17. Nov 2025

Rocket science, the wrong control parameter and one of the Martians & Life, Information, and Everything

Datum: 17. November 2025 | 11:30 – 12:30
Sprecher: Gasper Tkacik & Björn Hof, ISTA
Veranstaltungsort: Raiffeisen Lecture Hall
Sprache: Englisch

Rocket science, the wrong control parameter and one of the Martians
The unlikely story of how I lost my house because of scientific dispute, took refuge in a former mental institution just to get caught by the dimensionless quantity I had been running from in the first place: the friction Reynolds number.
 

Life, Information, and Everything
How matter moves and how energy flows are what physics students learn as a rule about the universe, irrespective of whether they are interested in things inert, living, truly non-binary, or trying to fake life. In contrast to matter and energy, how information is processed is studied with less theoretical flourish, less empirical drive, and often without proper units. That is the case even though the narrative of life is full of all the right verbiage, for example, “information processing”, “positional information”, “information in the genome”, “flow of information in the central dogma” and “neural coding”. This talk will be a story about an (ex?)physicist, unhappy with (and striving to change) such ridiculous state of world affairs.