Sublime

The big question we pondered more than all others was the mystery of self-organization: How can disorganized configurations of matter spontaneously become organized?

Indeed, something of a watershed appears to have been reached in 2003, when three leading scientists, Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe that has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.

It seems that, from the perspective of mathematical science, there exist two natural domains. The first is the physical domain of particles, fields, and universal laws, with an associated search for elegant theories that apply everywhere in the known universe. Here, science has made great strides. The second domain is that of complex phenomena.

The colony possesses something; Adam doesn’t know what to call it. Purpose. Will. A kind of awareness—something so different from human intelligence that intelligence thinks it’s nothing.

a remarkable chain of events the triangle of observations, theorizing, and anthropic reasoning on λ—each one revolutionary in its own right—came together in the early 2000s. It is this confluence of ideas that led to anthropic multiverse cosmology,

One person who was carefully watching the response of the scientific community to Lyell’s radical thesis was English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). Consider the situation in biology around 1850. The field was endlessly complex, faced with countless species of animals and plants, any one of which presented great intricacy. If anything, most

V. S. Ramachandran and Stuart Hameroff, “Beyond Belief: Science, Reason, Religion & Survival. Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Nov 5–7, 2006 (Session 4),” The Science Network, 2006, http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-science-religion-reason-and-survival/session-4-1.

to produce branch effective physics and possibly higher levels of complexity.

process resembles biological evolution.