Back in the 1980s, a physicist, Per Bak, proposed that the human mind may operate on some of the same principle as a sand pile – avalanches of various sizes help keep the entire system stable overall, a process Bak named “self-organized criticality.” More precisely, “the brain’s ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously from … Read more
From the io9 Space page, the has been an announcement of an impending announcement, i.e., today it was announced that there will be a press conference tomorrow by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The speculation is that they may announce having discovered gravitational waves (the last predicted by unseen element in Einstein’s General Theory of … Read more
If you, like me, did not see the first episode of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot (and not having tv, there was no way for me to watch it live), Hulu has made it available for free to those in the United States (sorry to the rest of 6.7 billion people on the Earth). Watch … Read more
If we conceive of the universe as a kind of fluid, the physics of the cosmos makes a lot more sense (at least in my limited understanding). This cool article from Quanta Magazine offers a fluid model of the cosmos. Big Bang Secrets Swirling in a Fluid Universe By: Natalie Wolchover February 12, 2014A new … Read more
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, then you probably already know the answer (and the explanation) to the following question: if you hold on to one end of a slinky and let the other side hang down until it stops moving, what would happen to the bottom end exactly when you let … Read more
When it comes to the world beyond our direct, ordinary experience, we just don’t have what it takes to understand the differences in scale. If you are given a model Earth and Moon made to scale, for instance, and you’re asked to estimate how far apart they would have to be from each other to … Read more
Apparently the title of this documentary also has something to do with Toy Story? Well, I haven’t seen that movie, but I can tell you what this documentary is about… Infinity. The most obvious way to start thinking about infinity is through numbers: take any number, and you’ll soon realize that there is no such thing … Read more
We’ve seen in previous episodes of this 60-second Adventures in Thought series, all sorts of philosophical, logical, mathematical and scientific paradoxes and all-around weirdness. To remind you, we’ve seen Zeno’s paradox concerning motion, the grandfather paradox concerning backward travel through time, John Searle’s chinese room thought experiment concerning thought and computation, Hilbert’s infinite hotel concerning … Read more