For a physicist, all the world is information. The Universe and its workings are the ebb and flow of information. In this engaging and mind-stretching interview, Vlatko Vedral considers some of the deepest questions about the Universe and considers the implications of interpreting it in terms of information.
Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988) was an American theoretical physicist who became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. In his poem ‘Wonder’ he muses on the emergence of complexity and consciousness from the blind play of atoms.
Creationism and Scientism appear to disagree on almost everything but, as B Alan Wallace examines, they share much more in common than either group would like to admit.
By studying how ant colonies work without any one leader, Deborah Gordon has identified striking similarities in how ant colonies, brains, cells and computer networks regulate themselves.
Enrico Coen suggests that there are only seven organising principles sufficient to explain much, if not all, of biology – whether we are dealing with genetics, development, evolution, learning and brain function, populations or culture.
Clouds are often given a ‘bad press’ but, as the founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society discusses, looking at clouds puts you in a frame of mind that involves embracing the fortuitous formations, the stimulation of the imagination and the creation of ideas.
Cognitive scientists hypothesize that our ability to imagine is the result of something called a “mental workplace,” a neural network that coordinates activity across multiple regions of the brain.
Discussing his latest research, neuroscientist Alex Schlegel explores this in its relation to consciousness and the future of ‘fathoming the mind’.
Murray Hunter explores imagination as a multidimensional concept which encompasses a number of different modes that may overlap, work in tandem, be functional, or even dysfunctional.
Metaphorical thinking — our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other — shapes our view of the world and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. Brain Pickings founder and author, Maria Popova, discusses how children have an instinctive metaphor-making ability.
Originally published in ‘Brain Pickings’, the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large, this forms the second part of her article on W.I.B Beveridge’s ‘The Art of Scientific Investigation’ in which she examines his ideas on the role of intuition and the imagination.