Singularities, which are fascinating, have been peered into recently and new discoveries are made into how to retrieve information from black holes.
Through Ray Kurzweil’s website, comes This fascinating article:
Physicists at Penn State have provided a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes, those regions of space where gravity is so strong that, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, not even light can escape. The team’s findings pave the way toward ending a decades-long debate sparked by renowned physicist Steven Hawking.
“Once you consider quantum gravity, then space-time becomes much larger and there is room for information to reappear in the distant future on the other side of what was first thought to be the end of space-time.”
Are you serious? What does that mean? Information is being spit into the future and we have to wait for it? Is this a LOST theory?
Ray Kurzweil’s technological singularity borrows the principle to describe a point in the near future when technology begins to increase along Moore’s Law so rapidly that the outcome is impossible to predict, or something.
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
Wow Dianne. If Delicious Ghost had an award for best comment, you’d have just won it. It turns out I JUST watched the “Stroke of Insight” video on the TED website just the day before you wrote this. Her account is still fresh in my mind. It was one of the most interesting things to consider and has come up in conversation at least once a day since I viewed it. She recalls the experience like a drug trip; clearly she is an ex-hippy. It almost gets awkward towards the end…at least I thought so and usually give people a little heads up before turning Bolte loose on their brains.
If you need more to chew on I highly recommend the TED talk about Memes, a subject dear to us here at DG.
Thanks for being such an awesome DG reader and please tell us about any other interesting discoveries, singularity related or otherwise.