Epstein Secrets

Newton was an extraordinary man. He discovered many of the physical principles we use today, and his view of the Universe reigned unchallenged until Einstein’s discovery of relativity. He was also, by many accounts, a nasty piece of work. Not only was he a famous academic, he also head of the Royal Mint. H

k. Who cares why? In 1964, John Bell, an Irish physicist working at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (“CERN’), devised a way to test Einstein’s hidden variable theory. He pointed out that if photons possess hidden variables and we randomly measure them with a detector set at three angles, w

ile, we realize there might be no solution. And indeed there is not. This is the Kochen- Specker Paradox. The odd shaped cubes on the building in the Escher print are an example of one of these impossible figures. An analogy to this problem is trying to solve a_ broken Rubik’s Cube. There is a really mis

- and which, we conjecture, is structurally and dynamically basically the same as the creativity underlying the genius of adult human creators like Einstein, Dali, Dostoevsky, Hendrix, and so forth ... and as the creativity that will power massively capable genius machines in future. We will consider th

g by High-Dimensional Embedding. 2002. Hob78. J. Hobbs. Resolving pronoun references. Lingua, 44:311-338, 1978. Hof79. Douglas Holstadter. Codel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic, 1979. Hol75. J. R. Holland. Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. University of Michigan Press, 1975

on to win Nobel Prizes for Physics in 1956 and 1968, respectively. There are many similar anecdotes: Apparently stupid people go on to great things. Einstein’s teacher famously stated he would never amount to anything and Sir John Gurdon’s school report said he was ‘too stupid’ for science. He went on to d

piece of trivia links Hofstadter with Penrose: Roger Penrose and his father invented the Penrose Steps, inspiring the never- ending staircase in the Escher prints featured in Hofstadter’s book. For movie buffs, the Penrose steps appear in the film Inception, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The fact we get pl