This is an excellent idea Wai. I guess we look up the thread called "JOINING POST" to the info.
As for me, I studied mathematics and physics at an undergrad level. Whilst still at high school, I was studying quantum mechanics and general relativity, and started my science degree wanting to research beyond these theories. By the time I finished my BSc, I had decided that "reductionism" has gone too far, and that there was a whole world of "mesoscale" or "complex" physics that was opening up. As a result I moved into nonequilibrium statistical physics for my PhD. The field of Complex Systems basically took off at this time. At age 19, I toyed with an idea (no doubt inspired by Corewars from Martin Gardiner's column) of evolving small self-reproducing creatures as a means of understanding evolution. By the time I had finished my formal requirements for entering scientific research (ie a PhD), Tom Ray had achieved this task with Tierra. So after my PhD I got into artificial life, and I developed my own evolutionary model called Ecolab. As a result I've taken part in some of the big intellectual debates of the 90s in complex systems, including self-organised criticality as an explanation of punctuationlism, complexity trends through evolution and explanations of diversity growth during the history of the biosphere. During the mid-90s I started musing over the MWI and the anthropic principle, and realised that the univserse was not just some accident of creation, but the result of an evolutionary process. These thoughts finally culminated in my paper "Evolution in the Multiverse", where the MWI is analogous to variation in Darwin's theory of evolution, and the Anthropic principle is analogous to selection. Whilst riding a bicycle, I would speculate on what would be happening in the "neighbouring" universes where I was a little faster or slower, and that car that nearly missed me actually hit me and killed me. I realised at that time I would never know, and came up with my own formulation of what has become known as the Quantum Theory of Immortality. About this time, David Deutsch's book Fabric of Reality appeared, which I bought and devoured. It is truly an excellent book, although has its failings like any work. Later, I saw the New Scientist article about Max Tegmark, and I thought - here's someone with guts! As they say, most of the rest is history, documented in the Everything and FOR lists. As a result of discussions on this list, I have written a paper "Why Occams Razor", which develops these ensemble theories to the point of deriving all the postulates of quantum mechanics, except the correspondence principle. The paper was first written 2.5 years ago, and is in its 3rd revision. It is very difficult to get this sort of stuff published, but I'm perservering, because I suspect this will be one of the most important papers I'll write. I have to say I have little time for deliberate obfuscation, whether by excessive use of obscure verbal terms, or execessive mathematical rigour. However, I do believe that mathematical concepts and terms are about our only chance of comprehending and communicating this subject area. For this reason, I am disappointed at the approach the FOR list takes of banning all mathematical description. Relevant References: Stuart Kauffman: "The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution" This is quite a well written book, curiously aside from the description of Kauffman's own contribution to the field, the NK model. One problem is that many readers of this book assume that Kauffman invented the whole field. Murray Gell-Mann: The Quark and the Jaguar Tom Ray's Tierra: http://www.isd.atr.co.jp/~ray/tierra/index.html Ecolab: http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks/ecolab/ Li & Vitanyi (Thanks Wai Dai) Bruno Marchal's thesis: (which I read in French, but got confused by modal logic :) Roy Frieden: Physics from Fisher Information Standish, R.K. (2000) ``Evolution in the Multiverse'' Complexity International, 7. http://www.csu.edu.au/ci Standish, R.K. (2001) ``On Complexity and Emergence'' Complexity International, 9. http://www.csu.edu.au/ci Standish, R.K. (2002) ``Why Occam's Razor'' arXiv: physics/0001020 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Director High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile) UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 (") Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 2075, Red Centre http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------