Books in the The Frontiers Collection series

This collection of prize-winning essays addresses the controversial question of how meaning and goals can emerge in a physical world governed by mathematical laws. What are the prerequisites for a system to have goals? What makes a physical process into a signal? Does eliminating the homunculus solve the problem? The three first-prize winners, Larissa Albantakis, Carlo Rovelli and Jochen Szangolies tackle exactly these challenges, while many other aspects (agency, the role of the observer, causality versus teleology, ghosts in the machine etc.) feature in the other award winning contributions. All contributions are accessible to non-specialists.These seventeen stimulating and often entertaining essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries to the FQXi essay competition in 2017.The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

This book addresses key conceptual issues relating to the modern scientific and engineering use of computer simulations. It analyses a broad set of questions, from the nature of computer simulations to their epistemological power, including the many scientific, social and ethics implications of using computer simulations.

While "Map is not the territory" as Alfred Korzybski remarked, join us in this journey to know more, while we inquire on the nature and the reality of the maps which try to map the reality out there.

The chips in present-day cell phones already contain billions of sub-100-nanometer transistors. By 2020, however, we will see systems-on-chips with trillions of 10-nanometer transistors. But this will be the end of the miniaturization, because yet smaller transistors, containing just a few control atoms, are subject to statistical fluctuations and thus no longer useful. We also need to worry about a potential energy crisis, because in less than five years from now, with current chip technology, the internet alone would consume the total global electrical power!This book presents a new, sustainable roadmap towards ultra-low-energy (femto-Joule), high-performance electronics. The focus is on the energy-efficiency of the various chip functions: sensing, processing, and communication, in a top-down spirit involving new architectures such as silicon brains, ultra-low-voltage circuits, energy harvesting, and 3D silicon technologies. Recognized world leaders from industry and from the research community share their views of this nanoelectronics future. They discuss, among other things, ubiquitous communication based on mobile companions, health and care supported by autonomous implants and by personal carebots, safe and efficient mobility assisted by co-pilots equipped with intelligent micro-electromechanical systems, and internet-based education for a billion people from kindergarden to retirement. This book should help and interest all those who will have to make decisions associated with future electronics: students, graduates, educators, and researchers, as well as managers, investors, and policy makers.Introduction: Towards Sustainable 2020 Nanoelectronics.- From Microelectronics to Nanoelectronics.- The Future of Eight Chip Technologies.- Analog¿Digital Interfaces.- Interconnects and Transceivers.- Requirements and Markets for Nanoelectronics.- ITRS: The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors.- Nanolithography.- Power-EfficientDesign Challenges.- Superprocessors and Supercomputers.- Towards Terabit Memories.- 3D Integration for Wireless Multimedia.- The Next-Generation Mobile User-Experience.- MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) for Automotive and Consumer.- Vision Sensors and Cameras.- Digital Neural Networks for New Media.- Retinal Implants for Blind Patients.- Silicon Brains.- Energy Harvesting and Chip Autonomy.- The Energy Crisis.- The Extreme-Technology Industry.- Education and Research for the Age of Nanoelectronics.- 2020 World with Chips.

The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death.

The fourteen award-winning essays in this volume discuss a range of novel ideas and controversial topics that could decisively influence the course of human life on Earth.

The release of this second volume of CHIPS 2020 coincides with the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, a critical year marked by the end of the nanometer roadmap and by a significantly reduced annual rise in chip performance.

These essays by leading philosophers and scientists focus on recent ideas at the forefront of modern Darwinism, showcasing and exploring the challenges they raise as well as open problems.

In this largely nontechnical book, eminent physicists and philosophers address the philosophical impact of recent advances in quantum physics. These are shown to shed new light on profound questions about realism, determinism, causality or locality. The participants contribute in the spirit of an open and honest discussion, reminiscent of the time when science and philosophy were inseparable. After the editors¿ introduction, the next chapter reveals the strangeness of quantum mechanics and the subsequent discussions examine our notion of reality. The spotlight is then turned to the topic of decoherence. Bohm¿s theory is critically examined in two chapters, and the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics is likewise described and discussed. The penultimate chapter presents a proposal for resolving the measurement problem, and finally the topic of loop quantum gravity is presented by one of its founding fathers, Carlo Rovelli. The original presentations and discussions on which this volume is based took place under the auspices of the French ¿Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques¿. The book will appeal to everybody interested in knowing how our description of the world is impacted by the results of the most powerful and successful theory that physicists have ever built.

Like its much acclaimed predecessor "Quantum [Un]Speakables: From Bell to Quantum Information" (published 2002), it comprises essays by many of the worlds leading quantum physicists and philosophers.

This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy.

In this essay collection, leading physicists, philosophers, and historians attempt to fill the empty theoretical ground in the foundations of information and address the related question of the limits to our knowledge of the world.Over recent decades, our practical approach to information and its exploitation has radically outpaced our theoretical understanding - to such a degree that reflection on the foundations may seem futile. But it is exactly fields such as quantum information, which are shifting the boundaries of the physically possible, that make a foundational understanding of information increasingly important. One of the recurring themes of the book is the claim by Eddington and Wheeler that information involves interaction and putting agents or observers centre stage. Thus, physical reality, in their view, is shaped by the questions we choose to put to it and is built up from the information residing at its core. This is the root of Wheeler¿s famous phrase ¿it from bit.¿ After reading the stimulating essays collected in this volume, readers will be in a good position to decide whether they agree with this view.

The prize-winning essays in this book address the fascinating but sometimes uncomfortable relationship between physics and mathematics. Is mathematics merely another natural science? Or is it the result of human creativity? Does physics simply wear mathematics like a costume, or is math the lifeblood of physical reality?The nineteen wide-ranging, highly imaginative and often entertaining essays are enhanced versions of the prize-winning entries to the FQXi essay competition ¿Trick or Truth¿, which attracted over 200 submissions. The Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, catalyzes, supports, and disseminates research on questions at the foundations of physics and cosmology, particularly new frontiers and innovative ideas integral to a deep understanding of reality, but unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

The release of this second volume of CHIPS 2020 coincides with the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, a critical year marked by the end of the nanometer roadmap and by a significantly reduced annual rise in chip performance.

Questioning the Foundations of Physics

The essays in this book look at the question of whether physics can be based on information, or - as John Wheeler phrased it - whether we can get "It from Bit".

Life is connected with individual living beings, yet it is also a collective and inherently global phenomenon of the material world. It embodies a dual existence of cycles of phenotypic life, and their unseen driver - an uninterrupted march of genetic information whose collective immortality is guaranteed by individual mortality.

Participants: Guido Bacciagaluppi, Caslav Brukner, Jeffrey Bub, Arthur Fine, Christopher Fuchs, GianCarlo Ghirardi, Shelly Goldstein, Daniel Greenberger, Lucien Hardy, Anthony Leggett, Tim Maudlin, David Mermin, Lee Smolin, Antony Valentini, David Wallace, Anton Zeilinger, and Wojciech Zurek.

In a Darwinian world, religious behavior - just like other behaviors - is likely to have undergone a process of natural selection in which it was rewarded in the evolutionary currency of reproductive success.