Josh Mitteldorf

Josh Mitteldorf studies evolutionary theory of aging using computer simulations. The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. It may be that therapies to slow the progress of aging need not repair or regenerate anything, but only need to interfere with an existing program of self-destruction. Mitteldorf has taught a weekly yoga class for thirty years. He is an advocate for vigorous self care, including exercise, meditation and caloric restriction. After earning a PhD in astrophysicist, Mitteldorf moved to evolutionary biology as a primary field in 1996. He has taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, LaSalle and Temple University. He is presently affiliated with MIT as a visiting scholar. In private life, Mitteldorf is an advocate for election integrity as well as public health. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. His two daughters are among the first children adopted from China in the mid-1980s. Much to the surprise of evolutionary biologists, genetic experiments indicate that aging has been selected as an adaptation for its own sake. This poses a conundrum: the impact of aging on individual fitness is wholly negative, so aging must be regarded as a kind of evolutionary altruism. Unlike other forms of evolutionary altruism, aging offers benefits to the community that are weak, and not well focussed on near kin of the altruist. This makes the mechanism challenging to understand and to model. more at http://mathforum.org/~josh

Energy from the Vacuum

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A lot of powerful people don’t want this to be real. That doesn’t mean it is real, but it makes it the kind of subject that I want to know about. There are persistent stories of people who invent perpetual motion machines only to disappear or to die mysteriously or become insane. Foster Gamble, in particular, … Read more

Nobel Committee Nods to Mystical Physics

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The Nobel Committee is risk-averse. They don’t want to look foolish a generation down the road, so they have subverted Alfred Nobel’s original intent, which was to reward the most promising discovery of the current year, and instead they dip into the deep past. Yes, they avoid mistakes this way, but by the time a scientist … Read more

“Remember, do no harm”

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A towering genius can be a babe in the woods; A high-functioning scientist can be a useful idiot. Babe in the Woods The smartest man I ever knew tried to teach me relativistic quantum field theory when I was a 20-year-old Harvard undergrad. By that age, Julian Schwinger had already collaborated as an equal with … Read more

COVID deaths and Vaccine deaths

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Truth was the first casualty in the war on COVID. Trusted sources of medical information became propaganda outlets, and when that wasn’t enough, the raw data on which medical analysis was based was withheld and even falsified by the governments that controlled it. Hence, it’s refreshing to see an honest analysis of apparently honest government … Read more

Exactly the same

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This is about identical particles, Bosons and Fermions, and why the world seems solid when we kick it and how physics tells us that everything is really one thing. Alice and Bob are both people, but you would never confuse them—they’re not identical.  “Identical twins” are a lot closer. Some people can’t tell them apart, … Read more

IF, AND, NOT

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Future pundits warn us that the Artificial Intelligence revolution could get out of our hands, as robots develop minds of their own and evade human control. Meanwhile, I’m sure you’ve noticed that user interfaces on every web site you’ve loaded in the last few years is buggy, quirky, and makes stupid mistakes, mistakes that are … Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and the Secret of Life

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Irwin Schrödinger described his Cat Paradox in 1935. You’ve heard the gist described in many ways. In quantum mechanics, if something is possible and something else is possible, it is always possible for the something and something else to exist in superposition. An object can be in two places at once. A proton can be spinning clockwise … Read more

mRNA Vaccines: A Flawed Idea from the Start

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The mRNA vaccines for COVID are doubly flawed. One problem in particular must have been known to the biochemists and the other to the leadership who choose to rely on these vaccines. The first problem is that the dose is uncontrolled; different people produce vastly different amounts of the spike protein from the same injection. … Read more

Proof we are not living in a simulation

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If quantum biology is a thing, reality “computes” more efficiently than any computer. Introduction To some of us it is obvious, something we know in our hearts beyond doubt. There is nothing more real to me than my own consciousness. It is an example of what Immanuel Kant called a synthetic a priori. We may not … Read more