Stanisław Marcin Ulam (13 April 1909 – 13 May 1984) was a Polish and American mathematician, nuclear physicist and computer scientist. He participated in the Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, discovered the concept of the cellular automaton, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion. In pure and applied mathematics, he proved a number of theorems and proposed several conjectures.

Original Audio

Robin Hanson:

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life -- https://amzn.to/40FehaZ

The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth -- https://amzn.to/40q5lVx

The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate -- https://amzn.to/4h1UBUB

Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Rationality: From AI to Zombies (2 book series) -- https://amzn.to/4g6iHME

Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck -- https://amzn.to/4apZZ1e

A Girl Corrupted by the Internet is the Summoned Hero?! -- https://amzn.to/3C8M5E6

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(00:00) Introduction

(02:27) Petrie-Flom Center Open House – Health Law, Biotechnology, and the Future

(51:55) Q&A

Daniel A. Greenberg (28 September 1934 – 2 December 2021), was one of the founders of the Sudbury Valley School, has published several books on the Sudbury model of school organization, and was described by Sudbury Valley School trustee Peter Gray as the "principal philosopher" among its founders. He was a physics professor at Columbia University, and was described by Lois Holzman as the school's "chief 'philosophical writer'".

(00:00) Introduction

(01:01) Schools of the Future

(58:27) Q&A

James Thomas Farrell (February 27, 1904 – August 22, 1979) was an American novelist, short-story writer and poet. He is most remembered for the Studs Lonigan trilogy, which was made into a film in 1960 and a television series in 1979.

James T. Farrell

Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote several texts concerning AI and philosophy.

Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 Turing Award.

Marvin Minsky

Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as his work in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.

Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, he was ranked the seventh-greatest physicist of all time.

He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to the wider public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.

Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures, including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman also became known through his autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and books written about him such as Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton and the biography Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

Richard Feynman

Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character: ⁠https://amzn.to/3WjI3QV⁠

Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher: ⁠https://amzn.to/4bmS447⁠

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I: The New Millennium Edition: Mainly Mechanics, Radiation, and Heat: ⁠https://amzn.to/4b0HPm2⁠

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Jaak Panksepp (June 5, 1943 – April 18, 2017) was an Estonian-American neuroscientist and psychobiologist who coined the term "affective neuroscience", the name for the field that studies the neural mechanisms of emotion. He was the Baily Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science for the Department of Veterinary and Comparative Anatomy, Pharmacology, and Physiology at Washington State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, and Emeritus Professor of the Department of Psychology at Bowling Green State University. He was known in the popular press for his research on laughter in non-human animals.

Jaak Panksepp

Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions – ⁠https://amzn.to/49YPkJ0⁠

The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions – ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/3WmQJ8V⁠

The Emotional Foundations of Personality: A Neurobiological and Evolutionary Approach – ⁠https://amzn.to/4afUL6F⁠

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Peter Ware Higgs (29 May 1929 – 8 April 2024) was a British theoretical physicist, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the mass of subatomic particles.

In the 1960s, Higgs proposed that broken symmetry in electroweak theory could explain the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, which was proposed by several physicists besides Higgs at about the same time, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, the detection of which became one of the great goals of physics. On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the discovery of the boson at the Large Hadron Collider. The Higgs mechanism is generally accepted as an important ingredient in the Standard Model of particle physics, without which certain particles would have no mass.

The discovery of the Higgs boson prompted fellow physicist Stephen Hawking to note that he thought that Higgs should receive the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work, which he finally did, shared with François Englert in 2013.

Peter Higgs