John Horton Conway Quotes

[T]he best packings in up to eight dimensions belong to families <math>A_n, D_n </math> and <math>E_n</math>, and the corresponding s turn up in apparently unrelated areas... [I]n 24 dimensions the <math>\Lambda_{24}</math> has... connections with , s, and the Monster simple group... [O]ne day someone will write an article on "The Ubiquity of the Leech lattice." ...There are applications of... packings to number theory... [e.g.,] solving s, and to "the "... There are... applications of sphere packings... in digital communications... a typical question from... spread-spectrum communications for mobile radio... how many spheres of radius 0.25 can be packed in a sphere of radius 1 in 100-dimensional space? ...Two and three-d... packings... circles in a two-d... packing may represent s... in... a cable. Three-d... packings have applications in chemistry and physics... biology... antenna design... choosing directions for X-ray tomography... and... statistical analysis on spheres... n-dimensional packings may be used in... numerical evaluation of integrals... on the surface of a sphere in <math>\R^n</math> or in its interior. ...A related application ...n-dimensional search or approximation problems ...[I]n physics... dual theory and superstring theory... have involved the <math>E_8</math> and <math>\Lambda_{24}</math> lattices and the related Lorentzian lattices in dimensions 10 and 26...

I'm going to present arguments... to strongly support... that we do... have free will, but not... to prove it at the deductive level.

Dennis Overbye ...says ~everything we know of science convinces me ...that the world is deterministic, nevertheless I cling to the illusion of free will.~ (I'm not quoting his exact words.) ..~I can't run my life without this illusion.~ Some people have described it as a necessary illusion. We don't think it's an illusion ...It's not ...We think we have free will.

[S]uppose I had a twin brother... [M]y sisters would have had a much better chance... [T]hey could... interrogate us separately... Then we can't change the object. ...Without transmitting information ...we couldn't win... [T]hat's what manages to happen in the particle case. ...[T]his ...Simon also thought of a long time ago.... but he didn't... deduce the .

[T]he strangest contribution of quantum mechanics to this discussion is the EPR paradox. ...That's an essential contribution to our theorem too. ...Despite the fact that information can't be transmitted faster than the speed of light, ...remotely separated events can be correlated ...and this is the content of our TWIN axiom, you can put two particles into a... singleton state... the angular momentum of the pair of particles is zero... [B]y the conservation of angular momentum... if you measure the angular momentum of this in any direction, then for the angular momentum of the other you get the negative answer, but... we're going to square it, that means... the squared component of spin is the same... [T]hese particles have been sort of hypnotized. If you ask... they will give the same answer... like I and my twin brother... [T]he funny thing is, even though the proves that the answers do not exist ahead of time, the equality of the answers can exist...

When I was on the train from Liverpool to Cambridge to become a student, it occurred to me that no one at Cambridge knew I was painfully shy, so I could become an extrovert instead of an introvert.

The classical... problem is... how densely a large number of identical spheres ([e.g.,] ball bearings...) can be packed together. ...[C]onsider an aircraft hangar... [A]bout one quarter of the space will not be used... One... arrangement... the face-centered cubic (or fcc) lattice... spheres occupy <math>\pi / \sqrt{18} = .7405...</math> of the total space.... the lattice packing has density <math>.7405...</math> . [H]pwever, there are partial packings that are denser than the face-centered cubic... over larger regions...

[S]omebody said, ..."We have to believe in free will. There's no choice." That's a nice ...sort of paradox ...

The general... problem... packing... in n-dimensional space. ...[T]here is nothing mysterious about n-dimensional space. A point in real n-dimensional space <math>\R^n</math> is... a string of real numbers<math>x = (x_1,x_2,x_3, ...,x_n)</math>.A sphere in <math>\R^n</math> with center <math>u = (u_1,u_2,u_3, ...,u_n)</math> and radius <math>\rho</math> consists of all points <math>x</math>... satisfying <math>(x_1-u_1)^2 + (x_2-u_2)^2+ ... +(x_n-u_n)^2 = \rho^2</math>. We can describe a sphere packing in <math>\R^n</math>... by specifying the centers <math>u</math> and the radius.

[L]ots of philosophical discussions about free will are concerned with the question of assigning moral responsibility. ...If the judge is a determinist, I might argue it was all determined. I just had to do it. I'm not responsible. ...We're not concerned with assigning moral responsibility... I want you to think of free whim...

One consequence of the ... plus the assumption we actually have free will, is that even in the... inanimate world of particles, it's not true, this . A particle does one thing or another, and there's no reason... There's nothing in the previous history of the universe which tells it what to do.

Don't think... I believe unreservedly in quantum mechanics, but I'm not going to change my mind before there's some reason...

[W]hen... non-predictivity of quantum mechanics was discovered, it came as a great surprise. People tried to explain it away. ...Many ...invented larger theories. ...Nobody has succeeded in making one of these theories relativistically invariant, and physics appears to be relativistically invariant. ...Physicists have believed ...in the result that we're proving for a long time. It's no surprise. "I knew all that," they say. However, what they didn't know was that it can be deduced in this very precise, logical fashion, from so little information... that is not at all contentious. ...[T]hese 3 axioms ...they're routine, they're accepted ...They follow from quantum mechanics and relativity. There's nothing dubious about them ...and that's all we need... [T]he original deductions... [of] quantum mechanics... used more. They used all sorts... and some... were... pretty poorly understood...

Descartes... his type of determinism is only partial. I call it disconnected... that the physical world and... our bodies, but not our minds operate mechanically... We're robots, but the mind is different... that "The will is by its nature so free that it can never be constrained." This is normally called Descartes' dualism... mind, soul or spirit, and matter... [M]atter operates according to one set of laws, and mind or spirit... to another.

He'd been working with... Jim Ax for two decades on a theory that is now contradicted by... [our] . ...I admire Simon tremendously.