Jacob Bekenstein The Conservative Revolutionary

Jacob Bekenstein, an Israeli physicist of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, planted the seeds of a revolution of our understanding of space-time. Using conservative intuitive methods including time-old gedanken experiments, he discovered that black holes have thermodynamical properties such as entropy.Moreover, he found that their entropy was not extensive, unlike that of any other thermodynamical system considered before, but rather is proportional to the surface of their horizon. Furthermore, Bekenstein pioneered the study of black holes by focusing on their information content aspects. This led him to obtain bounds of a holographic nature on the amount of information that can be stored in a given region of space-time.This book contains a series of scientific and personal contributions by his contemporaries who recall the struggle against his ideas and then with them: the fate accompanying many revolutionary ideas. This is followed by original scientific contributions by many of the leaders of current research on black hole physics and holography. They have trodden his path and expanded it. The impact of Jacob Bekenstein's visionary ideas is just starting to be understood.

Absolute concepts of time and energy are integral to standard thermal physics, but background independent systems are devoid of them. This thesis explores the foundational question of generalising equilibrium statistical mechanics to background independent systems, and applies the resulting formulation to non-perturbative discrete quantum gravity. It offers a discussion of the rich interface of thermal physics and quantum gravity in this context, providing a broad contextualisation of such topics. This work details how standard tools from many-body physics can be generalised to discrete quantum gravity labelled with graph-based, or dual polyhedral, quanta that are common to various approaches like tensorial group field theory, loop quantum gravity, dynamical triangulations and lattice quantum gravity. It provides a systematic investigation, both conceptual and technical, of quantum gravitational Gibbs states, thermofield double vacuum states, and their application in condensate cosmology to probe questions of Big Bang singularity resolution and geometric inflation.

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Asian Conference Supercomputing Conference, SCFA 2022, which took place in Singapore in March 2022. The 8 full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions. They cover a range of topics including file systems, memory hierarchy, HPC cloud platform, container image configuration workflow, large-scale applications, and scheduling.

In a universe filled by chaos and disorder, one physicist makes the radical argument that the growth of order drives the passage of time -- and shapes the destiny of the universe. Time is among the universe's greatest mysteries. Why, when most laws of physics allow for it to flow forward and backward, does it only go forward? Physicists have long appealed to the second law of thermodynamics, held to predict the increase of disorder in the universe, to explain this. In The Janus Point, physicist Julian Barbour argues that the second law has been misapplied and that the growth of order determines how we experience time. In his view, the big bang becomes the "Janus point," a moment of minimal order from which time could flow, and order increase, in two directions. The Janus Point has remarkable implications: while most physicists predict that the universe will become mired in disorder, Barbour sees the possibility that order -- the stuff of life -- can grow without bound. A major new work of physics, The Janus Point will transform our understanding of the nature of existence.

This text presents a theory of genius and creativity, based on the personality characteristics of creative persons and geniuses. It uses modern research into the causes of cognitive over-inclusiveness to suggest possible applications of these theories to c

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Astronomer John Barrow takes an intriguing look at the limits of science, who argues that there are things that are ultimately unknowable, undoable, or unreachable.