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

by Clifford A. Pickover

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?

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Physics

384 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 2006

About the author

Clifford Alan Pickover is an American author, editor, and columnist in the fields of science, mathematics, science fiction, innovation, and creativity. For many years, he was employed at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown, New York, where he was editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He has been granted more than 700 U.S. patents, is an elected Fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and is author of more than 50 books, translated into more than a dozen languages.

Reviews

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Pickover the way I like him, with lots of random information that I can use in my own mind environment. This book's only real flaw content-wise is that it rehashes stuff from his other books, but Pickoverians expect that. :) Sometimes he draws new connections between his favorite subjects, but sometimes he's just being a bit redundant. It also has the usual typos and half-assed editing. Clifford, if you're out there, I need a job. If you need a very chameleonic editor that can actually spell...

[Jef · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh. That was beautiful Clifford. It made me cry to finish it. I learned so many random little things that just fascinated me. I'm going to keep this one.