How Close Are We to Creating Artificial Life? Sensational headlines and viral media videos have recently declared a monumental breakthrough: scientists have supposedly created "synthetic life" or assembled a "cell built from scratch". The center of this media storm is "SpudCell," an artificial liposome
What if the world does not begin with things, but with the first distinction between one thing and another? George Spencer-Brown was a mathematician, philosopher, psychologist, engineer, poet, novelist and chess player. He was even a glider pilot. Depending on whom you ask, he was an overlooked genius, a
Imagine a structure that contains every possible computation that could ever be run — every rule, every initial condition, every update, branching and folding into every other, forever. Not a universe. Not even a multiverse. The entire space of computational possibility itself. This is what physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram
Kurt Gödel’s famous ontological argument begins with a strikingly simple idea: God is the being who possesses every positive property. Gödel is arguably one of the greatest logicians in history and his formulation had a certain elegance. The legend goes that Gödel believed in God but was not about
Dominik Hofmann is a strategic advisor to deep-tech founders and investors, working at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and innovation. He holds a Master's degree in Digital Business Management and Engineering from Hochschule Fresenius and studied consciousness and epistemology at MIT, where he received two nominations for
In a conversation with Curt Jaimungal on his Theories of Everything podcast, David Deutsch made a claim that really piqued my interest. Einstein, he argued, would not survive the modern academic funding system. Not because his ideas were bad — obviously — but because the system is structurally incapable of recognizing the
It is amazing how many different definitions there are for science, considering its enormous position in modern society. And as with many things, inconsistent definitions, or the failure to recognize the use of different definitions, seems responsible for many, many disagreements. So here is my definition of science. The minimization
On Friday April 17th, we hosted Professor Krishnaswami Alladi, a long-time professor of mathematics at the University of Florida. In the landscape of modern number theory, some mathematicians produce results, while others help preserve and extend intellectual legacies. Professor Alladi stands out for doing both, with a particular commitment
When we think about time, we usually imagine a steady flow — a one-directional progression from past to future, fixed and irreversible. This intuition feels almost self-evident. Yet within modern physics, this picture begins to fracture. Under certain conditions, time may not simply flow forward; it may bend, loop,
When we think of nothing, we usually imagine emptiness — a space devoid of matter, motion, and meaning. Yet at the heart of contemporary physics, this everyday intuition collapses. In the quantum world, nothing is not a barren void; it is a dynamic foundation, alive with possibility. What physicists call zero-
My wife and I spent the day in Istanbul, mostly on foot, mostly moving without any particular plan except to see the Hagia Sophia. Anyone who has read even a little about the city knows that the building is treated almost like a condensed version of the region’s history.
You may have never heard of Federico Ardila-Mantilla, but let me just introduce you to his four axioms from the project he calls Todos Cuentan. This approach really resonates so strongly with us. We didn’t create the axioms, but we admire them and see them as a thoughtful