Shortly after posting The End of the World on my blog, someone suggested that I should submit my super-reality paper to the peer-reviewed journal, Axiomathes. No, I hadn’t heard of it either: I had to look it up on Google. The blurb from the publisher, Springer, says: “Axiomathes publishes studies of evolving ideas, perspectives, and […]
Douglas is standing beside his car, mesmerized, gazing into the distance, trying to grasp what his eyes are seeing. His phone rings: “Where are you?” He answers in a flat monotone, struggling to control his mounting panic: “You could call it the end of the world.” This is my favourite moment of The Thirteenth […]
In The Finite Multiverse I computer-painted a picture to illustrate my point that not every conceivable universe can, in fact, exist. My picture was the clock tower of Big Ben draped with a vast Nazi swastika flag. Now the BBC have a trailer for a miniseries they’re going to run this month – and […]
The proofs in mathematics that I like best are those which are simple but unexpected. I’m thinking of proofs like the one about the infinity of primes, or the proof that the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers. These particularly appeal to me because you start out […]
I get the New Scientist magazine every week. The front cover usually shows the headline of the main feature inside. Often, this describes a fundamental idea about quantum theory, newly published on arXiv or in one of the print journals. This probably shouldn’t be surprising, in spite of the fact that the theory’s roots are […]
Most papers that are published on arXiv or in paper journals carry a line under the author’s name telling you how to contact them. Generally, this is the address of the institution, typically a university, where the author did the work, and this can include their email address. Of course, being retired, I had no […]
Professor Ramin Zahedi of Hokkaido University, who so kindly endorsed my original submission to the Cornell University arXiv site, also encouraged me to submit the paper to the PhilSci archive hosted by the University of Pittsburgh. I have to admit that I wasn’t familiar with this archive, although I had occasionally come across it […]
Candidly, I’ve lived with the idea of reality being purely a mathematical structure for so long that I’ve forgotten what it felt like before the penny first dropped. I owe my Damascene conversion in 1980 to Douglas Hofstadter’s brilliant, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which was written primarily to explain the […]