Science and Ultimate Reality

A few years ago, John Barrow edited an excellent collection of papers entitled Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum theory, Cosmology, and Complexity. It will, however, set you back £50, so to continue the trend established yesterday, I here provide the list of contents with hyperlinks to those papers which can be freely downloaded.

Part I. An Overview of the Contributions of John Archibald Wheeler:
1. John Archibald Wheeler and the clash of ideas, Paul C. W. Davies

Part II. An Historian’s Tribute to John Archibald Wheeler and Scientific Speculation Through the Ages:
2. The heritage of Heraclitus: John Archibald Wheeler and the itch to speculate, Jaroslav Pelikan

Part III. Quantum Reality - Theory:
3. Why is nature described by quantum theory? Lucien Hardy
4. Thought experiments in honor of John Wheeler, Freeman J. Dyson
5. It from qubit, David Deutsch
6. The wave function: it or bit?, H. Dieter Zeh
7. Quantum Darwinism and envariance, Wojciech H. Zurek
8. Using qubits to learn about it, Juan Pablo Paz
9. Quantum gravity as an ordinary gauge theory, Juan M. Maldacena
10. The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics, Bryce S. DeWitt

Part IV. Quantum Reality - Experiment:
11. Why the quantum? It from bit? A participatory universe? Three far-reaching, visionary questions from John Archibald Wheeler and how they inspired a quantum experimentalist, Anton Zeilinger
12. Speakable and unspeakable, past and future, Aephraim M. Steinberg
13. Conceptual tensions between quantum mechanics and general relativity: are there experimental consequences? Raymond Y. Chiao
14. Breeding non-local Schrödinger cats: a thought experiment to explore the quantum classical boundary, Serge Haroche
15. Quantum erasing the nature of reality - or, perhaps, the reality of nature? Paul G. Kwiat and Berthold-Georg Englert
16. Quantum feedback and the quantum-classical transition, Hideo Mabuchi
17. What quantum computers may tell us about quantum mechanics, Christopher R. Monroe

Part V. Big Questions in Cosmology:
18. Cosmic inflation and the arrow of time, Andreas Albrecht
19. Cosmology and immutability, John D. Barrow
20. Quantum cosmology, inflation, and the anthropic principle, Andrei Linde
21. Parallel universes, Max Tegmark
22. Quantum theories of gravity: results and prospects, Lee Smolin
23. A genuinely evolving universe, Joao Magueijo
24. Planck-scale models of the universe, Fotini G. Markopoulou
25. Implications of additional spatial dimensions to questions in cosmology, Lisa Randall

Part VI. Emergence, Life, and Related Topics:
26. Emergence: us from it, Philip D. Clayton
27. True complexity and its associated ontology, George F. R. Ellis
28. The three origins: cosmos, life and mind, Marcelo Gleiser
29. Autonomous agents, Stuart A. Kauffman
30. To see a world in a grain of sand, Shou-Cheng Zhang

Science and Ultimate Reality