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A transdisciplinary group of thinkers consider time and its relation to an Interplanetary future.

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When imagining interplanetary life and human civilization in space, it’s always a matter of time. Philosophers and physicists from Aristotle to Carlo Rovelli have deeply considered the nature of time. Given the scale of the social-technical systems required for any off-Earth endeavor, however, this age-old discussion requires broader input.

Complex systems emerge from a multitude of time-scales, clocks, arrows of time, and therefore a multitude of rates at which things come together and fall apart. But our experience of time seems to vary with the perspective we take on a subject: the lifespan of an organism seems to be the result of constraints of mass and energy; a firm, the flows and stocks of capital and labor; a state, the developments of its people and their political economy.

How do these different time-scales interrelate and inform one another on Earth today? What might a reconsideration of the complexity of time add to our collective effort to sustain life on and with other planets? And how can we create scalable yet adaptable social-technical systems that work together to achieve our interplanetary futures?

This panel will bring together researchers, scientists and theorists to attempt an answer to these questions. They will explore the possible methods and tools for complex collaboration, and consider what it will take to support and grow life beyond the Earth while keeping, at the center of it all, the beating heart of time.

Participants:

Laura Maguire
Zara Mirmalek
Geoffrey West
Sean Carroll
Moderator: David Krakauer

Watch at: www.youtube.com

One of the major resource requirements of computers—ranging from biological cells to human brains to high-performance digital computers—is the energy used to run them. Those energy requirements of performing a computation have been a long-standing focus of research in statistical physics, going back (at least) to the early work of Landauer and colleagues.

However, one of the most prominent aspects of computers is that they are inherently non-equilibrium systems. They are also often quite small, far from the thermodynamic limit. Unfortunately, the research by Landauer and co-workers was grounded in the statistical physics of the 20th century, which could not properly address the thermodynamics of non-equilibrium, nanoscale systems.

Fortunately, recent revolutionary breakthroughs in stochastic thermodynamics have overcome the limitations of 20th century statistical physics. We can now analyze arbitrarily off-equilibrium systems, of arbitrary size. Here I show how to apply these recent breakthroughs to analyze the thermodynamics of computation. Specifically, I present formulas for the thermodynamic costs of implementing (loop-free) digital circuits, of implementing Turing machines, and of implementing multipartite processes like the interacting organelles in a cell.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

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The increasing availability of large-scale datasets that trace the entirety of the scientific enterprise, have created an unprecedented opportunity to explore scientific production and reward. Parallel developments in data science, network science, and artificial intelligence offer us powerful tools and techniques to make sense of these millions of data points. Together, they tell a complex yet insightful story about how scientific careers unfold, how collaborations contribute to discovery, and how scientific progress emerges through a combination of multiple interconnected factors. These opportunities—and challenges that come with them—have fueled the emergence of a multidisciplinary community of scientists that are united by their goals of understanding science. These practitioners of the science of science use the scientific methods to study themselves, examine projects that work as well as those that fail, quantify the patterns that characterize discovery and invention, and offer lessons to improve science as a whole. In this talk, I’ll highlight some examples of research in this area, hoping to illustrate the promise of science of science as well as its limitations.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those laws. To hold such a position in a principled way, it’s important to have a clear understanding of “emergence” and when it happens. Anil Seth is a leading researcher in the neuroscience of consciousness, who has also done foundational work (often in collaboration with Lionel Barnett) on what emergence means. We talk about information theory, entropy, and what they have to do with how things emerge.

Read the full article at: www.preposterousuniverse.com

Today we’re talking to IU Professor Johan Bollen about the impact social media is having on us, and the complex relationship we have with the tech companies that run them.

Read the full article at: www.wfyi.org