Life beyond death. What should we expect? by Professor David Fontana, who sadly died last year. This was his last published book.

see http://www.scimednet.org/as-far-as-we-can-get/ for a review.

I went with friends to a recent excellent overview of his life (in London) where physicists, psychologists (he was one) and researchers presented personal reflections on his life and their own studies. He was admired as a truly great researcher and a wonderful human being by all who knew him. Anyway see here:

http://www.spr.ac.uk/main/civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=30

And there’s plenty of scope here (I hasten to add!) for physical scientists to get involved with. Indeed some were involved in observing the physical phenomena seen with Fontana during his decades long series of investigations. An excellent and eye-opening day though I knew of his work before.

I don’t know what the above comment about “cornucopian” philosophy meant, especially considering that Deutsch is pretty much in your face about his adherence to Karl Popper. My judgment is that Popper’s notorious falsifiability is a failed effort to erase philosophical materialism or naturalism from science in pursuit of a specific antiCommunist agenda. I don’t think it was an accident that Popper initially insisted that natural selection was unscientific! Deutsch even copies Popper’s justification of US-style single member districts with elections by pluralities!

Even if you like Popper, some of Deutsch’s ideas in this book can’t really be characterized as something you disagree with. Discussing the evolution of the modern human mind without reference to language is just plain obtuse. The deranged insistence that primitive man lived in oppressive societies indicates that Deutsch never grasped the idea that earliest humans lived in fissioning bands spreading constantly into new lands. However can you have a truly oppressive society when you and your cothinkers can just march away? I can’t even guess whether Deutsch hasn’t grasped that modern hunter/gatherer societies are not typical of the post because they’ve been marginalized or if he’s projecting some delusion about the savage/unconscious mind onto some movie screen in his head.

Recommending this without serious cautions? Does the many worlds interpretation really reaquire all adherents cover for one another? Or do you all think like this? What’s next, recommending Timothy Ferris’ Science of Liberty?

“David Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you…Deutsch (who is famous, among other reasons, for his pioneering contributions to the field of quantum computation) is so smart, and so strange, and so creative, and so inexhaustibly curious, and so vividly intellectually alive, that it is a distinct privilege, notwithstanding everything, to spend time in his head.”

Great list…I would also add Margaret Wertheim’s “Physics on the Fringe”, Peter Englund’s “The Beauty and the Sorrow” and Terrence Deacon’s “Incomplete Nature” (another thought-provoking book about everything)

And sorry for being OT, but can you explain how WMAP data can show the dark flow of all galaxies in the visible universe headed in one direction? (Towards the Great Attractor, I suppose?) I don’t understand how this is possible if the Hubble effect shows that all galaxies are speeding away from each other in all directions. It seems like a contradiction.