Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe — through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations.
Lee Smolin is an American theoretical physicist. Smolin is best known for his contributions to quantum gravity theory, in particular the approach known as loop quantum gravity. He advocates that the two primary approaches to quantum gravity, loop quantum gravity and string theory, can be reconciled as different aspects of the same underlying theory.
Some truths are mathematically outside the reach of the human brain, despite its abilities. As pure mathematics has shown us, some propositions cannot be proved or disproved from within a given system. They require a way of getting “outside the box” in order to gain information about them that could lead to a proof or disproof of an assertion.
Our inherent inability to penetrate our cosmic past to a level that could get us back to the Big Bang and whatever caused it may be our main stumbling block on the way to understanding where we came from, why we came here, where we are going, and who or what made us. In any logical system there are unprovable assertions, and the question of God may well be one of these unknowns — forever to remain outside our reach.
When it comes to consciousness, nothing allows us to deduce the properties of subjective experience — the redness of red, the bitterness of regret, the warmth of fire — from the mass, momentum, spin, charge, or any other property of subatomic particles bouncing around in the brain. This is the hard problem of consciousness.
There is indeed no ‘hard problem’: the brain is in no way fundamentally distinct from mind. But instead of meaning that mind is nothing but the brain, what this means is that the brain is nothing but mind! It is mind that is the broader framework, encompassing the brain but also the rest of existence. Our heads are in mind, not mind in our heads. The brain is merely an image in mind of a process of mind.
Bernardo Kastrup has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering with specializations in artificial intelligence and reconfigurable computing. Kastrup has worked as a scientist in some of the world’s foremost research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). He is a successful entrepreneur and currently works in the high-tech industry. He writes about metaphysics and philosophy of mind.
Although theoretical physicist Paul Dirac apparently showed his usual Trappist calm, he was jubilant. In a few squiggles of his pen, he had described the behavior of every single electron that had ever existed in the universe. The equation was ‘achingly beautiful’, as physicist Frank Wilczek later described it: like Einstein’s equations of general relativity, the Dirac equation was universal yet fundamentally simple; nothing in it could be changed without destroying its power.
Nearly seventy years later, stonemasons carved a succinct version of the Dirac equation on his commemorative stone in Westminister Abbey: iγ.∂ψ = mψ.
A wonderful, and thoroughly engaging biographical account of the life of one of the greatest scientific geniuses of the modern age. Based on previously undiscovered archives, The Strangest Man reveals the many facets of physicist Paul Dirac’s brilliantly original mind. Dirac is remembered as a unique individual who could conjure the laws of nature from pure thought. The Strangest Man is a gem in that it provides the benefit of having been written by an insider — Graham Farmelo is a physicist — but Graham’s detailed explanations of the intricacies of physics are easy to follow, and do not require a scientific background.
Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation, which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory“. At age 31, Dirac was the youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. He also did work that forms the basis of modern attempts to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics.
Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. He was an extraordinarily reserved loner, relentlessly literal-minded and seemingly devoid of empathy. Nevertheless, Dirac was an intensely loyal family man. His tastes in the arts ranged from Beethoven to Cher, and from Rembrandt to Mickey Mouse.
Albert Einstein said of Dirac, “This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful”.Nevertheless, by virtue to his mathematical brilliance, Dirac earned the distinction of being one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century.
Dirac married Margit Wigner in 1937. He adopted Margit’s two children, Judith and Gabriel. Paul and Margit Dirac had two children together, both daughters, Mary Elizabeth and Florence Monica.
Asked to explain his discoveries in quantum mechanics, Dirac responded that they “cannot be explained in words at all”.
Graham Farmelo is best known form his work on science communication and is the author of The Strangest Man, a prize-winning biography of the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac.
Farmelo is a biographer and science writer, a By-Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, U.K., and an Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, U.S.A. His research was in the field of particle physics (hadronic interactions) and chaos (scattering theory) Farmelo lives in London.
Who Knows Anyhow? 