Update (added 12 March 2020): We understand many in the FQXi community are dealing with disruptions due to COVID-19. We want to relieve a bit of this pressure by extending the essay contest deadline to April 24, 2020. If anyone has submitted an essay already and has issues with this extension or feels disadvantaged, please email, essay_contestATfqxi.org, and to discuss submitting an updated essay.
This will push back the remaining schedule as follows:
Community and Public ratings deadline - May 18, 2020.
Notification of winning essays on or around July 31, 2020.
At FQXi we're excited to launch our latest essay contest, with generous support from the Fetzer Franklin Fund and the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation. The topic for this contest is: Undecidability, Uncomputability, and Unpredictability.
For a brief time in history, it was possible to imagine that a sufficiently advanced intellect could, given sufficient time and resources, in principle understand how to mathematically prove everything that was true. They could discern what math corresponds to physical laws, and use those laws to predict anything that happens before it happens. That time has passed. Gödel's undecidability results (the incompleteness theorems), Turing's proof of non-computable values, the formulation of quantum theory, chaos, and other developments over the past century have shown that there are rigorous arguments limiting what we can prove, compute, and predict. While some connections between these results have come to light, many remain obscure, and the implications are unclear. Are there, for example, real consequences for physics -- including quantum mechanics -- of undecidability and non-computability? Are there implications for our understanding of the relations between agency, intelligence, mind, and the physical world?
In this essay contest, we open the floor for investigations of such connections, implications, and speculations. We invite rigorous but bold and open-minded investigation of the meaning of these impossibilities for reality, and for us, its residents. The contest is open now, and we will be accepting entries until March 16th.
Note: Despite a slight slip on the contest page, we aren't looking at time travel for essay entries! The real timeline is available which might be more helpful to those who don't have access to a flux capacitor.