Information Philosophy Institute

Home > Institute

In the Fall of 2017 I completed the design and building of my own iTV-Studio in the conference room, with the goal of delivering weekday online lectures on philosophy, physics, and other topics for the rest of my life.

The studio streams live to CCTV in Cambridge and to both YouTube and Facebook. Between November and January I delivered fifty online lectures. But the conference room became too hot for webcasting as the weather turned warm. I thought of a new heating/cooling system, maybe also insulating the walls (good for sound isolation).

I turned back to writing my fourth book, on Albert Einstein, "My God, He Plays Dice!," with the goal of publication by my 82nd birthday in June, 2018. I completed several more chapters and developed many new insights into Einstein's thought, notably that the observable universe may contain only a finite amount of information. A finite volume contains only a finite number of particles of matter and energy. A finite volume also contains only a finite number (but a number increasing rapidly with universe expansion) of energy-accessible phase-space cells ℏ³.

Einstein suspected that the mathematical continuum, with its infinite number of infinitesimal points, might not be the best description of a finite number of discrete particles. His contemporary mathematicians, Richard Dedekind, Leopold Kronecker, Herman Weyl, L.E.J. Brouwer, and even David Hilbert, thought that infinities and infinitesimals might simply be human ideas. Material particles really exist. A theoretical field may also be simply a human idea. Perhaps, Einstein worried, his unified field theory may be just a "castle in the air?"

Einstein himself had shown that the continuous ether did not exist, but he feared that his general relativity was restoring a continuous gravitational field!

I put a lot of energy, time, and money into a pre-release screening of Olivier Wright's PSI film at MIT on April 4,2018, hosting my colleagues in the free will debates, Dan Dennett, Bob Kane, and Alfred Mele.

But then the newly elected president of the Harvard Crimson, Derek Xiao, accepted my standing offer to build an iTV-Studio for the Crimson, modeled on my own conference room, with six cameras and two media computers. My grandson Carter and his associate Austin Dugas put the new Crimson studio together in a matter of weeks in the basement of the Crimson building, next door to their 4-color press.

I next turned back to the Einstein book for several weeks. Beyond the goal of getting Einstein credit for so many of the basic concepts in quantum mechanics, I began to see how his view of an "objective" and "local" reality might explain some of the great quantum mysteries, like entanglement and the two-slit experiment.

But I then became totally distracted by the design and building of an Information Philosophy Institute. I thought I might demolish a number of my garages next door to put up a new building with four guest visitor offices, along with a new sound-isolated iTV-Studio, a lecture space, and a screening room. I engaged a construction firm, who began with an architect and lawyer that cost several thousand dollars but who made little progress toward the goal of a new building.

Sadly, the idea of a new building was too ambitious and simply was not to be.

Instead I settled for remodeling the basement of 77 Huron Avenue with a smaller boiler room, an expanded workshop, offices for a sound-isolated iTV-Studio with a screening room, offices for visiting colleagues, a remodeled bath, an expanded kitchenette, and new entrances at front and rear. This would also serve as a modest repository and archive of my inventions as well as my philosophical research.

The cellar had become cluttered with my work designing and building a dozen multi-camera iTV-Studios, several in briefcases, the iTV-Van, and the two room-size systems. The cellar foundation walls were leaking, flooding the floors with inches of standing water when it rained heavily. The old horsehair plaster and drop-down ceilings produced a lot of dust and dirt. Rugs on the rec room floor were stained and dirty. Floors above were sagging, perhaps because of termite damage years ago? The old steam heating system took up lots of space and overhead steam pipes were in the way everywhere.

My grandchildren were no longer using the pool table and pinball machines. My daughter-in-law had a sewing area and small exercise space, but the cellar was cold in the winter months. A new heating system could add radiators there.

I interviewed several contractors and finally found an excellent one. He filed for building permits, one for remodeling the first floor bath next to our guest room, and another for the basement remodel. He got the first, but not the second, which was delayed for months. See my design and building plans and progress here.

With basement remodeling on hold, I went back to the Einstein book, and by year end had my fifth draft. Writing had begun in August 2015 and I finally uploaded the print book to Amazon in February, 2019.

Serious work on the basement renovation began then, after a meeting with Cambridge Zoning commissioner Rangit SInganayagam, who approved the building permit when he saw the plans for improving my workspaces were not an attempt to add a new apartment.

I had been hoping the new offices would be finished by my 83rd birthday in mid-June. But final inspection was only completed in late August.

I am now designing solar energy for my flat roof, so I can charge my first electric car (Tesla Model 3) directly from the sun and "off the grid."

I plan to cover the old black EPDM roof (which has not leaked for years since Holly and I patched it) with a white PVC membrane and the latest solar panels with microinverters. I began to research solar panels and PVC roofs intensely.

The new roof and solar panels are now postponed until 2020. They need to be done in the same year.

Here is the current floor plan of the IΦI (I-Phi) institute studio offices.