Dear Colleagues, Science & Ultimate Reality In recent years much attention has been given to the possibility of unifying the various forces of nature within a quantum mechanical framework and to the formulation of a so-called theory of everything. (See the paper posted in this thread by Lee Smolin.) The quest being carried on by…
Dear Colleagues, Science & Ultimate Reality In his excellent summary of John Wheeler’s career, Kenneth Ford identified three phases in Wheeler’s thinking: the particle period, the field period, and the information period. The concept of information is inextricably bound up with quantum mechanics, and Wheeler’s incisive question “How come the quantum?” stands as a challenge…
†The origin of time asymmetry in the physical universe has exercised the attention of many of the world’s greatest physicists since the time of Maxwell and Boltzmann. The problem is easily stated. Almost all physical processes display a unidirectionality in time, yet the underlying laws of physics (with a minor exception in particle physics) are…