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New particles may yet be discovered, and even new laws. But it is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.

What makes “Mind and Cosmos” worth reading is that Dr. Nagel is an atheist, who rejects the creationist idea of an intelligent designer. The answers, he believes, may still be found through science, but only by expanding it further than it may be willing to go.

“Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning,” he wrote, “but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that the tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.”

This may not sound scary, but the heat death is far worse than being burnt to a crisp. That's because nearly everything in everyday life requires some kind of temperature difference, either directly or indirectly.

This was the first evidence of a fundamentally new kind of energy, dubbed "dark energy", which didn't behave like anything else in the cosmos.

Dark energy has a peculiar property. As the universe expands, its density remains constant. That means more of it pops into existence over time, to keep pace with the increasing volume of the universe. This is unusual, but doesn't break any laws of physics.

James H. Simons likes to play against type. He is a billionaire star of mathematics and private investment who often wins praise for his financial gifts to scientific research and programs to get children hooked on math.But in his Manhattan office, high atop a Fifth Avenue building in the Flatiron district, he’s quick to tell of his career failings.He was forgetful. He was demoted. He found out the hard way that he was terrible at programming computers. “I’d keep forgetting the notation,” Dr. Simons said. “I couldn’t write programs to save my life.”After that, he was fired.His message is clearly aimed at young people: If I can do it, so can you.

Down one floor from his office complex is Math for America, a foundation he set up to promote math teaching in public schools. Nearby, on Madison Square Park, is the National Museum of Mathematics, or MoMath, an educational center he helped finance. It opened in 2012 and has had a quarter million visitors.

Dr. Simons received his doctorate at 23; advanced code breaking for the National Security Agency at 26; led a university math department at 30; won geometry’s top prize at 37; founded Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, at 44; and began setting up charitable foundations at 56.

As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

Information, he argues, is more than just the contents of our overflowing libraries and Web servers. It is “the blood and the fuel, the vital principle” of the world. Human consciousness, society, life on earth, the cosmos — it’s bits all the way down.

Shannon’s paper, published the same year as the invention of the transistor, instantaneously created the field of information theory, with broad applications in engineering and computer science.

information theory wound up reshaping fields from economics to philosophy, and heralded a dramatic rethinking of biology and physics.

Dr. Heuer, born in Bad Boll in southern Germany in 1948, has spent his career in the trenches of particle physics, in which scientists emulate 3-year-olds by smashing bits of matter together to see what comes out.

He had an opportunity to put that philosophy to the test early in his term at CERN, when physicists reported in a seminar there that they had measured subatomic particles known as neutrinos streaming from Geneva to their detector in Italy faster than the speed of light, contrary to the laws of physics then known.

The neutrino controversy helped set a sort of dubious stage for the main event in particle physics so far this century: the Higgs boson.

Two teams of physicists working independently at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, reported on Tuesday that they had seen traces of what could be a new fundamental particle of nature.

One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.

At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.

seen traces of what could be a new fundamental particle of nature.

One possibility, out of a gaggle of wild and not-so-wild ideas springing to life as the day went on, is that the particle — assuming it is real — is a heavier version of the Higgs boson, a particle that explains why other particles have mass. Another is that it is a graviton, the supposed quantum carrier of gravity, whose discovery could imply the existence of extra dimensions of space-time.

At the end of a long chain of “ifs” could be a revolution, the first clues to a theory of nature that goes beyond the so-called Standard Model, which has ruled physics for the last quarter-century.

We are different, of course. Our household gods are not Plato and Aristotle — philosophers of a fixed cosmos — but Darwin and Freud.

We know the past better than Adams did, but it speaks to us from a far greater remove. And our implicit notion of what lies at the bottom of history is not a moral but a psychological one

What does Adams have to say to us today? I have trouble answering this question without resorting to Adams’s own habits of thought — without, that is, thinking in moral rather than psychological terms. Born in 1767, old enough to have seen the Battle of Bunker Hill with his own eyes, drilled by both parents in the imperishable virtues of republicanism, Adams exalted the ideal of public service to a degree that almost beggars our imagination.

Thomas Kuhn, the well-known physicist, philosopher and historian of science, was born 94 years ago today. He went on to become an important and broad-ranging thinker, and one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, transformed the philosophy of science and changed the way many scientists think about their work. But his influence extended well beyond the academy: The book was widely read — and seeped into popular culture

One measure of his influence is the widespread use of the term "paradigm shift," which he introduced in articulating his views about how science changes over time.

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?

what happens to a dying star as it collapses to form a singularity — that tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of a black hole.

shaped the course of modern physics and changed our common understanding of why everything that is is

Time, of course, seems real to us. We live in and through time. But to physicists, time's fundamental reality is an illusion.

Ever since Newton, physicists have been developing ever-more exact laws describing the behavior of the world. These laws live outside of time because they don't change. That means these laws are more real than time.

The idea of timeless laws works fine when it's applied to parts of the Universe, like jet planes and GPS satellites, but Smolin argues, "it falls apart when applied to the Universe as whole."

“Nothing is fixed. All is in flux,” physicist Alan Lightman wrote in his soaring meditation on how to live with our longing for absolutes in a relative universe, reminding us that all the physical evidence gleaned through millennia of scientific inquiry indicates the inherent inconstancy of the cosmos.

This awareness, so unnerving against the backdrop of our irrepressible yearning for constancy and permanence, was first unlatched when the ancients began suspecting that the Earth, rather than being the static center of the heavens it was long thought to be, is in motion, right beneath our feet. But it took millennia for the most disorienting evidence of inconstancy to dawn — the discovery that the universe itself is in flux, constantly expanding, growing thinner and thinner as stars grow farther and farther apart.

If the universe is constantly expanding, to trace it backward along the arrow of time is to imagine it smaller and smaller, all the way down to the seeming nothingness that banged into the somethingness within which everything exists.

The fact is, we still don’t know what life is.

since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things.

If you say life consumes fuel to sustain itself with energy, you risk including fire; if you demand the ability to reproduce, you exclude mules. NASA hasn’t been able to do better than a working definition: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”