A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection

Clifford A Pickover

Apr 2009 · Sold by Basic Books

About this ebook

A Beginner's Guide to Immortality is a celebration of unusual lives and creative thinkers who punched through ordinary cultural norms while becoming successful in their own niches. In his latest and greatest work, world-renowned science writer Cliff Pickover studies such colorful characters as Truman Capote, John Cage, Stephen Wolfram, Ray Kurzweil, and Wilhelm Rontgen, and their curious ideas. Through these individuals, we can better explore life's astonishing richness and glimpse the diversity of human imagination. Part memoir and part surrealistic perspective on culture, A Beginner's Guide to Immortality gives readers a glimpse of new ways of thinking and of other worlds as he reaches across cultures and peers beyond our ordinary reality. He illuminates some of the most mysterious phenomena affecting our species. What is creativity? What are the religious implications of mosquito evolution, simulated Matrix realities, the brain's own marijuana, and the mathematics of the apocalypse? Could we be a mere software simulation living in a matrix? Who is Elisabeth Kobler-Ross and Emanuel Swedenborg? Did church forefathers eat psychedelic snails? How can we safely expand our minds to become more successful and reason beyond the limits of our own intuition? How can we become immortal?

Ratings and reviews

Great read, gives you a lot to think about!

Covers a lot of ground has left me with a lot to think about.

About the author

Clifford A. Pickover received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is the author of thirty-six highly acclaimed books on science, mathematics, art, and religion. His web site, pickover.com, has received several million visits.