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The last of the five philosophical problems is the problem of final aims. The problem here is to try to formulate some {298} statement of the ultimate purpose of the universe. In other words, the problem is to read God's mind. Previous attempts to read God's mind have not been notably successful. One of the more…
I remember a talk that Von Neumann gave at Princeton around 1950, describing the glorious future which he then saw for his computers. Most of the people that he hired for his computer project in the early days were meteorologists. Meteorology was the big thing on his horizon. He said, as soon as we have good…
The next obvious feature of the universe in which we live is that it is old, very old. It took intelligent life about 3.5 billion years to develop on Earth. Hence, our existence requires a universe that accommodated our arrival by lasting billions of years. The current best estimate for the age of our universe is…
We must make the following remark: a proof, that after a certain time t1, the spheres must necessarily be mixed uniformly, whatever may be the initial distribution of states, cannot be given. This is in fact a consequence of probability theory, for any non-uniform distribution of states, no matter how improbable it…