Max Tegmark

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Max Tegmark

Max Erik Tegmark (born May 5, 1967 in Stockholm ) is a Swedish-American cosmologist and philosopher of science .

Live and act

Life

Max Tegmark is the son of a Swede (Karin Tegmark) and the mathematics professor at the Royal Technical University (KTH) in Stockholm Harold Shapiro . He studied at the KTH with degrees in economics in 1989 and physics in 1990 and at the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his master's degree in physics in 1992 and his doctorate with Joseph Silk in 1994 . As a post-doctoral student he was at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich and from 1996 as a Hubble Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study . He was then Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (tenure from 2003) and has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2000 , where he teaches as a professor of physics. He is the director of the Fundamental Questions in Physics Institute (FQXi).

In 2012 he became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . From 2001 to 2006 he was a Packard Fellow.

From 1997 to the divorce in 2009 he was married to the Brazilian astrophysicist Angelica de Oliveira-Costa, with whom he has two children and who worked together scientifically.

In 2014, Tegmark co-founded the Future of Life Institute , which is dedicated to reducing existential risks for all of humanity, particularly through nuclear weapons or transformative technologies such as advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and biotechnology. The organization's advisory board includes entrepreneur Elon Musk , AI researcher Stuart Russel , philosopher Nick Bostrom and physicist Stephen Hawking before he passed away in 2018.

Act

As a cosmologist, he deals with the evaluation of precision measurements of cosmic background radiation (CMB), such as those carried out e.g. B. be carried out by the satellites COBE and WMAP , and cosmological redshift surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (of which he was a collaborator), 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey or the Las Campanas Redshift Survey. In 2003 he and others discovered in the WMAP data an anomaly in the CMB distribution (orientation of both the quadrupole and octupole components of the distribution), called Axis of Evil by João Magueijo in 2005 . It was confirmed with data from the Planck Space Telescope . The nature of these anomalies, however, is controversial; it is possible that they are relics of the data evaluation for which various effects overlaying the CMB must be eliminated.

Together with Daniel Eisenstein and Wayne Hu, he proposed in 1998 to look for baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the CMB data and the large Redshift surveys of galaxies, where they should be detectable as a kind of cosmic measure of length (of around 500 million light years) .

In addition to cosmology, he also deals with fundamental questions in the border area to the philosophy of science, for example the role of consciousness or the second law of thermodynamics in cosmology and especially in his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH), which is a philosophy of modal realism with the assumption of parallel worlds (Multiverse) connects. He sees this as a candidate for a Theory of Everything (TOE). According to this, the universe (or a universe in a multitude of others) is a mathematical construct and physical reality is an aspect of those universes that are complex enough to contain self-aware substructures (SAS). Tegmark distinguishes a hierarchy of universes (level 1–4), starting with our universe (level 1). At level 4, they correspond to special mathematical formalisms, to which he assigns a reality to everyone on an equal footing. A very special example from Tegmark's point of view would be the formalism of string theory or M-theory . According to him, a possible universe is a mathematical system and is not only modeled or simulated by mathematics. Tegmark counters the objection that this would contradict Gödel's incompleteness theorem , according to which in a sufficiently rich mathematical axiom system there are undecidable but true statements, by restricting the mathematical constructs corresponding to the universes to decidable theories.

According to Tegmark, even at level 1, according to the currently favored model of an infinite universe, there are not only an infinite number of animate planets, but also an infinite number of exact doubles. Because of the finiteness of the speed of light, only a small section of the universe is visible to every observer. According to the multi-world interpretation of quantum mechanics (level 3) universes branch according to Tegmark into all possible conceivable alternatives, described in an abstract mathematical function space ( Hilbert space ). According to Tegmark, level 2 are universes with different initial conditions and values ​​of the natural constants, such as those that appear as inflationary bubbles in models of chaotic inflation ( Andrei Linde ).

He first published his speculative theory in 1998 in the Annals of Physics after several rejections (it was too speculative for the reviewer) thanks to the support of John Archibald Wheeler , who gave him a letter of recommendation, after which the article was published.

Fonts (selection)

  • Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence . Allen Lane, London 2017, ISBN 978-0-241-23719-9 .
    • Life 3.0: Being human in the age of artificial intelligence . Ullstein, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-550-08145-3 .
  • Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Knopf 2014.
    • Our mathematical universe. In search of the essence of reality . Ullstein, Berlin 2015 ISBN 978-3-550-08092-0 .
  • Shut up and calculate . In: New Scientist , 2007, arxiv : 0709.4024 .
  • Parallel Universes . (PDF) In: Scientific American , May 2003.
  • Editor with Angela de Oliveira-Costa: Microwave Foregrounds . Astronomical Society of the Pacific, San Francisco 1999.
  • Measuring Spacetime: From the Big Bang to Black Holes . In: Science , Vol. 296, 2002, pp. 1427-1433.
  • with J. Silk, Martin Rees, A. Blanchard, T. Abel, F. Palla: How Small Were the First Cosmological Objects? In: Astrophysical Journal , Volume 474, 1997, pp. 1-12.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Center for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER): A new existential risk reduction organization has launched in Cambridge, Massachusetts. May 31, 2014, accessed May 19, 2018 .
  2. ^ Team - Future of Life Institute . In: Future of Life Institute . ( futureoflife.org [accessed May 19, 2018]).
  3. ↑ Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Stuart Russell, Frank Wilczek: Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines. In: Huffington Post. April 19, 2014. Retrieved May 19, 2018 (American English).
  4. ↑ In 2004 you published an estimate of cosmological parameters from the SDSS and WMAP: Tegmark u. a .: Cosmological parameters from SDSS and WMAP . In: Phys. Review D , Volume 69, 2004, p. 103501 (SDSS collaboration) arxiv : astro-ph / 0310723
  5. ↑ Tegmark et al. a. The 3D Power Spectrum of Galaxies from the SDSS . In: Astrophys. J. , Volume 606, 2004, pp. 702-740 (SDSS collaboration)
  6. ^ Tegmark, De Oliveira Costa, Andrew Hamilton: A high resolution foreground cleaned CMB map from WMAP . In: Phys. Review D , Volume 68, 2003, p. 123523, arxiv : astro-ph / 0302496 .
  7. ↑ For example the proper motion of the earth, solar system and galaxy and various galactic and extra-galactic microwave sources. They are called the foreground , in contrast to the CMB, which is actually of interest, the cosmic microwave background .
  8. ^ Eisenstein, Hu, Tegmark: Cosmic Complementarity: H 0 and Omega M from Combining Cosmic Microwave Background Experiments and Redshift Surveys . In: The Astrophysical Journal Letters , Volume 504, 1998, L57
  9. ^ Tegmark: Consciousness as a state of matter , 2014, arxiv : 1401.1219
  10. ^ Tegmark: Second law and cosmology , 2009, arxiv : 0904.3931 .
  11. ^ Tegmark: Parallel Universes . arxiv : astro-ph / 0302131 In: John D. Barrow , PCW Davies, CL Harper Science and Ultimate Reality: From Quantum to Cosmos ", honoring John Wheeler's 90th birthday . Cambridge University Press, 2003
  12. ^ Tegmark: Is “the theory of everything” merely the ultimate ensemble theory? In: Annals of Physics , Volume 270, 1998, pp. 1-51, arxiv : gr-qc / 9704009 .
  13. ^ Tegmark: The mathematical universe . In: Foundations of Physics , Volume 38, 2008, pp. 101-150, arxiv : 0704.0646 .
  14. ↑ Level 1 is our universe, level 2 other inflationary bubbles with possibly different cosmological parameters (but the same physical laws and in the same space-time), level 3 the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics with parallel universes existing side by side in an abstract Hilbert space
personal data
SURNAME Tegmark, Max
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Tegmark, Max Erik
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swedish cosmologist and philosopher of science
DATE OF BIRTH May 5th 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Stockholm