The last four days I spent in Atlanta, at Georgia Tech, visiting Eric Smith, the lead author of a pathbreaking book on the Origin of Life.  A couple years ago, I convinced Eric to write a book with me to extend his views to more general origins questions, from the origin of the Universe, to the origin of life, to the origin of consciousness -- or you could say, the origins of the Universe, life, and the ability to ask these questions.

By Piet Hut

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Last week I wrote about teaching physical reality in a more honest way in high school, starting with the best theory we have of gravitation, general relativity.  The other pillar of fundamental physics, also discovered early in the 20th century, is quantum mechanics, which is even more fun to teach without using mathematics.

By Piet Hut

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In high school, students are taught 19th century physics, two centuries out of date.  Mechanics and gravitation appear as it was known in the late 17th century, and electricity and magnetism as it was known in the early 19th century.  This is a shame: it would be like teaching pre-Darwinian biology!

By Piet Hut

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Predictions of technological singularities are as wrong as predictions of singularities in physics, which have always been the harbingers of new physics.  When any prediction leads to division by zero, we can be sure that new laws or regularities will set in.  What singularities are good for is . . .

By Piet Hut

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When the Universe was ten microseconds old, mist started to form in the Universe.  By the time the Universe reached the age of a hundred microseconds, the mist was complete: the Universe was drenched in tiny quark-gluon droplets that would become the protons and neutrons in the nuclei of the atoms that our bodies are built out of.

By Piet Hut

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In nature, culture, and technology, surprising novelty has appeared as products of ongoing evolution.  Many new forms  of organization are themselves remarkably life-like.  A key aspect is that their building blocks evolve together with  their structures and processes -- and so do we, as building blocks of many overlapping societal systems.

By Piet Hut

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To point out something really new, we can use a quick metaphor or we can take our time to tell a story that is richer in details.  A computer simulation can do both: pointing out a few salient characteristics of a situation as a kind of metaphor, and then letting it run to dynamically produce its own narrative.

By Piet Hut

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This weekend I flew out to San Francisco, to meet Carl Pabo.  We have only met a few times since we first met 12 years ago, but we are clearly kindred spirits.  We both want to radically change the way our society deals with knowledge, and after a few decades of exploration, we each are in the process of building up an organization that aims at doing just that.  The difference is . . . 

By Piet Hut

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Science is based on theory and experiment.  But to understand theory, we need to experience theory.  Unless we fall into an experience of mathematics, we cannot know what theory means, and we cannot compare theory and experiment.  In experiencing theory, I have encountered three very different levels of insight.

By Piet Hut

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This week, exactly fifteen years ago, two astrophysicists and two astronauts started a non-profit organization to protect the Earth from asteroid impacts.  I was one of the two astrophysicists.  We chose the name B612 Foundation in honor of the home of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince.

By Piet Hut

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This week, exactly thirty years ago, Scientific American published a special issue on advanced computing.  My computer scientist friend, Gerald Sussman, and I received the honor of being asked to write the article on Advanced Computing for Science.  All of science!  That was a daunting task.
By Piet Hut

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A few days ago I gave a short talk, followed by a much longer discussion, in the Consciousness Club series at YHouse.  The topic was the nature of reality, with the full title "Matter, Experience, and Reality".  Actually, I wound up talking about two more aspects of reality that we consciously partake in: what I like to call appearance and presence.
By Piet Hut

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Breakthroughs in science are often triggered by a realization that one or more of our assumptions were wrong.  In the rapid growth of experimental and theoretical insights in neuroscience, which of the underlying assumptions could be candidates for revision, potentially inducing a big shift in understanding?
By Piet Hut

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I gave a talk at a workshop on the topic of Universal Biology, a little over a week ago, at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) in Tokyo. The title of my talk was From Universal Biology to Universal Science, in which I argued that the structure of science can be understood as a generalization of a generalization of biology.
By Piet Hut

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The International Society for Theoretical Psychology holds its main conferences every two years in a different country.   This year the choice was Japan, and last week its members came together in Rikkyo University, one of the most prominent private universities in Tokyo.
By Piet Hut

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I was an enthusiastic proponent of the Open Source Movement, almost from the day that I encountered the Unix programming environment.  I very quickly realized how powerful it was, to write software that is very modular, and where the modules could be shared freely among anyone on the planet.

By Piet Hut

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The question of the origin of life on Earth, and possibly elsewhere in the Universe, is a fascinating topic of study.  In order to ask how life first appeared in a non-living environment, obviously it would help to know what exactly life is, and what sets it apart from non-living forms of matter and energy.

By Piet Hut

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What is science?  In how far is it different from other human activities?  Several answers come to mind.  Some people may insist that the use of mathematical models is crucial.  Others may point to the use of experiments ...

By Piet Hut

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A couple weeks ago, I identified the origins of life with the first information revolution on Earth.  But if life had never got beyond the state it was in for the first three billion years of its existence, it would have been a very quiet revolution indeed: there would have been nobody to notice it, and nobody to celebrate it.  At that time, well before the Cambrian explosion of diversity, complex multicellular organisms had not yet appeared...

By Piet Hut

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In my previous post I wrote that the relationship between matter and information is one of the great mysteries in all of science. But what counts as a mystery?
By Piet Hut

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