freedom. This is obviously a language with no rules at all to limit it. Such a language would naturally have no statistics to govern which letters would be used most often, which letters would be likely to follow a given letter, and so on.

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship