Tag Archives: reality

Our Mathematical Universe – Max Tegmark

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Our Mathematical Universe

My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Max Tegmark

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: January 7, 2014

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Seller: Penguin Random House LLC


Max Tegmark leads us on an astonishing journey through past, present and future, and through the physics, astronomy and mathematics that are the foundation of his work, most particularly his hypothesis that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and his theory of the ultimate multiverse. In a dazzling combination of both popular and groundbreaking science, he not only helps us grasp his often mind-boggling theories, but he also shares with us some of the often surprising triumphs and disappointments that have shaped his life as a scientist. Fascinating from first to last—this is a book that has already prompted the attention and admiration of some of the most prominent scientists and mathematicians.

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Our Mathematical Universe – Max Tegmark

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The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes – Donald Hoffman

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The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

Donald Hoffman

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: August 13, 2019

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.


Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. How can it be possible that the world we see is not objective reality? And how can our senses be useful if they are not communicating the truth? Hoffman grapples with these questions and more over the course of this eye-opening work. Ever since Homo sapiens has walked the earth, natural selection has favored perception that hides the truth and guides us toward useful action, shaping our senses to keep us alive and reproducing. We observe a speeding car and do not walk in front of it; we see mold growing on bread and do not eat it. These impressions, though, are not objective reality. Just like a file icon on a desktop screen is a useful symbol rather than a genuine representation of what a computer file looks like, the objects we see every day are merely icons, allowing us to navigate the world safely and with ease. The real-world implications for this discovery are huge. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.

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The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes – Donald Hoffman

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Infinite Reality – Jim Blascovich & Jeremy Bailenson

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Infinite Reality

Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution

Jim Blascovich & Jeremy Bailenson

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: April 5, 2011

Publisher: HarperCollins e-books

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


“Enough with speculation about our digital future. Infinite Reality is the straight dope on what is and isn’t happening to us right now, from two of the only scientists working on the boundaries between real life and its virtual extensions.” —Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed How achievable are the virtual experiences seen in The Matrix, Tron, and James Cameron’s Avatar? Do our brains know where “reality” ends and “virtual” begins? In Infinite Reality, Jim Blascovich and Jeremy Bailenson, two pioneering experts in the field of virtual reality, reveal how the human brain behaves in virtual environments and examine where radical new developments in digital technology will lead us in five, fifty, and five hundred years.

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Infinite Reality – Jim Blascovich & Jeremy Bailenson

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Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

Mother Jones

Few figures in the climate change debate are as polarizing as former Vice President Al Gore. His fans and his enemies are equally rabid, and his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth is still probably the most-referenced document on climate change in history. In the last few years, Gore’s global warming work has mostly been channeled into a nonprofit he oversees called the Climate Reality Project, which organizes rallies and educational events.

This week, that group held its annual “24 Hours of Reality” marathon of live-streamed videos and appearances by Gore and other celebrities to raise funds for climate action. The event took place in New York City, which is gearing up for a series of meetings and protests in advance of the biggest climate summit of the last five years, to take place Tuesday at the United Nations. Gore took a break from the broadcast to chat with Climate Desk’s Inquiring Minds podcast, offering his views on everything from President Obama’s climate polices and the role of the tea party in US politics to his hopes for a strong international climate treaty.

Gore said that Obama hasn’t yet gone far enough in his efforts against climate change, but that he nonetheless admires “what the president has done.”

“In his first term I expressed some considerable concern about what I thought he was failing to do,” Gore said, adding that after the demise of cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate, “there was not the kind of energy and activity that I felt was appropriate.” But Gore credited Obama for shifting course dramatically in his second term, and for going around the “logjam” in Congress by instructing the EPA to issue “historic regulations” on carbon emissions from power plants.

Gore did criticize some of Obama’s policies, including the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which Gore described as the “prevailing code for ‘let’s keep burning fossil fuels.'”

“But it’s not fair to just take those things out of context without looking at the totality of his policies,” he added. “And the totality of what he’s doing now in his second term is really historic.”

Gore expressed skepticism about the fracking boom. He said he opposed the use of natural gas as a bridge fuel—something the Obama administration has supported—”until and unless they demonstrate the ability to stop the methane leaks at every stage of the process, particularly during fracking.” (Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that some scientists argue can negate the climate benefits of burning natural gas instead of coal.) And he added that the increasing cost-effectiveness of solar and wind power was already posing a “threat to the viability of natural gas as a source of energy in the marketplace.”

You can hear Gore’s comments in full on this week’s episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast, below, and see the highlights of his comments in our exclusive video above.

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Gore: Fracking Won’t Solve Our Climate Crisis

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Republicans vote to deny climate change

Republicans vote to deny climate change

House GOP

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Miss.) is among the deniers who sit on the House energy committee.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee wasted a good chunk of time Tuesday on yet more anti-environmental legislation that doesn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in climate-changed hell of becoming law. H.R. 3826, The Electricity Security and Affordability Act, would suspend the EPA’s proposed climate rules for power plants.

And for bonus points, the committee threw out an amendment to the doomed bill that would have acknowledged that climate change is real.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), presumably tired of yawning her way through anti-scientific charades, added the amendment, merely acknowledging the banal fact that greenhouse gas pollution “threatens the American public’s health and welfare” by contributing to climatic changes. Here’s ClimateProgress explaining how the Republicans responded:

[The bill] passed in Tuesday’s committee, but the amendment, which would have placed on the record that the committee accepts that climate change is happening and is caused by greenhouse gas pollution, did not.

Twenty-four E&C [Energy & Commerce Committee] members — all Republicans — voted against the amendment. Among them was E&C Chair Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), who has said before that he doesn’t think climate change is caused by human activity, and Joe Barton (R-TX), who also questions humans’ role in climate change. …

This isn’t the first time House Republicans have rejected amendments stating the reality of climate change. In 2011, House Republicans voted down amendments that called on Congress to accept that climate change is real, man-made, and a human health threat.

How could the Republicans on the energy committee be so unfathomably stupid as to continue to claim that climate change is some kind of dystopian fantasy, despite all the science to the contrary?

Maybe they aren’t stupid. Maybe there’s another explanation. “In total,” ClimateProgress reported, “the Republicans who voted to deny climate change have accepted about $9.3 million in career contributions from the oil, gas, and coal industries.”


Source
24 House Republicans Just Voted To Deny The Reality Of Climate Change, ClimateProgress

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Republicans vote to deny climate change

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E-Squared – Pam Grout

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E-Squared

Nine Do-It-Yourself Energy Experiments That Prove Your Thoughts Create Your Reality

Pam Grout

Genre: Self-Improvement

Price: $3.99

Publish Date: January 28, 2013

Publisher: Hay House

Seller: Hay House, Inc.


E-Squared could best be described as a lab manual with simple experiments that prove reality is malleable, consciousness trumps matter, and you shape your life with your mind. Yes, you read that right. It says prove. The nine experiments, each of which can be conducted with absolutely no money and very little time expenditure, demonstrate that spiritual principles are as dependable as gravity, as consistent as Newton’s laws of motion. Rather than take it on faith, E-Squared invites you to prove the following principles: There is an invisible energy force or field of infinite possibilities. You impact the field and draw from it according to your beliefs and expectations. Your connection to the field provides accurate and unlimited guidance. The universe is limitless, abundant, and strangely accommodating.

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E-Squared – Pam Grout

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