position:professor of physics

How Do You Say “Life” in Physics ? - Issue 50 : Emergence
▻http://nautil.us/issue/50/emergence/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics-rp

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“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953) Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous. When he’s searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority. His caution is understandable. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called “dissipative adaptation,” which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned (...)

Why Theories of Everything Are Ill-Conceived - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/why-theories-of-everything-are-ill_conceived

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The police don’t often sympathize with speeding drivers, but if you’re a quantum gravity physicist who was distracted by a grand epiphany while driving at night, you might have a better chance. “The Italian policeman asked me politely if I was crazy to drive at that speed,” writes the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli in his new book Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. “I explained that I had just found the idea I’d been seeking for so long.”Rovelli’s epiphany? Figuring out how to write a book on quantum gravity for a popular audience. It was enough for the policeman, who wished a ticketless Rovelli good luck.A professor of physics at Aix-Marseille University in southeast France, Rovelli is one of the pioneers of “loop quantum gravity” theory, which envisions space as (...)

How Do You Say “Life” in Physics ? - Issue 34 : Adaptation
▻http://nautil.us/issue/34/adaptation/how-do-you-say-life-in-physics

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“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”
 —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) Jeremy England is concerned about words—about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like “consciousness” and “information”; too loaded, he says. Too treacherous. When he’s searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority. His caution is understandable. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called “dissipative adaption,” which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned (...)

Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon - Issue 32 : Space
▻http://nautil.us/issue/32/space/beauty-is-physics-secret-weapon

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We recognize beauty when we see it, right? Michelangelo’s David, Machu Picchu, an ocean sunrise. Could we say the same about the cosmos itself? Frank Wilczek, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks we can. And should. In his new book A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design, Wilczek lays out his case for the elegance of mathematics and the coherence of nature’s underlying laws. Wilczek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering, with David Gross and H. David Politzer, equations that govern one of the fundamental forces in physics, the strong interaction, which holds together quarks and gluons, and makes protons and neutrons. Their discovery of “asymptotic freedom” showed that as quarks get closer to each other, the charge between them (...)

Ingenious: Max Tegmark - Issue 9: Time
▻http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/ingenious-max-tegmark

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Max Tegmark, professor of physics at MIT, strode into the room smiling and laughing, and stayed that way for all of the couple of hours we spent together. That he takes the keenest pleasure from peering into the world through the kaleidoscope of his physics toolbox is amply clear. Leaning out of his chair, waving his arms, pouring his water bottle onto the carpeted hotel floor to drive home a point, he is in a constant state of animation, much like the objects (both microscopic and gargantuan) which he studies. So too does his gaze shift in quick succession from topic to topic: Consciousness, time, death, infinity, and the scientific method fell in quick succession. His self-described career path has walked the line between mainstream, respectable topics, and questions at the very (...)