The Unadulterated Intellect

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

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. (The Roy Furman chair is in honor of this extraordinary alumnus.)

Prior to rejoining the Harvard faculty, where he was the Berkman Professor of Law until 2000, Lessig was a professor at Stanford Law School, where he founded the school’s Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago.

Lessig clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. He serves on the Board of the AXA Research Fund, and is an Emeritus member of the board at Creative Commons.

Lessig is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Association, and has received numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, Fastcase 50 Award. In 2002, he was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries.

Lessig holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

Lawrence Lessig⁠

Free Culture – ⁠https://amzn.to/4aFonuS⁠

Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 – ⁠https://amzn.to/4aYaEz3⁠

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It – ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/4cZsdAF⁠

Lawrence Lessig's entire collection of books – ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/4b4hcfP⁠

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Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English mathematical and theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He is credited with laying the foundations of quantum field theory. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University and the University of Miami, and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient.

Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, coining the latter term. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation in 1928, which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter, and is considered one of the most important equations in physics, with it being considered by some to be the "real seed of modern physics". He wrote a famous paper in 1931, which further predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. His 1930 monograph, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, is considered to be one of the most influential texts on quantum mechanics.

Dirac's contributions were not only restricted to quantum mechanics. He contributed to the Tube Alloys project, the British programme to research and construct atomic bombs during World War II. Furthermore, Dirac made fundamental contributions to the process of uranium enrichment and the gas centrifuge, and whose work was deemed to be "probably the most important theoretical result in centrifuge technology". He also contributed to cosmology, putting forth his large numbers hypothesis. Dirac is also seen as having anticipated string theory well before its inception, with his work on the Dirac membrane and Dirac–Born–Infeld action, amongst other contributions.

Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of a Dirac paper, "I am toiling over Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful." In another letter concerning the Compton effect he wrote, "I don't understand the details of Dirac at all." In 1987, Abdus Salam stated that "Dirac was undoubtedly one of the greatest physicists of this or any century . . . No man except Einstein has had such a decisive influence, in so short a time, on the course of physics in this century."

Paul Dirac

Lectures on Quantum Mechanics – ⁠⁠https://amzn.to/3Q7ojMm⁠

The Principles of Quantum Mechanics – ⁠⁠⁠https://amzn.to/443HUTu⁠

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Chapters:

(00:00) Lecture 1: Quantum Mechanics

(59:32) Lecture 2: Quantum Electrodynamics

(2:04:06) Lecture 3: Magnetic Monopoles

(2:54:58) Lecture 4: Does 'G' Vary? (Large Numbers Hypothesis)

John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American scientist most widely known for his invention of an associative neural network in 1982. It is now more commonly known as the Hopfield network.

Hopfield was born in 1933 to Polish physicist John Joseph Hopfield and physicist Helen Hopfield. Helen was the older Hopfield's second wife. He is the sixth of Hopfield's children and has three children and six grandchildren of his own.

He received his A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1954, and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1958 (supervised by Albert Overhauser). He spent two years in the theory group at Bell Laboratories, and subsequently was a faculty member at University of California, Berkeley (physics), Princeton University (physics), California Institute of Technology (chemistry and biology) and again at Princeton, where he is the Howard A. Prior Professor of Molecular Biology, emeritus. For 35 years, he also continued a strong connection with Bell Laboratories.

In 1986 he was a co-founder of the Computation and Neural Systems PhD program at Caltech.

His most influential papers have been "The Contribution of Excitons to the Complex Dielectric Constant of Crystals" (1958), describing the polariton; "Electron transfer between biological molecules by thermally activated tunneling" (1974), describing the quantum mechanics of long-range electron transfers; "Kinetic Proofreading: a New Mechanism for Reducing Errors in Biosynthetic Processes Requiring High Specificity" (1974); "Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities" (1982) (known as the Hopfield Network) and, with D. W. Tank, "Neural computation of decisions in optimization problems" (1985). His current research and recent papers are chiefly focused on the ways in which action potential timing and synchrony can be used in neurobiological computation.

John Hopfield

CHAPTERS:

(00:00) Intro

(06:00) Artificial Neural Networks and Speech Processing

(01:04:19) Q&A

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.

Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger, and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularize the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

Arthur Conan Doyle