Epstein Secrets

dropping the ‘3.0 x’ part and just looking at the order of magnitude. The number 10°, one with eighty zeroes after it, is the number of atoms in the Earth, and 10’ the number of particles in the known Universe. 10° meters is the ‘plank number’ believed to be the smallest dimension you can have, and 10!”

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

it was certainly enacted by the sea captains. Discovery and risk were nothing but a nervy kind of scientific experiment, where the laboratory was the Earth’s surface and the tools of calculation were ships. And in our age? If we're right that our historic mandate is Dare to Connect, well the New Caste 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

ich was wild with metaphorical imagery: circular tubes full of fire, small holes through which celestial fire was visible as stars, and hemispherical Earth riding on turtleback. It was this wild modeling strategy, not Babylonian extrapolation, that jolted Eratosthenes (276- 194 BC) to perform one of the

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

anthropomorphic way, our fears about AI reflect this belief that our intelligence is what makes us special. But if we step back and look at life on Earth, we see that we are far from the most resilient species. If we’re going to be taken over at some point, it will be by some of Earth’s oldest life-for

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

ich was wild with metaphorical imagery: circular tubes full of fire, small holes through which celestial fire was visible as stars, and hemispherical Earth riding on turtleback. It was this wild modeling strategy, not Babylonian extrapolation, that jolted Eratosthenes (276- 194 BC) to perform one of the

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

anthropomorphic way, our fears about AI reflect this belief that our intelligence is what makes us special. But if we step back and look at life on Earth, we see that we are far from the most resilient species. If we’re going to be taken over at some point, it will be by some of Earth’s oldest life-for

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

jects obscure that they are actually attracted to the earth's surface at the same rate; and Darwin's epic realization that the diversity of life on Earth could arise from a single progenitor by the simple process of natural selection. None of these connections was all that obvious, at first. However,

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.

rtainty principle, as the energy it can carry is so small that no visible violation of the conservation of en- ergy will occur. Thus, an electron on Earth can emit a virtual photon that could travel to Alpha Centauri, four light-years away, and that pho- ton can still produce a force on an electron the

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

0. The strands of cable needed to make up the magnetic coils in the LHC span about 270,000 kilometers, or about six times the circum- ference of the Earth. If all the filaments in the strands were unrav- eled, they would stretch to the Sun and back more than five times. 11. The total energy in each bea

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

ntific discoveries that shape our view of planet earth. He has been described by TED Conferences as “an

leaders in science and industry including Brewster Kahle, Guy Steele, Sydney Brenner, David Waltz, Jack Schwartz, and Eric Lander. He even recruited Richard Feynman to spend his summers there. For many years, Thinking Machines Corporation connection machines were the fastest computers in the world. During 1994,