Is the Moon Alive?
1 post  •  created by William Orem   •  Aug. 18, 2008 @ 18:02 GMT
"Fascinating late-summer reading for FQXi-fans can be found here, in a Time magazine article from December . . . 1967. The article outlines the various precautions that our boys in the Apollo space p..."

Foundational Physics Apartheid?
2 posts  •  created by Zeeya Merali   •  Aug. 12, 2008 @ 15:33 GMT
"I recently read the hugely enjoyable novel “Final Theory”, a physics thriller in which the hero chases after Einstein’s long-lost Theory of Everything. It seemed like harmless summer reading, but a ne..."

Shutdown of the LHC, by Kevin Black
83 posts  •  created by Zeeya Merali   •  Aug. 5, 2008 @ 16:19 GMT
"As the LHC supposedly gears up, Harvard physicist Kevin Black, based at CERN, investigates rumors that the particle accelerator may, in fact, soon be shut down—by ripples from the future. From Kevin B..."

The Nature of Time? You tell us.
5 posts  •  created by Anthony Aguirre   •  Aug. 4, 2008 @ 17:52 GMT
"I believe that Henri Bergson, one of my favorite philosophers, once said that "Time is what prevents everything from happening at once." I've also heard it remarked that this clearly is not working a..."

A Close Encounter
3 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Aug. 4, 2008 @ 17:41 GMT
"What a great way to wrap up the summer. Cassini finds liquid hydrocarbons on Titan, making it the only other place we know of with natural lakes and charging up the search for life outside Earth. Pho..."

The LHC rap!
7 posts  •  created by Zeeya Merali   •  Aug. 2, 2008 @ 16:05 GMT
"Yes, you read the title correctly. It’s a rap. And it’s about the LHC. I’ve often thought that physicists should rap more. OK, that’s a lie, I’ve never thought that. But after seeing the brilliant LH..."

What if string theory is wrong? asks Moataz Emam
7 posts  •  created by Zeeya Merali   •  Jul. 29, 2008 @ 15:39 GMT
"As physicists wrangle over whether string theory truly represents reality, FQXi invited Moataz Emam of Clark University to ponder over the fate of string theorists like himself, if string theory turn..."

Do we really have free will?
9 posts  •  created by Zeeya Merali   •  Jul. 24, 2008 @ 19:31 GMT
"I may have been predestined to write this. There is a new paper this week by John Conway and Simon Kochen that reconsiders what physics has to tell us about free will. I’ve written about an earlier ..."

The Big Bang, and Before
5 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Jun. 18, 2008 @ 00:06 GMT
"There’s good work coming out of Caltech this month supporting the idea – familiar to readers of FQXi Community – that the universe in which we live is the result of a spontaneous quantum fluctuation..."

Constructive Suggestions for Improving the FQXi Community Page
6 posts  •  created by Kirsten A. Hubbard   •  May. 30, 2008 @ 14:25 GMT
"FQXi welcomes your constructive suggestions for how we may improve our Community website. Thank you!"

Gods and Astronomers
3 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  May. 22, 2008 @ 17:46 GMT
"It’s good news this month—of a sort—for Catholics who are also science-savvy. Jesuit astronomer Fr. Jose Funes has announced in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, that it’s okay for followe..."

Does Time Actually Move?
3 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Apr. 24, 2008 @ 19:42 GMT
"Perhaps the most lasting contribution to emerge from centuries of long-winded continental philosophy is the recognition that what nature does is distinct from what brains perceive. A perceiving consc..."

If the world ended tomorrow, would we notice?
4 posts  •  created by Anthony Aguirre   •  Mar. 31, 2008 @ 16:09 GMT
"In recognition of FQXi of Doomsday week, suppose the world ended tomorrow. In particular, suppose that, as discussed in Kate Becker's fun article, we live in a 'false vacuum', that can decay to a low..."

. . . and a Side of Obliteration
2 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Mar. 29, 2008 @ 20:06 GMT
"Next April 1st-themed Item: In the mood for total planetary annihilation? Strange to say, there is a veritable genre these days of websites, discussion boards and other resources dedicated to the ..."

Dark Matter: the Lighter Side
5 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Mar. 29, 2008 @ 19:59 GMT
"I’m not a nut, but I entertain at least one nutty idea. I can’t imagine any way for my nutty idea to be tested (that hasn’t stopped string theory), and I don’t see why anyone would want to test my id..."

Do You See Dark Matter?
3 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Mar. 12, 2008 @ 20:16 GMT
"The good news is, it's foundational either way. In one version, a whopping 4% of the energy density of the universe is baryonic. Another way to say this, of course, is almost everything that exists i..."

Unidentified Foundational Objects
6 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Feb. 27, 2008 @ 18:52 GMT
"The thing I respond to most strongly in these posts is the passion with which the issue is regarded on all sides. Whether we come down for or against counting UFO stories as credible evidence (of som..."

Are UFOs Foundational?
10 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Jan. 31, 2008 @ 16:48 GMT
"Readers of this blog have been pressing me (offline) this month with a sensible question: why am I not discussing the Stephenville UFO? After all, what could be more paradigm-shifting than ..."

Hunting LGM
3 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Jan. 12, 2008 @ 18:51 GMT
"Time to upgrade that so-last-season flip phone you are still carrying around in favor of a flashing lightweight earpiece? Tech moves so fast these days, in part thanks to the Law of Accelerating Retu..."

Bang / Crunch / Bang
64 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Dec. 7, 2007 @ 21:18 GMT
"I was contacted recently by Peter Lynds, the young physics iconoclast who turned some heads back in 2003 with a paper purporting correctly to resolve Zeno's paradox by defining time as having no quan..."

An Exceptionally Simple Personal FAQ
85 posts  •  created by A. Garrett Lisi   •  Nov. 20, 2007 @ 04:33 GMT
"Over the past month I have been asked many questions about my personal history and opinions on life, the universe, and everything. I have also received many emails of encouragement from the general pu..."

The Big-Bang versus the Big-Bang
6 posts  •  created by Anthony Aguirre   •  Nov. 13, 2007 @ 20:47 GMT
""Big-bang" versus "Big bang" I spend a good bit of time thinking about what happened in the period of time between the Big-Bang and the Big-Bang. No, I'm not crazy (or at least not with respect to th..."

A Hole in Messier
1 post  •  created by William Orem   •  Nov. 3, 2007 @ 18:17 GMT
"The sci-fi loving public and foundationally minded cosmologists alike are enamored of black holes. Black holes, as everyone knows, form from the crushed remains of certain burned-out stars -- those ..."

Co-Travelers
1 post  •  created by William Orem   •  Oct. 5, 2007 @ 19:36 GMT
"By some reports (speakers of Russian correct me here) a passable translation of "Sputnik" is "co-traveler," in the sense of "one who travels alongside." There's a whole art to scientific designation -..."

Pioneer Slows, Kilogram Goes
14 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Sep. 23, 2007 @ 15:11 GMT
"The late, great Carl Sagan was fond of including this line in his essays: "But I could be wrong." The idea is not merely humble, it is profound: we do not progress in our knowledge of the universe by ..."

Summer in Space
2 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Sep. 7, 2007 @ 20:27 GMT
"The summer is at an end. As a capstone to it, I want to go against the mainstream (isn't that what FQX is all about?) of popular science journalism and say that this summer's furor over drunk cosmona..."

Peering Into the Void
5 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Sep. 1, 2007 @ 15:37 GMT
"By now you've probably heard about the hole in the universe, but it's an interesting enough discovery to bear repeating. Larry Rudnick, a University of Minnesota astronomy professor, is reporting in ..."

The Convexity Club
6 posts  •  created by Matthew Leifer   •  Aug. 15, 2007 @ 16:37 GMT
"Plenty of people have been writing about the recent fqxi conference, which was excellent by the way, so I'll write instead about another fqxi-funded event that happened at the beginning of July in St...."

DNA Dust
3 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Aug. 13, 2007 @ 16:55 GMT
"Connecting to our ongoing discussion in these pages over the likelihood that we will be able to recognize alien life, the multiplicity of possible forms life probably takes, and the difficulties of k..."

Questions about the foundations of the world: continental plate and glacier edition
2 posts  •  created by Anthony Aguirre   •  Jul. 30, 2007 @ 16:40 GMT
"I've recently returned from FQXI's inaugural conference in Reykjavik Iceland. After seeing (and driving through) the rift between the Atlantic and European plates, and later being told that the ho..."

Can We Recognize Aliens?
8 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Jul. 21, 2007 @ 14:22 GMT
"The National Research Council has released a report on the search for alien life forms that warns -- rightly, in my view -- against "Terran" thinking. Terran, or Earth-based thinking, is the kind of n..."

Why This Universe?
8 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Jun. 28, 2007 @ 19:50 GMT
"There's an excellent -- really -- article available for free download from Skeptic.com called "Why This Universe?" by Robert Kuhn. The title, disarmingly broad as it is (one thinks of "Love and Death,..."

Open Source Science
2 posts  •  created by A. Garrett Lisi   •  Jun. 21, 2007 @ 18:26 GMT
"Nature (the magazine, not the universe) recently unveiled their new, open, online preprint archive: Nature Precedings It's intended to be the natural science equivalent to the physics arXiv. But sinc..."

How do we fund Einstein without funding Crackpots?
27 posts  •  created by Anthony Aguirre   •  Jun. 20, 2007 @ 17:32 GMT
"Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean has posted a very nice "Alternative science respectability checklist" . The extensive (and somewhat amusing...) commentary there brings up in places an important point..."

Quantum Distractions
1 post  •  created by Matthew Leifer   •  Jun. 11, 2007 @ 22:25 GMT
"It's been a while since my last post and the number one rule of blogging is never to apologise for your absence. On the other hand, since fqxi is all about breaking the rules I'll say that I'm sorry,..."

Should we worry if we are weird?
8 posts  •  created by Anthony Aguirre   •  May. 30, 2007 @ 18:06 GMT
"I've just finished reading an interesting paper by Hartle and Srednicki critiquing the assumption that 'we are typical', used in various cosmological model-testing arguments. Here is the basic issue..."

Baez on Quantum Foundations
2 posts  •  created by Matthew Leifer   •  May. 11, 2007 @ 12:10 GMT
"John Baez's protoblog This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics is about quantum foundational issues this week. It contains a discussion of some of the ideas that people working on the boundary of qu..."

Is the world made of wave-vectors?
19 posts  •  created by Matthew Leifer   •  May. 7, 2007 @ 20:44 GMT
"It seems appropriate to start my contribution to quantum foundational debates at fqxi with one of the most contentious issues in the subject - the status of the wave-vector. There are essentially two..."

Help Fight Negativity!
2 posts  •  created by A. Garrett Lisi   •  May. 3, 2007 @ 15:33 GMT
"Throughout his or her tortured existence, a mathematical physicist has two mortal enemies. These enemies are battled constantly, strike at any moment, and can merely wound or actually kill vast swaths..."

Quantum Grantmaking
16 posts  •  created by Anthony Aguirre   •  May. 1, 2007 @ 12:59 GMT
"At about 1 AM GMT on April 20, 2007, the Universe split into at least 32,768 nearly-identical copies. How? And did it really? The event was precipitated by yours truly gathering a quantum-mechanical..."

Vita Nuova
7 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Apr. 25, 2007 @ 21:46 GMT
"The days' big news, of course, was the second Earth. This was the discovery of the first "Earth-like" planet outside our solar system. The inglamorously named "581 c" is circling the red dwarf Gli..."

Out of Plato's Cave?
10 posts  •  created by William Orem   •  Apr. 24, 2007 @ 14:19 GMT
"It's becoming something of a trope in contemporary science fiction: the character who believes himself to be in the real world finds out, through a series of enlightenment-style experiences, that what..."

Deferential Geometry
3 posts  •  created by A. Garrett Lisi   •  Apr. 19, 2007 @ 13:53 GMT
"We've had a series of late season storms sweep through Tahoe this past week. Flurries of snow swirl around briefly, then settle and melt in the spring sun. During a break in the clouds today C and I h..."