78 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American theoretical physicist — Research Scientist at Google — who works on quantum error correction, quantum computing, and theoretical aspects of information in physics.
German-American physicist who published the special theory of relativity (1905), the general theory of relativity (1915), and the photoelectric effect (Nobel Prize 1921) — demonstrating that space, time, mass, and energy are related, and transforming the foundations of physics.
American physicist who designed the Michelson-Morley experiment — the most famous null result in physics, disproving the luminiferous ether and setting the stage for special relativity.
British science journalist and author — former The Economist science editor — author of The Man from the Future (biography of John von Neumann) — the most accessible account of von Neumann's life and ideas.
Soviet Russian mathematician who made fundamental contributions to topology (Tikhonov's theorem on products of compact spaces), mathematical physics, and regularization methods for ill-posed problems.
American physicist who discovered the Compton effect — the increase in wavelength when X-rays scatter off electrons — definitively establishing the particle nature of light.
British astrophysicist who confirmed Einstein's general relativity through the 1919 solar eclipse expedition and developed influential philosophical ideas about the arrow of time and the nature of physical reality.
The collected correspondence between C.G. Jung and Nobel Prize physicist Wolfgang Pauli — edited by C.A. Meier — documenting their 25-year intellectual dialogue about synchronicity, the relationship between physics and psychology, and the unus mundus (one world).
American industrial research laboratory created by AT&T in 1925 — which invented the transistor, the laser, the solar cell, Unix, C, and information theory — making it the most productive research laboratory in the history of technology.
American cosmologist at UC San Diego — designer of the BICEP telescope at the South Pole — author of Losing the Nobel Prize — who came close to winning the Nobel Prize when his team's claimed detection of primordial gravitational waves was contaminated by cosmic dust.
Italian theoretical physicist — developer of loop quantum gravity — author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, The Order of Time, and Helgoland — the most widely read popular science writer in Italy and among the most widely read globally.
Australian-American physicist and entrepreneur — former JPL scientist — who writes about space, energy, and technology with unusual analytical depth — co-founder of Terraform Industries (using solar power to produce synthetic natural gas from air).
Greek philosopher who became the third head of the Stoic school and systematized its logic, physics, and ethics into a comprehensive philosophical system.
British physicist — University of Oxford — who laid the theoretical foundations of quantum computing and whose epistemological philosophy (based on Karl Popper) argues for an optimistic view of human knowledge creation — author of The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity.
American parapsychology researcher who led the government-funded remote viewing program at Stanford Research Institute (later moved to Science Applications International) — a physicist by training who became one of the most systematic researchers of anomalous cognition (ESP, precognition).
Lebanese-American physicist at Princeton who is a rocket propulsion specialist and also a pioneer of 3D audio recording technology (BACCH) — his dual career combining physics with audio perception research.
Hungarian-American physicist — 'Father of the Hydrogen Bomb' — Hoover Institution fellow — who designed the Teller-Ulam thermonuclear bomb, advocated for SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative), and was the most controversial major physicist in American history for his role in Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing.
Walter Isaacson's biography of Albert Einstein — arguing that his creative genius arose from his rebellious nonconformity and his ability to think in pictures.
William Shockley's textbook on semiconductor physics — the foundational text for understanding the physics underlying transistors and modern electronics.
Cuban-American painter and physicist whose large-scale paintings combine poetic imagery with philosophical inquiry — he holds a PhD in applied physics from Cornell and an MFA — and whose work explores memory, loss, and meaning at the intersection of art and science.
German physicist and chemist who formulated the Hückel rule for aromaticity and developed the Hückel molecular orbital method — a foundational contribution to theoretical chemistry.
Hungarian-American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1963 and posed two famous philosophical puzzles: Wigner's Friend (a challenge to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics) and the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.
Italian physicist and astronomer who confirmed the Copernican heliocentric model with his telescope, developed the mathematical method of natural science, and was tried by the Inquisition — making him the founding martyr of scientific freedom and the symbol of the conflict between empirical inquiry and religious authority.
South African cosmologist who co-authored with Stephen Hawking The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time and has argued against the multiverse and for the reality of top-down causation in complex systems.
American physics professor at Grinnell College who mentored Robert Noyce — introducing him to transistor technology and arranging for Noyce to meet John Bardeen — providing the academic foundation and connections that led Noyce to MIT and eventually to Fairchild Semiconductor.
German physicist and consciousness researcher at the Parmenides Foundation who has developed formal frameworks for understanding mind-matter relations and synchronicity — particularly the Atmanspacher-Römer framework connecting Pauli-Jung synchronicity to quantum non-locality.
German physicist who experimentally confirmed Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism by producing and detecting radio waves — one of the most consequential experiments in the history of physics.
Werner Heisenberg — German theoretical physicist who developed quantum mechanics and formulated the uncertainty principle (1927) — demonstrating that the position and momentum of a particle cannot both be precisely measured simultaneously — one of the foundational discoveries of 20th century physics.
Hermann von Helmholtz was a 19th-century German physicist and physician whose work on perception, thermodynamics, and electrodynamics made him one of the most versatile scientists of the 19th century.
Christopher Nolan's 2014 science fiction epic about a team of astronauts traveling through a wormhole to find habitable planets for humanity — notable for its collaboration with physicist Kip Thane and its visually accurate depiction of black holes and time dilation.
English mathematician and physicist — who invented calculus (simultaneously with Leibniz), formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation, demonstrated that white light is composed of a spectrum, and built the first practical reflecting telescope — Warden/Master of the Royal Mint in his later career.
American theoretical physicist and scientific director of the Manhattan Project — who led the team that built the first atomic bomb — later stripped of his security clearance in 1954 during the McCarthy era — whose life embodies the moral complexity of scientific power.
American physicist and AI researcher at Anthropic who co-authored the Neural Scaling Laws paper — demonstrating that AI model performance improves predictably as a power law function of model size, data, and compute — one of the most consequential empirical findings in modern AI.
American physicist who co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 — the most consequential invention of the 20th century — and who won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice (transistor and superconductivity), the only person to do so in the same field.
Hungarian-American mathematician — who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics (von Neumann algebras), game theory (minimax theorem), computing (von Neumann architecture), nuclear weapons design, and self-replicating automata — widely considered the greatest mathematician of the 20th century after Gödel.
British physicist who has argued that time does not exist as a fundamental feature of the universe — the appearance of time arises from a static configuration space (Platonia).
American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who argued that quantum cosmology shows that the universe can arise from 'nothing' — generating significant philosophical controversy about what 'nothing' means in physics.
Australian cosmologist at Western Sydney University — author of A Fortunate Universe (with Geraint Lewis) — who argues that the fine-tuning of physical constants is a genuine scientific puzzle that theism explains better than the multiverse.
Hugh Everett's interpretation of quantum mechanics in which the wave function never collapses — instead, at each 'measurement' the universe branches into multiple worlds, each realizing one possible outcome.
Argentinian physicist who worked on quantum decoherence, the arrow of time, and the foundations of statistical mechanics.
Sean Carroll's podcast bridging theoretical physics, philosophy of science, and cosmology — one of the leading science podcasts for intellectually demanding audiences.
Serbian-American inventor — who developed alternating current (AC) electrical systems, the Tesla coil, the induction motor, and made fundamental contributions to radio — whose work enabled the electrification of the world but who died penniless and alone.
Robert Wood's 1905 foundational textbook on physical optics — which established the modern experimental basis for the science of light — and which reflected Wood's lifetime of extraordinary experimental optical physics work.
American theoretical physicist who developed quantum electrodynamics (QED), the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, and Feynman diagrams — and was the most celebrated physics teacher of the 20th century.
American physicist at UC Berkeley who founded the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project — originally as a skeptical reanalysis of climate data, which ended up confirming the consensus on human-caused warming — and is known for his willingness to change his views based on evidence.
American experimental physicist at Johns Hopkins who made fundamental contributions to physical optics — discovering Wood's anomalies, pioneering ultraviolet and infrared photography — while being known as one of science's great characters, a man who turned scientific investigation into performance art.
British mathematician and physicist who made foundational contributions to general relativity (Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems) and has argued controversially that consciousness requires non-computational physics.
American physicist and laser physicist who co-founded the SRI remote viewing program with Hal Puthoff — co-authored Mind Reach and The Mind's Big Bang — and who has spent his career arguing that remote viewing has been scientifically demonstrated and that consciousness extends beyond the brain.
American physicist and biotech entrepreneur who wrote Loonshots — arguing that organizations naturally suppress radical innovation ('loonshots') the same way water freezes, and that the key leadership skill is managing the phase transition between the 'artists' (innovators) who pursue loonshots and the 'soldiers' (operators) who run the core business.
American theoretical physicist and philosopher who has argued for the Everettian interpretation of quantum mechanics, a naturalistic account of emergent time, and a 'poetic naturalism' where all ontological levels are valid.
Carlo Rovelli's 2014 essay collection — 7 brief chapters on general relativity, quantum mechanics, the architecture of the cosmos, particles, time, and the nature of the mind — the most widely read popular physics book in Italian history.
Penrose's follow-up to The Emperor's New Mind — responding to critics and developing the Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) theory of quantum consciousness with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.
American physicist at SLAC and Hoover Institution — who combined high-energy physics with arms control advocacy — one of the most respected physics voices on nuclear weapons policy — worked with the President's Science Advisory Committee.
German science journalist — author of The Secret Pulse of Time and The Science of Happiness — who writes popular science on subjective experience, physics, and consciousness.
American theoretical physicist and genomics researcher — former VP Research at Michigan State — co-founder of Genomic Prediction — who works on the genomics of cognitive traits and has argued that polygenic screening for intelligence is both possible and ethical.
American physicist at NYU — former Undersecretary for Science at the Department of Energy — former chief scientist at BP — author of Unsettled — who argues that the scientific case for climate alarm is more uncertain than public communication suggests.
David Deutsch's 2011 philosophical argument — that the beginning of Infinity is the discovery of good explanations (hard to vary, testable), that all human progress comes from this discovery, and that there are no fundamental limits to what can be understood or achieved.
Roger Penrose's argument that human consciousness cannot be simulated by a Turing machine — drawing on Gödel's incompleteness theorems, quantum mechanics, and the physics of spacetime.
Jung and Pauli's joint exploration of the relationship between psychology and physics — Jung's essay on synchronicity alongside Pauli's study of archetypal symbolism in Kepler's work.
Julian Barbour's 2020 book arguing that the arrow of time does not require a special low-entropy beginning — in a timeless configuration space, complexity grows in both temporal directions from a central minimum-complexity state (the Janus Point).
A book exploring the relationship between modern physics and mystical experience — arguing that quantum mechanics, non-locality, and the measurement problem open conceptual space for understanding mystical claims about consciousness and non-ordinary reality.
William Egginton's 2023 book interweaving the thought of Kant, Borges, and Heisenberg — arguing that all three reached the same conclusion from different directions: that reality as we experience it is always a construction mediated by our cognitive and physical limitations, never the thing itself.
Roger Penrose's 1,100-page comprehensive account of the mathematical and physical structure of the universe — covering everything from complex numbers to quantum field theory, string theory, and cosmology.
Stefan Klein's 2007 exploration of the science of subjective time — examining why time speeds up with age, slows in danger, and varies with attention — synthesizing physics, psychology, and neuroscience.
Liu Cixin's 2008 Chinese science fiction novel (2014 English translation by Ken Liu) — the first in the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy — beginning during the Cultural Revolution and expanding to first contact with an alien civilization on an unstable three-sun system.
American physicist who claimed to have discovered a relationship between high-voltage electrical fields and gravitational effects (the Biefeld-Brown effect) — which has been cited in UAP propulsion theory discussions despite never being mainstream-accepted.
Roger Penrose's mathematical framework for describing spacetime using complex numbers and spinors — an alternative approach to quantum gravity based on the geometry of light rays.
American physicist who co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 with John Bardeen and William Shockley — sharing the 1956 Nobel Prize — and who contributed the experimental work that made the point-contact transistor functional.
Randall Munroe's 2014 book — answering absurd hypothetical science questions (What if everyone on Earth jumped at once? What if a baseball traveled at 90% of the speed of light?) with rigorous scientific calculation — the most entertaining science education book.
American physicist who led the Bell Labs team that invented the transistor — sharing the 1956 Nobel Prize — and who founded Shockley Semiconductor in Palo Alto, creating the talent concentration that spawned Fairchild Semiconductor and then the entire Silicon Valley ecosystem.
American physicist (Stanford) who has pursued the scientific study of intentional effects on physical reality — a fringe research program regarded skeptically by mainstream physics.
Austrian-Swiss theoretical physicist who received the 1945 Nobel Prize for the Pauli exclusion principle — and who, while in Jungian analysis with a student of Jung's, entered a 25-year intellectual correspondence with Jung about synchronicity, the relationship between quantum mechanics and psychology, and the unus mundus.
Scott Aaronson's wide-ranging tour of quantum computing's foundational questions — from ancient Greek atomism through computational complexity to quantum mechanics and consciousness.
Stanford theoretical physicist who co-discovered string theory and developed the string theory landscape — the multiverse of possible universes predicted by the theory.
Columbia philosopher of physics known for rigorous treatments of the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics.
Leonard Susskind's popular exposition of the string theory landscape — arguing that the apparent fine-tuning of physical constants is explained by a multiverse of 10^500 universes.
MIT cosmologist and AI safety advocate — co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, author of Life 3.0 on AI futures, and developer of the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis.
Lawrence Krauss's book traces the development of modern physics — from Galileo through quantum field theory — as a narrative of humanity replacing supernatural explanations with empirical discovery. The title ironically alludes to the Christian Gospel narrative, asserting that the scientific story of the universe surpasses it.