Even for the brain of a worm, the best theory on offer would, she says, take several billion years to calculate. That can’t be the right answer.
Category: mathematics – Page 134
Aubrey de Grey Longevity Q&A — The last 25 years, SENS, Longevity Escape Velocity, & More
Annotated!
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English author and biomedical gerontologist. He is the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation and VP of New Technology Discovery at AgeX Therapeutics.
Feel free to ask any related questions that you want Aubrey to try and answer!
Futurist Foundation is a non-profit organization with the goal to connect futurists and promote crowd-sourced projects in science, technology, engineering, mathematics & design.
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0:00 Introduction.
A “no math” (but seven-part) guide to modern quantum mechanics
Welcome to “The curious observer’s guide to quantum mechanics”–featuring particle/wave duality.
The Mathematics of Consciousness
https://youtube.com/watchv=efVBUDnD_no&feature=share
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In this video I talk about a few approaches to mathematically describe consciousness and their shortcomings. I also briefly talk about what such studies could one day be good for. You can watch the talks from the workshop that I mention (and many more!!) here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWgIDgfzRDp-PmQvMsYiNlg.
#Science #Mathematics #Consciousness.
2020’s Biggest Breakthroughs in Math and Computer Science
For mathematicians and computer scientists, 2020 was full of discipline-spanning discoveries and celebrations of creativity. We’d like to take a moment to recognize some of these achievements.
1. A landmark proof simply titled MIP = RE” establishes that quantum computers calculating with entangled qubits can theoretically verify the answers to an enormous set of problems. Along the way, the five computer scientists who authored the proof also answered two other major questions: Tsirelson’s problem in physics, about models of particle entanglement, and a problem in pure mathematics called the Connes embedding conjecture.
2. In February, graduate student Lisa Piccirillo dusted off some long-known but little-utilized mathematical tools to answer a decades-old question about knots. A particular knot named after the legendary mathematician John Conway had long evaded mathematical classification in terms of a higher-dimensional property known as sliceness. But by developing a version of the knot that yielded to traditional knot analysis, Piccirillo finally determined that the Conway knot is not slice.
3. For decades, mathematicians have used computer programs known as proof assistants to help them write proofs — but the humans have always guided the process, choosing the proof’s overall strategy and approach. That may soon change. Many mathematicians are excited about a proof assistant called Lean, an efficient and addictive proof assistant that could one day help tackle major problems. First, though, mathematicians must digitize thousands of years of mathematical knowledge, much of it unwritten, into a form Lean can process. Researchers have already encoded some of the most complicated mathematical ideas, proving in theory that the software can handle the hard stuff. Now it’s just a question of filling in the rest.
Self and Consciousness | Prof. Anil Seth
Happy 2021 from 2020.
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In this talk, Anil looks into the mechanisms at play when experiencing both inner and outer phenomena, the central components of which are prediction and perception.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and the Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is a Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow, and a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Professor Seth is Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness, sits on the steering group and advisory board of the Human Mind Project, and was President of the British Science Association Psychology Section in 2017.
He is the co-author of the ‘30 Second Brain’, and contributes regularly to a variety of media including New Scientist, The Guardian, and the BBC. His 2017 TED talk has been viewed more than 9 million times. Professor Seth’s research bridges neuroscience, mathematics, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, philosophy and psychiatry. He has also worked extensively with playwrights, dancers and other artists to shape a truly humanistic view of consciousness and self. You can keep up to date with his work at www.anilseth.com.
SpaceX Completed A Record-breaking Launch Manifest In 2020
SpaceX’s fleet of reusable Falcon 9 rockets enabled it to conduct more missions in 2020 than ever before. SpaceX completed a record-breaking launch manifest this year, it conducted 26 rocket launches –the most annual launches it has performed in history. Rocket reusability has played a significant role in increasing launch cadence. Falcon 9 is capable of launching payload to orbit and returning from space to land vertically on landing pads and autonomous droneships at sea. To date, SpaceX has landed 70 orbital-class Falcon 9 boosters and reused 49. This year the company accomplished flying two particular rocket boosters 7 times. Engineers aim to reuse a first-stage booster at least 10 times to reduce the cost of spaceflight. The most reused Falcon 9 rockets that reached 7 reflights this year are two first-stage boosters identified as B1051 and B1049. SpaceX is just three flights away from achieving 10 reflights. SpaceX officials state Falcon 9 [Block 5] is designed to perform up to 100 reflights.
Stephen Marr, a spaceflight photographer who goes by the name @spacecoast_stve on Twitter, shared a photo collage of all the Falcon 9 boosters used in 2020, “SpaceX carried out a record-breaking 26 launches this year, but how many boosters did it take to get it done? The answer is 11. And here they are!” he wrote. SpaceX founder Elon Musk replied to Marr’s tweet –“Falcon was 25% of successful orbital launches in 2020, but maybe a majority of payload to orbit. Anyone done the math?” he said.
The Case for Teleological Evolution
The Big Bang might never have existed as many cosmologists start to question the origin of the Universe. The Big Bang is a point in time defined by a mathematical extrapolation. The Big Bang theory tells us that something has to have changed around 13.7 billion years ago. So, there is no “point” where the Big Bang was, it was always an extended volume of space, according to the Eternal Inflation model. In light of Digital Physics, as an alternative view, it must have been the Digital Big Bang with the lowest possible entropy in the Universe — 1 bit of information — a coordinate in the vast information matrix. If you were to ask what happened before the first observer and the first moments after the Big Bang, the answer might surprise you with its straightforwardness: We extrapolate backwards in time and that virtual model becomes “real” in our minds as if we were witnessing the birth of the Universe.
In his theoretical work, Andrew Strominger of Harvard University speculates that the Alpha Point (the Big Bang) and the Omega Point form the so-called ‘Causal Diamond’ of the conscious observer where the Alpha Point has only 1 bit of entropy as opposed to the maximal entropy of some incredibly gigantic amount of bits at the Omega Point. While suggesting that we are part of the conscious Universe and time is holographic in nature, Strominger places the origin of the Universe in the infinite ultra-intelligent future, the Omega Singularity, rather than the Big Bang.
The Universe is not what textbook physics tells us except that we perceive it in this way — our instruments and measurement devices are simply extensions of our senses, after all. Reality is not what it seems. Deep down it’s pure information — waves of potentiality — and consciousness orchestrating it all. The Big Bang theory, drawing a lot of criticism as of late, uses a starting assumption of the “Universe from nothing,” (a proverbial miracle, a ‘quantum fluctuation’ christened by scientists), or the initial Cosmological Singularity. But aside from this highly improbable happenstance, we can just as well operate from a different set of assumptions and place the initial Cosmological Singularity at the Omega Point — the transcendental attractor, the Source, or the omniversal holographic projector of all possible timelines.
Artificial intelligence solves Schrödinger’s equation
A team of scientists at Freie Universität Berlin has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) method for calculating the ground state of the Schrödinger equation in quantum chemistry. The goal of quantum chemistry is to predict chemical and physical properties of molecules based solely on the arrangement of their atoms in space, avoiding the need for resource-intensive and time-consuming laboratory experiments. In principle, this can be achieved by solving the Schrödinger equation, but in practice this is extremely difficult.
Up to now, it has been impossible to find an exact solution for arbitrary molecules that can be efficiently computed. But the team at Freie Universität has developed a deep learning method that can achieve an unprecedented combination of accuracy and computational efficiency. AI has transformed many technological and scientific areas, from computer vision to materials science. “We believe that our approach may significantly impact the future of quantum chemistry,” says Professor Frank Noé, who led the team effort. The results were published in the reputed journal Nature Chemistry.
Central to both quantum chemistry and the Schrödinger equation is the wave function —a mathematical object that completely specifies the behavior of the electrons in a molecule. The wave function is a high-dimensional entity, and it is therefore extremely difficult to capture all the nuances that encode how the individual electrons affect each other. Many methods of quantum chemistry in fact give up on expressing the wave function altogether, instead attempting only to determine the energy of a given molecule. This however requires approximations to be made, limiting the prediction quality of such methods.