Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Howard Bloom - The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates


This is a nearly hour long interview with Howard Bloom, by Harold Channer, on his new book, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Create. Here is a description of the book provided by the author:
There's a secret hidden in a mathematical nugget called Peano's Axioms.  Is Peano 's mystery the key to the cosmos?
The God Problem tackles the question of how a godless cosmos creates; of how a universe without a bearded and bathrobed god in the sky pulls off acts of genesis. And it pursues the riddles behind five mildly flabbergasting heresies: 
  1. a does not equal a 
  2. one plus one does not equal two 
  3. entropy is wrong 
  4. randomness is not as random as you think and
  5. information theory is way off base.
Says The God Problem
God's war crimes, Aristotle's sneaky tricks, Galileo's creationism, Newton's intelligent design,  entropy's errors,  Einstein's pajamas, John Conway's game of loneliness, Information Theory's blind spot, Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning?  Everything, as you're about to see.
In The God Problem you'll take a scientific expedition into the secret heart of a cosmos you've never seen.   An electrifyingly inventive cosmos. An obsessive-compulsive cosmos. A driven, ambitious cosmos. A cosmos of colossal shocks.  A cosmos of screaming, stunning surprise.  A cosmos that's the biggest invention engine--the biggest breakthrough maker, the biggest creator--of all time.
One critic has suggested that The God Problem may be a great book on a par with Darwin's Origin of the Species and Newton's Principia Mathematica.  One Nobel Prize winner and two Macarthur Genius Award winners have said The God Problem is "spectacular" and "great."    Early readers like Amazon.com's number one non-fiction reviewer have said The God Problem is "the next paradigm," "a game-changer," and a book that will "change your life."  And Heinz Insu Fenkl of SUNY's Interstitial Studies Institute says, "The God Problem is the next paradigm. It doesn't take you down the proverbial 'rabbit hole' -- it will take you to a place from which you will never re-emerge, a brand new universe in the same skin as the one you now unknowingly inhabit."
Will The God Problem utterly change the way you see everything around you and everything inside you? That's my intention.  But only one person can answer that question: you.
"Enthralling.  Astonishing.  Written with the panache of  the Great Blondin turning somersaults on the rope above Niagara.  Profound, extraordinarily eclectic, and crazy.   The most exciting cliffhanger of a book I can remember reading." ~ James Burke, creator and host of seven BBC TV series, including Connections
"I have just come out from the giddy ride through things of the mind and mathematics that is The God Problem. Bloom takes us on a magic carpet ride of ideas about: well, about everything. And it turns out that everything we knew about everything is probably wrong. The God Problem is an intellectual cave of wonders made more wonderful by the tales of the lives of the people behind the ideas. Don't start this book late at night, for it will banish sleep."  ~ Robin Fox, Rutgers University, author of  The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind, former director of research for the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation
"If Howard Bloom is only 10 percent right, we'll have to drastically revise our notions of the universe. There's no mysticism in The God Problem-- no God, no religion, no incommunicable spiritual insights -- just the contagious joy of a great mind set loose on the biggest intellectual puzzles humans have ever faced. Whether you're a scientist or a hyper-curious layperson, Bloom's argument will rock your world." ~ Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, National Magazine Award Winner
Enjoy the interview.

Howard Bloom - The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates

Interviewed by Harold Channer


Howard Bloom is author of: 

Resume, in part:
  • Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute
  • Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University
    Founder: International Paleopsychology Project
  • Founder, Space Development Steering Committee
  • Member Of Board Of Governors, National Space Society
  • Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society
  • Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project
  • Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab
  • Member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human Ethology. Scientific Advisory Board Member, Lifeboat Foundation
  • Advisory Board Member, The Buffalo Film Festival
  • Board Member, Humanity Plus
  • Board of Editors, The Journal of Space Philosophy

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