Light passes freely through light. Were that not true, the visual messages we receive from the world would be scrambled by scattering, and much more complicated to interpret. In QED, that basic fact makes good sense: photons respond to electric charge, but photons themselves are electrically neutral.A Beautiful Question by Frank Wilczek (2015)
The equations for atoms and light are, almost literally, the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound.Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question (2015)
It will be fruitful, and great fun, to use modern resources of signal processing and computer graphics to translate the beautiful concepts and equations of physics into new forms of art. Then, physicists will be able to bring their visual cortices fully to bear on them, and people in general will be able to admire and enjoy them. In the future, artists and scientists will work together more together, and create new works of extraordinary beauty...
Artificial intelligence...offers strange new possibilities for the life of mind. An entity capable of accurately recording its state could purposefully enter loops to relive especially enjoyable episodes, for example. A quantum mind could experience the superposition of “mutually contradictory” states or allow different parts of its wave function to explore vastly different scenarios in parallel. Being based on reversible computation, such a mind could revisit the past at will and could be equipped to superpose past and present.How Physics Will Change—and Change the World—in 100 Years by Frank Wilczek
I have described a future in which people know much more about, and have vastly greater power over, the physical world than we do today. Paradoxically, perhaps, I think that this will make them more sensitive to gaps in their knowledge, and ambitious to accomplish more...Such emergent humility reflects not so much modesty, as largeness of vision.
The real danger is not machines that are more intelligent than we are usurping our role as captains of our destinies. The real danger is basically clueless machines being ceded authority far beyond their competence.Daniel Everett writes:
The mind is never more than a placeholder for things we do not understand about how we think. The more we use the solitary term "mind" to refer to human thinking, the more we underscore our lack of understanding. The idea that comes up in discussions about Artificial Intelligence that we should fear that machines will control us is but a continuation of the idea of the religious "soul," cloaked in scientific jargon. It detracts from real understanding.Ursula Martin asks:
What kind of a thinking machine might find its own place in slow conversations over the centuries, mediated by land and water? What qualities would such a machine need to have? Or what if the thinking machine was not replacing any individual entity, but was used as a concept to help understand the combination of human, natural and technological activities that create the sea’s margin, and our response to it? The term "social machine" is currently used to describe endeavours that are purposeful interaction of people and machines — Wikipedia and the like — so the "landscape machine" perhaps.Mark Pagel says:
It is not thinking machines or AI per se that we should worry about but people.Frank Wilczek says:
Without careful restraint and tact, researchers could wake up to discover they've enabled the creation of armies of powerful, clever, vicious paranoiacs.
About six times as much - that is, 26.8 per cent - is invisible, or "dark" matter [which] reveals itself by tugging with its gravity on the visible stars and galaxies. No one knows what the dark matter is made of, though speculation ranges from hitherto undiscovered subatomic particles to fridge-sized black holes the mass of Jupiter.
But even the dark matter is trumped by the final component of the universe. About 68.3 per cent is dark energy. It is invisible, it fills all of space and it has repulsive gravity [which] is speeding up the expansion of the universe...
What all this tell us is that the stuff science has been studying for the past 350 years is not the most important stuff. In fact it is but a minor component of the universe...But proportion is not necessarily the same as importance. Iron, for example, constitutes just 0.00067 per cent of the elemental composition of the human body yet it is essential to life. Further, the existence of dark matter and dark energy are still disputed. All the same, Chown's point is worth attention. [2] As Paul Broks put it:
We may, as a species, be suffering the cosmic equivalent of Anton’s syndrome, the neurological condition in which patients rendered totally blind by damage to the visual cortex believe they can see perfectly well.Sometimes, an overlooked absence contains clues to something amazing. In 1814 Joseph Fraunhofer discovered that the apparent continuity of a rainbow is an illusion:
There are tiny gaps, dim or black arcs of missing colors, too narrow for us to see in the glare of natural rainbows...Fraunhofer eventually cataloged 576 of these gaps, or "absorption lines"...Today tens of thousands are known. [3]Analysis of the "gaps" in the light from stars has taught us what they are made of, and that star-stuff is the same as Earth-stuff.
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