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What’s Fundamental in the Cosmos? (Part IV)

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What’s Fundamental in the Cosmos? (Part III)

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One of artificial intelligence’s legendary pioneers, Marvin Minsky, recently died. With this tribute, we celebrate his penetrating analysis of brains, minds, AI, religion...

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A Tribute to Marvin Minsky

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Prediction is the fruitful product of good science, but how far can prediction go? Physics is the most mathematical and rigorous of the sciences and so prediction is most...

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What Can’t be Predicted in Physics?

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What does it take to make a cosmos? What are the most basic building blocks—the forces, fields and particles? How do they work, and work together? How do these ‘laws...

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How do You Make a Cosmos?

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Dig down to the deepest level of reality, the smallest things that exist, the building blocks of everything else. What do we find? What’s there at the very bottom?...

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What’s Fundamental in the Cosmos? (Part II)

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Are events measured by time? Or is time created by sequences of events? Which is more fundamental, events or time? Worse, we may get different answers from quantum mechanics...

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Events and the Nature of Time

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Time seems natural and absolute: the flow of moments one following another, from the unknown past to the knife’s edge present to the unknowable future. Butperhaps this is...

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What’s Real about Time?

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Time is a mystery; it’s not what it seems. Time’s flow feels unstoppable, yet some say time is not fundamental, perhaps not even real. Why do physicists and...

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What is Time?

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What does it mean for space and time to be the same thing? Not related to each other, but literally two descriptions of precisely the same entity called...

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How Can Space and Time be the Same Thing?

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How deep goes time? Is time bedrock reality, part of the fundamental fabric of reality? Or is time an emergent thing, generated by deeper truths of existence? What is the...

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Is Time Fundamental?

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What does it mean for time to be ‘real’? Is time the ultimate stage on which all events play? Some physicists and philosophers would say no, time is an illusion;...

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Is Time Real?

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Does the concept of observation have deep relevance in fundamental physics? What about in quantum physics where some kind of observation seems to be needed to transform...

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Physics of the Observer (Part II)

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Quantum mechanics, the best theory of the very small, and general relativity, the best theory of the very large, are deeply incompatible. One way to compare and contrast the...

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Events in Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (Part II)

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Quantum theory is very strange. No act is wholly sure. Everything works by probabilities, described by a wave function. But what is a wavefunction? One theory is that every...

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Many Worlds of Quantum Theory (Part II)

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Quantum theory may be weird—superposition and entanglement of particles that in our normal world would make no sense—but quantum theory is truly how the microworld works....

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What does Quantum Theory Mean? (Part II)

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Quantum theory has been the most powerful explanation of how the world, down deep, really works. But quantum theory is weird: things in two states or places at the same time,...

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Quantum Mechanics Experiments

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“Quantum” is the theory of the utterly small. “Cosmology” is the study of the utterly large. They combine, remarkably, when in the very early universe the entire...

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What is Quantum Cosmology?

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Science is humankind’s magnificent achievement, the way of thinking to discern facts and truths and to reject errors and myths. But how to understand the scientific...

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Why Philosophy of Science? (Part III)

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We think we understand the physical world but we do not. For example, some features of the world are derived from others, which makes the latter more fundamental and the...

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How Does Philosophy Illuminate the Physical World? (Part III)

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We search deepest levels of cosmic reality, the big picture of the puzzle of the universe — beginning, size, structure, future, far future. We seek significance in...

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What is Philosophy of Cosmology?

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Cosmology is the study of the universe, via theory and observation, of its beginning, evolution, large-scale structure, and far future. A philosophy of cosmology seeks to...

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Philosophy of Cosmology

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We think we understand the physical world but we do not. For example, some features of the world are derived from others, which makes the latter more fundamental and the...

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How Does Philosophy Illuminate the Physical World? (Part II)

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Science is humankind’s magnificent achievement, the way of thinking to discern facts and truths and to reject errors and myths. But how to understand the scientific...

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Why Philosophy of Science? (Part II)

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Here’s the claim: each level of the scientific hierarchy — physics, chemistry, biology, psychology — has its own special laws that can never be explained by deeper laws...

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What’s Strong Emergence?

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The world works at different levels — fundamental physics, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology — with each level having its own rules and regularities....

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What Is Strong Emergence?

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The universe began as a simple hot bath of particles and forces. How then the vast diversity of things we find on earth today? Much depends on the principles of...

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How Complexity and Emergence Create a Cosmos?

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Are the laws of nature or physics blind in that they seek no direction and have no ‘purpose’? That’s the scientific paradigm. But the world works so well:...

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Is the World Self-Organizing?

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Our universe began with a swirling, seething plasma—everything, everywhere, all the same. Today we have galaxies, stars, planets, people. How did such structure come about?...

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What is Complexity in the Cosmos?

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Is emergence a mystery? Does ordinary stuff have mysterious properties? Take anything; find and separate all its parts and catalogue their properties. Then recombine those...

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Can Emergence Explain Reality?

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Mathematics describes the real world of atoms and acorns, stars and stairs, with remarkable precision. So is mathematics invented by humans—like chisels and hammers and...

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Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered? (Part II)

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Is probability a deep probe of how the world works at fundamental levels? Or is probability merely a tool of human perception in trying to discern what is true and what is...

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What’s the Deep Meaning of Probability? (Part III)

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Is probability a deep probe of how the world works at fundamental levels? Or is probability merely a tool of human perception in trying to discern what is true and what is...

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What’s the Deep Meaning of Probability? (Part I)

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Power laws relate diverse quantities in a defined numerical way, such that a change in one is associated with a change in the other according to specific formulas or...

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Why do Power Laws Work so Widely? (Part II)

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Power laws relate diverse quantities in a defined numerical way, such that a change in one is associated with a change in the other according to specific formulas or...

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Why do Power Laws Work so Widely? (Part I)

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In 1960, the physicist Eugene Wigner published an article, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” which has attracted great...

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Why the ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness’ of Mathematics? (Part III)

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That the cosmos is a computer sounds like a modern metaphor, a way of explaining how things work. But some make a bolder claim: that the cosmos is in reality a computer, not...

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Is the Cosmos a Computer? (Part II)

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Of what is reality made? What are the most basic building blocks from which the cosmos is constructed? Particles? Mass-Energy? Forces? Fields? A new candidate is...

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Does Information Create the Cosmos?

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Information is all the rage in science, changing how we think about fundamental questions. Information has many descriptions, some of them surprising. Why is Information so...

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What is Information?

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Information is a common word but has technical meanings so important that our entire world depends on them. What are the kinds of information? How about the scientific...

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What is Information?

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Information has become increasingly important in understanding the physical world around us, from ordinary computers to the underlying principles of fundamental physics,...

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Physics of Information

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That the cosmos is a computer sounds like a modern metaphor, a way of explaining how things work. But some make a bolder claim: that the cosmos is in reality a computer, not...

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Is the Cosmos a Computer? (Part I)

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Could our entire universe have been created by a super-intelligent species, just like computer scientists write software to simulate chemical reactions or the weather? It may...

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Are we Living in a Simulation?

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Is our entire universe a vast computer game, the creation of super-smart hackers existing somewhere else? Before you smirk and laugh, watch and think! Who’s to say that...

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Could Our Universe Be a Fake?

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Perhaps our entire universe is like a gigantic computer game, the creation of super-smart hackers existing somewhere else? Before you smirk and laugh, watch and think!

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Could Our Universe Be a Fake?

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Closer To Truth is highlighting remarkable women in philosophy and physics/cosmology.

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Women in Philosophy and Physics/Cosmology

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What is the nature of scientific breakthroughs? What are common characteristics among all the sciences? What are specific signs of breakthroughs in physics and biology?...

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What are Breakthroughs in Science? (Part III)

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What is the process by which scientific breakthroughs come about? What are the ways in which breakthroughs in physics occur? No “formula” for breakthroughs — but what...

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How do Scientific Breakthroughs Happen? (Part II)

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What characterizes breakthroughs in physics, historically and prospectively? Relativity and quantum mechanics were breakthroughs of the absolute largest and smallest forces...

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What are Breakthroughs in Physics? (Part I)

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What is the process by which scientific breakthroughs come about? What are the ways in which breakthroughs in physics occur? No “formula” for breakthroughs — but what...

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How do Scientific Breakthroughs Happen? (Part III)

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What is the nature of scientific breakthroughs? What are common characteristics among all the sciences? What are specific signs of breakthroughs in physics and biology?...

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What are Breakthroughs in Science? (Part II)

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