Advocates of free will can rest easy, for now. A 30-year-old classic experiment that is often used to argue against free will might have been misinterpreted.
In 1999, while sitting at a bus stop in Cuernavaca, Mexico, a Czech physicist named Petr Šeba noticed young men handing slips of paper to the bus drivers in exchange for cash. It wasn’t organized crime, he learned, but another shadow trade: Each driver paid a “spy” to record when the bus ahead of his…
Alcoa, the world’s leading producer of primary aluminum, just unveiled its first commercial building installations of smog-eating architectural panels they call Reynobond with EcoClean. The aluminum panels are coated with titanium dioxide. Its air-purifying properties have been widely used in other self-cleaning products such as air-purifying light bulbs. Alcoa claims that by adding 10,000 square…
There’s a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to this day don’t realize that information is physical…
One day, sometime around the middle of this century, during the lifetime of people now alive, the population of the planet will be smaller than it was the day before. Global population growth is slowing, will level off, and one remarkable day, decline. This day will mark the dividing line – the definitive transition –…
Some questions about his neuroscientific research on Carmelite nuns.
V.V. Raman says the most important thing the world can learn from India’s religious visions is the doctrine of polyodosism: There are multiple paths for individuals and for groups to attain spiritual fulfillment. Author Metanexus Editors