In the video below, Dr. Kenneth Hayworth, president and co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, ponders the following possibility: Imagine that it would be possible to make an identical copy of yourself, including your memories and experiences. Is that copy of you, you? Meaning, if someone pointed a gun to your head, would you be comfortable dying, knowing that the other you, the copy, would still be alive?

Most of us would push the gun away, or hide, as quickly as possible. Hayworth, a senior scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Farm Research Campus in Ashburn, Va., says that this instinctive reaction of preserving ourselves at all costs is what we are evolutionarily programmed to do. But should this make sense, now that a copy of you exists?

If being human means sharing the essential characteristic of having a consciousness, and if this consciousness is reproducible at least for the sake of argument we are all interconnected. Hayworth argues that even within this reductionist approach to consciousness in that it is reproducible from knowing how it springs from our brain's architecture and functionality there is a place for spirituality. Not out there, but through our interconnectedness and essential unity as a species. We may be far from such scientific achievements, but the ideas are worth debating. Would you let your copy live in your place?

Here is the video:

P.S.: I would not be comfortable dying for my "copy" for the simple reason that I find it impossible to construct an "identical" copy of myself. There are no such things as perfect measurements in science; there are always errors. As such, there won't be a perfect copy of ourselves, given the enormous amount of information required to achieve such a feat. As more information is extracted and stored, errors will pile up, unavoidably. So, a copy of you may be a good approximation of you, but it won't be a perfect you. Perfection is a guiding concept, not something that is achievable in reality.

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist and professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the co-founder of 13.7, prolific author of papers and essays, and active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

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Is An Identical Copy Of You, You?

The premiere screening of the one hour documentary Mystery of the Trees will be presented in the sanctuary of the Episcopal Church of the Holy Family, 200 Griffith Road, Saturday, February 7, at 7 p.m. with reception following.

This first-ever glimpse into a part of Native American culture that has been mostly hidden from public knowledge is presented by the Mountain Stewards, a non-profit organization located in Jasper, who produced the film. The narration and participation of telling this story by Native

American actor Wes Studi (Dancing with Wolves, Last of the Mohicans, plus many other films) and interviews with tribal elders from the Cherokee, Muscogee-Creek, Comanche, Delaware, Ute, Osage, Quapaw and other tribes anchor the film

In a seven year journey, the Mountain Stewards, formed to build trails so that hikers could experience the beauty of the North Georgia mountains, moved from mere curiosity about oddly shaped trees they began to encounter to an in-depth research study of what many call Indian Marker Trees. In the best tradition of scientific exploration, probing the mystery first found in their own backyard raised many questions. As a result, in 2007, researchers from multiple states joined with the Mountain Stewards in exploring this fascinating but obscure story. As research continued, interviews with tribal elders provided glimpses into the understanding of the cultures which, after living close to nature for thousands of years, were almost destroyed.

The interviews with the elders not only resulted in a greater appreciation of the Indians use of trees but also instilled in the researchers a deeper respect for the spirituality and wisdom of those who were the first people on the land. It is hoped that the documentary will encourage the preservation of the story-telling trees as well as point the way to future areas of study about many other aspects of Indian culture that have been impacted.

The initial presentation of information on the Indian trees was offered in a book Mystery of the Trees published by the Mountain Stewards in December 2011 with a second printing in November 2012. The book offers an in-depth, world-wide look at the story of the trees. It can be purchased through the website at http://www.mysterytrees.org. Other information about the Mountain Stewards, a 501(c)(3) organization, can be found on its main web site, http://www.mountain stewards.org

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Wednesday January 28, 2015 01:07 PM

The Associated Press

(c) 2015, Bloomberg News.

Charles Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose discoveries in quantum electronics led to the laser technology used in fiber-optic communications, medicine and James Bond films, has died. He was 99.

He died on Tuesday on his way to the hospital, according to the website of the University of California at Berkeley, where Townes had worked for almost 50 years, most recently as professor emeritus.

Townes won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for his discovery of the maser -- a device that creates a concentrated beam of microwave radiation -- a decade earlier. Soviet physicists Nicolay Basov and Aleksandr Prokhorov, who independently produced the same findings, shared the award. Townes later laid the theoretical foundations for the laser, originally put forth by Albert Einstein in 1917, based on the emission of light, instead of microwave radiation.

"He was one of the most important experimental physicists of the last century," Reinhard Genzel, a professor of physics at Berkeley, said of Townes, according to the article on the school's website. "His strength was his curiosity and his unshakable optimism, based on his deep Christian spirituality."

Citing a religious-like revelation, Townes said he was sitting on a park bench among blooming azaleas in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1951 when it dawned on him how to create a beam of short-wavelength, high-frequency molecules, according to a 2014 article marking his birthday.

Laser is an acronym for "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation." Theodore Maiman is credited with operating the first laser device on May 16, 1960, at the Hughes Research Laboratory in California. In the decades that followed, the technology was used for everything from atomic clocks, corrective eye surgery, supermarket bar-code scanners, CD-ROMs and DVDs, to industrial cutting instruments and light shows at rock concerts.

It even had a prominent role in James Bond movies. In the 1964 film "Goldfinger," the main villain threatened to kill British secret agent 007 with an industrial laser device. Bond also escaped deadly beams in "Die Another Day" (2002), and his laser watch helped him out of tight situations in "Never Say Never Again" (1983) and "GoldenEye" (1995).

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Charles Townes, 99; Nobel winner pioneered laser technology