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Adam Frank

Adam Frank Biography

Writer

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“The mystery of what happened to Easter Island’s civilization has haunted generations of writers and scientists. There are no trees on Easter Island because the Easter Islanders cut them all down. They deforested their island in the building and transportation of those giant stone heads. In the process of deforesting the island, they also started a downward spiral that drove their civilization to collapse. Easter Island serves as an object lesson for the interaction between an isolated, habitable environment and a civilization using that environment’s resources: they did it to themselves. The parallel to our current situation on Earth seems clear. In his 2007 bestseller, Collapse , anthropologist Jared Diamond unpacked that parallel. His work explored the trajectories of a number of human civilizations that disappeared at the height of their vibrancy and power. Diamond’s examples included the Anasazi of the American southwest, the Maya, and the Norse colony on Greenland. In each case, the civilization overshot the carrying capacity of its environment. Their populations grew as the society became ever more ingenious at extracting resources from its surroundings. Eventually, the limits to growth were hit. A short time after running into those limits, each civilization fell apart. Easter Island was the”

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Book:Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth
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“Like most young physicists, when I was a kid enraptured with physics, I thought, "Everything can be explained by the theory of the atom!" But as I've gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there's a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn't actually account for the world. As I've gotten older, I've also become sensitive to the ways - to all that is not amenable to explanation. Things that, even if you had an explanation, what good would it be?”

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Author:Adam Frank
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“New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves. The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are. There's a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used. We're gonna have to think about the world in a different way if we want to address complex systems.”

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Author:Adam Frank
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“Rather than make claims of final theories, perhaps we should focus on our ever-continuing dialogue with the universe. It is the dialogue that matters most, not its imagined end. It is the sacred act of inquiry wherein we gently trace the experienced outlines of an ever-greater whole. It is the dialogue that lets the brilliance of the diamond’s infinite facets shine clearly. It is the dialogue that instills within us a power and capacity that is, and always has been, saturated with meaning.”

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Book:About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang
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