Epstein Secrets

Long Now project, then, was like one of those carefully isolated arctic freezers, where samples of essential grains and DNA from Beethoven’s hair and Einstein’s brain are sunk and iced against the godforbid day in which our basic feedstock or a chunk of humanity has been wiped out by accident or disaster. B

“Space-Time Convergence;” Later geographer David Harvey renamed it as “Space Time Compression,” which is

Hillis thesis, p. 19 190 He drove: Po Bronson, “The Long Now: Time Traveling with Danny Hillis”, Wired (May, 1998) 191 Feynman: W. Daniel Hillis, “Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine” Physics Today February 1989, p. 78 192 “At times”: Michael J. Black “Book Reviews: The Connection Machine”, Al Magazine

day” (as the title of a book by civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate puts it) and is in jeopardy of impris

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré ’s Maps: Empires of Time. Neil Gershenfeld is a physicist and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. He is the author of

Afterwords, which were very much on their wavelength. I jumped at the opportunity, the main reason being that the keynote speaker was none other than Richard Feynman. I love 12 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016815 to spend time with physicists, the reason being that they think about the universe, 1.e. everything. And no phys

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré ’s Maps: Empires of Time. Neil Gershenfeld is a physicist and director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. He is the author of

day” (as the title of a book by civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate puts it) and is in jeopardy of impris

Afterwords, which were very much on their wavelength. I jumped at the opportunity, the main reason being that the keynote speaker was none other than Richard Feynman. I love 12 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016232 to spend time with physicists, the reason being that they think about the universe, 1.e. everything. And no phys

determined by phenomena that lie well beneath the surface of our experience—phenomena that don't rely in any way upon our existence. In this sense, Einstein was wrong: "God" does appear to play dice with the universe, or universes. So far we have been lucky. But like playing at the craps table, our luck

ot implemented. Novel ideas generally stagnate and die without the courage to implement them. I bring this up here because perhaps the true mark of Einstein's ge- nius was not his mathematical prowess (although, contrary to conven- tional wisdom, he was mathematically talented), but his creativity and hi

small scales, nature behaves in a way that human intuition cannot ever fully embrace, because we cannot directly experience the behavior itself. As Richard Feynman once argued, no one understands quantum mechanics—if by under- stand one means developing a concrete physical picture that appears fully intuitive.

hrough Newton's discovery of the laws of motion, through the experimental and theoretical investigations of the nature of electromagnetism, through Einstein's unification of space and time, through the discoveries of the nucleus, quantum mechanics, protons, neutrons, and the discovery of the weak and st

romagnetic wave whose speed could be calculated from first principles, and lo and behold, the prediction was equal to the mea- sured speed of light. Einstein's unification of space and time predicted that clocks would slow for moving observers, and lo and behold, they do, and in just the way he predicted

tion. Still, questions remained, especially given the apparent disagree- ment with the Seattle/Oxford results. At a talk at Caltech on the subject, Richard Feynman, characteristically, homed in on a key outstanding ex- perimental question and asked whether the SLAC experimentalists had checked that the detector

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

ing certain things are true. Science does not forbid beliefs. It just requires you to be prepared to have one overturned if a better one comes along. Richard Feynman summed this up in a lecture he delivered at Cal Tech: “If you want to discover a theorem,” he said, “first, you guess, then you work out some effect

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. In his second-best book, the great medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi described the new place-based

hine and founded what may have been the first Al company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it. This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist remarked, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” Maybe “despite” is the wrong word, since Feynman had

is a science historian, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor and co- founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, and the author of Einstein's Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. In his second-best book, the great medieval mathematician al-Khwarizmi described the new place-based

hine and founded what may have been the first Al company—Thinking Machines Corporation—to produce and market it. This was despite a lunch he had with Richard Feynman, at which the celebrated physicist remarked, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” Maybe “despite” is the wrong word, since Feynman had

quantum craziness of reality was taken by an unlikely explorer, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. In one sense, Dirac was the perfect man for the job. As Einstein is re- puted to have later said of him, "This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful! When I think of Dirac, an old jok

e most important in modern particle physics, is, not surprisingly, called the Dirac equation. (Some years later, when Dirac first met the physicist Richard Feynman, whom we shall come to shortly, Dirac said after another awkward silence, "I have an equation. Do you?") Dirac's equation was beautiful, and as th