Epstein Secrets

acuse, Dionysus II. Dion wrote: The state is in disorder. The boy is interested in philosophy. Here is a chance for you to apply all you've mastered. Plato had argued, after all, that virtuous, philosophically trained men might just manage an enduring and just rule. “I pondered the matter,” Plato wrote.

question: “Wow, do really | let this thing gatekeep me?” Who should rule in this new world? You? The New Caste? The machines? 4, The great test of Plato’s life began when he was 60 years old. He’d had an astonishing life until then, of course. He’d been taught by Socrates and, in turn, had sharpened t

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

strates that the discovery that 'nature really follows the simple and elegant rules intuited by the twentieth- and twenty-first- century versions of Plato's philosopher? is one of the most astonishing achievements of the human intellect." —Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics

o endure any- thing, rather than think as they do and live after their manner." So much for those whose lives are lived entirely in illusion, which Plato suggests includes most of humanity. Then, the allegory states that the journey upward—into the light—is the ascent of the soul into the intellectua

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.

aking, they are the best learners in the universe. Much of the process of turning data into theories happens before we are five. Since Aristotle and Plato, there have been two basic ways of addressing the problem of how we know what we know, and they are still the main approaches in machine learning. Ar

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

aking, they are the best learners in the universe. Much of the process of turning data into theories happens before we are five. Since Aristotle and Plato, there have been two basic ways of addressing the problem of how we know what we know, and they are still the main approaches in machine learning. Ar

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

but the spin will not be flipped. Thus, in the mirror a left-handed particle will turn into a right-handed particle. (And so, if the poor souls in Plato's cave had had mirrors, they might have felt less strange about the shadows of arrows flipping direction.) This working picture of left-handed par

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

erform within the superconductor, as long as it remained su- perconducting, would reveal that photons are massless in the outside world. If you were Plato's philosopher inside such a superconductor, you would have to intuit an incredible amount about the outside world be- fore you could infer that a my

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