But scientists in the late 20th century have found patterns in things formerly thought to be chaotic; their theories help explain the unstable irregular yet highly structured features of everyday experience. It now seems likely that randomness and chaos play an essential role in the evolution of the living world-and of intelligence itself. Script by Dr. Roger White.

    The Big Questions series is designed to let renowned experts address the 20 most fundamental and frequently asked questions of a major branch of science or philosophy. Each 3,000-word essay simply and concisely examines a question that has eternally perplexed enquiring minds, and provides answers based on the latest research. This ambitious project is a unique distillation of humanity's best ideas. In "The Big Questions: Evolution," Francisco Ayala answers the 20 key questions: What is evolution? Was Darwin right? What is natural selection? What is survival of the fittest? Is evolution a random process? What is a species? What are chromosomes, genes and DNA? How do genes build bodies? What is molecular evolution? How did life begin? What is the tree of life? Am I really a monkey? What does the fossil record tell us? What is the missing link? Is intelligence inherited? Will humans continue to evolve? Can I clone myself? Where does morality come from? Is language a uniquely human attribute? Is Creationism true?

    Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines.The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness.In an engaging style that will captivate audiences from the merely curious to the professional scientist, Hawkins shows how a clear understanding of how the brain works will make it possible for us to build intelligent machines, in silicon, that will exceed our human ability in surprising ways.Written with acclaimed science writer Sandra Blakeslee, On Intelligence promises to completely transfigure the possibilities of the technology age. It is a landmark book in its scope and clarity.

    

    He was trying to find an equation that explained all physical reality - a theory of everything. He failed, but others have taken up the challenge in a remarkable quest that is shedding light on unsuspected secrets of the cosmos.Experimental physicist and award-winning educator Dr. Don Lincoln of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory takes you on this exciting journey in The Theory of Everything: The Quest to Explain All Reality. Suitable for the intellectually curious at all levels and assuming no background beyond basic high-school math, these 24 half-hour lectures cover recent developments at the forefront of particle physics and cosmology, while delving into the history of the centuries-long search for this holy grail of science.You trace the dream of a theory of everything through Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Feynman, Gell-Mann, Weinberg, and other great physicists, charting their progress toward an all-embracing, unifying theory. Their resulting equations are the masterpieces of physics, which Dr. Lincoln explains in fascinating and accessible detail. Studying them is like touring a museum of great works of art - works that are progressing toward an ultimate, as-yet-unfinished masterpiece.Listening Length: 12 hours and 21 minutes

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    This time physicist Robert Gilmore takes us on a journey with Dorothy, following the yellow building block road through the land of the Wizard of Quarks. Using characters and situations based on the Wizard of Oz story, we learn along the way about the fascinating world of particle physics. Classes of particles, from quarks to leptons are shown in an atomic garden, where atoms and molecules are produced. See how Dorothy, The Tin Geek, and the Cowardly Lion experience the bizarre world of subatomic particles.

    But many people use data in ways they don't even understand, meaning they aren't getting the most from it. Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way will change that.This book will give you a complete understanding of Bayesian statistics through simple explanations and un-boring examples. Find out the probability of UFOs landing in your garden, how likely Han Solo is to survive a flight through an asteroid shower, how to win an argument about conspiracy theories, and whether a burglary really was a burglary, to name a few examples.By using these off-the-beaten-track examples, the author actually makes learning statistics fun. And you'll learn real skills, like how to:- How to measure your own level of uncertainty in a conclusion or belief- Calculate Bayes theorem and understand what it's useful for- Find the posterior, likelihood, and prior to check the accuracy of your conclusions- Calculate distributions to see the range of your data- Compare hypotheses and draw reliable conclusions from themNext time you find yourself with a sheaf of survey results and no idea what to do with them, turn to Bayesian Statistics the Fun Way to get the most value from your data.

    His Incompleteness Theorem turned not only mathematics but also the whole world of science and philosophy on its head. Equally legendary were Gö's eccentricities, his close friendship with Albert Einstein, and his paranoid fear of germs that eventually led to his death from self-starvation. Now, in the first popular biography of this strange and brilliant thinker, John Casti and Werner DePauli bring the legend to life. After describing his childhood in the Moravian capital of Brno, the authors trace the arc of Gö's remarkable career, from the famed Vienna Circle, where philosophers and scientists debated notions of truth, to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived and worked until his death in 1978. In the process, they shed light on Gö's contributions to mathematics, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence -- even cosmology -- in an entertaining and accessible way.

    The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin propose relies on three central ideas. There is only one universe at a time. Time is real: everything in the structure and regularities of nature changes sooner or later. Mathematics, which has trouble with time, is not the oracle of nature and the prophet of science; it is simply a tool with great power and immense limitations. The argument is readily accessible to non-scientists as well as to the physicists and cosmologists whom it challenges.

    It describes how the laws and discoveries of information theory now support controversial revisions to Darwinian evolution, begin to unravel the mysteries of language, memory and dreams, and stimulate provocative ideas in psychology, philosophy, art, music, computers and even the structure of society. Perhaps its most fascinating and unexpected surprise is the suggestion the order and complexity may be as natural as disorder and disorganization. Contrary to the entropy principle, which implies that order is the exception and confusion the rule, information theory asserts that order and sense can indeed prevail against disorder and nonsense. From the simplest forms of organic life to the words used to express our most complex ideas, from our genes to our dreams, from microcomputers to telecommunications, virtually everything around us follows simple rules of information. Life and the material world, like language, remain "grammatical." Grammatical man inhabits a grammatical universe.

    To James Hillman, the acknowledged intellectual source for Thomas Moore's bestselling sensation Care of the Soul, it is the central and guiding force of his utterly compelling "acorn theory" in which each life is formed by a unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny, just as the mighty oak's destiny is written in the tiny acorn.In this new look at age-old themes, Hillman provides a radical, frequently amusing, and highly accessible path to realization through an extensive array of examples. He urges his readers to discover the "blueprints" particular to their own individual lives, certain that there is more to life than can be explained by genetics or environment. As he says, "We need a fresh way of looking at the importance of our lives."What The Soul's Code offers is an inspirational, positive approach to life, a way of seeing, and a way of recovering what has been lost of our intrinsic selves.

    Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable.In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines. He describes the near-term benefits we can expect, from intelligent personal assistants to vastly accelerated scientific research, and outlines the AI breakthroughs that still have to happen before we reach superhuman AI. He also spells out the ways humans are already finding to misuse AI, from lethal autonomous weapons to viral sabotage.If the predicted breakthroughs occur and superhuman AI emerges, we will have created entities far more powerful than ourselves. How can we ensure they never, ever, have power over us? Russell suggests that we can rebuild AI on a new foundation, according to which machines are designed to be inherently uncertain about the human preferences they are required to satisfy. Such machines would be humble, altruistic, and committed to pursue our objectives, not theirs. This new foundation would allow us to create machines that are provably deferential and provably beneficial.In a 2014 editorial co-authored with Stephen Hawking, Russell wrote, "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last." Solving the problem of control over AI is not just possible; it is the key that unlocks a future of unlimited promise.

    Shows how any proof can be understood as a sequence of techniques. Covers the full range of techniques used in proofs, such as the contrapositive, induction, and proof by contradiction. Explains how to identify which techniques are used and how they are applied in the specific problem. Illustrates how to read written proofs with many step-by-step examples. Includes new, expanded appendices related to discrete mathematics, linear algebra, modern algebra and real analysis.

    The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most immediate and incontrovertible phenomena are left unexplained by the natural sciences because they lack the physical properties—such as mass, momentum, charge, and location—that are assumed to be necessary for something to have physical consequences in the world. This is an unacceptable omission. We need a "theory of everything" that does not leave it absurd that we exist.Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.The book's radically challenging conclusion is that we are made of these specific absenses—such stuff as dreams are made on—and that what is not immediately present can be as physically potent as that which is. It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate components of the physical world.