Footnote Physicist

          “You have to learn the rules before you can break them.”           – Anonymous           “To boldly go where no man has gone before!”           – Captain James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner) I           In philosophy of science, no answer is ever perfectly certain such that it can be etched in stone for eternity: we are fallible minds who may always be wrong, or else we wouldn't need any epistemology, for we would naturally be in possession of our knowledge of the world at birth (or otherwise trivially learn it all as we went along).  This epistemological humility sets science apart from most other dogmatic philosophies.  Make no mistake, though—the uncertainty of scientific knowledge is a strength: it keeps its body of knowledge from emulsifying assumptions into dogma, and ultimately makes the state of...

          “Whereas the complexity of an object measures how complicated it is to describe, its information           content measures the extent to which it describes the rest of the world... What I am casually calling           the information content of an object is in technical terms called the mutual information between           the object and the rest of the world.”           – Max Tegmark I           “The rule that dynamical laws must be deterministic and reversible is so central to classical           physics that we sometimes forget to mention it when teaching the subject... what is undoubtedly           the most fundamental of all physical laws— the conservation of information .  The conservation of       ...

          “[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the           characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are           triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible           to comprehend a single world.”           – Galileo Galilei (1623) I           I want to put forth a word of caution about the present "Mathematics" chapter, as well as the following "Computation" chapter: they are the most technical in this book.  They represent a technical survey that runs that gamut from what you would have learned in K-12 school (though perhaps could better understand and appreciate as an adult), to some of what university undergraduates might learn.  As ...