Max Tegmark
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| Max Tegmark | |
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| Born | May 5, 1967 Sweden |
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Max Tegmark (born 5 May 1967) is a Swedish-American cosmologist. Tegmark is an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he belongs to the scientific directorate of the Foundational Questions Institute. Currently, he also teaches a relativity class (8.033) to undergraduates at MIT.
As part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey team, he has worked on data analysis, extracting the parameters of the Lambda-CDM model from observational large-scale structure and cosmic microwave background data.
He is one of the proponents of the quantum suicide thought experiment, and has come up with a mathematical argument for the multiverse. The computational expression of a single random number between one and zero (with all its infinite decimals) is longer than the computational expression of the whole set of numbers that exist between 1 and 0, so it may be more informationally economical for reality to consist of infinite parallel universes instead of just one. The computer code for such a computation is only two lines long.[citation needed]
He has also been a strong critic of those who would infer a theory of consciousness from quantum effects, such as Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff.
Tegmark has also formulated the "Ultimate ensemble theory of everything", whose only postulate is that "all structures that exist mathematically exist also physically". This simple theory, with no free parameters at all, suggests that in those structures complex enough to contain self-aware substructures (SASs), these SASs will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically "real" world. This idea is formalized as the "Mathematical universe hypothesis" in his seminal paper The mathematical universe.
Tegmark was born in Sweden, son of Karin Tegmark and Harold S. Shapiro, studied at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and later received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. After having worked at the University of Pennsylvania, he is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
He is married to astrophysicist Angelica de Oliveira-Costa and they have two sons, Philip and Alexander.
[edit] Trivia
- In 2006, Tegmark was one of fifty scientists interviewed by New Scientist about their predictions for the future. His prediction: "In 50 years, you may be able to buy T-shirts on which are printed equations describing the unified laws of our universes." [1]
- Tegmark appears in the documentary "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" in which he is interviewed by Mark Oliver Everett, the son of the founder of the Many Worlds Interpretation, Hugh Everett.
[edit] External links
| Persondata | |
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| NAME | Tegmark, Max |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Tegmark |
| SHORT DESCRIPTION | Cosmologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1967 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Sweden |
| DATE OF DEATH | |
| PLACE OF DEATH | |
