On Sale: Apr 13, 2009
Page Count: 384 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9780786734610

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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?

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Clifford A. Pickover

About the Author

Clifford A. Pickover has published more than 50 books, translated into a dozen languages, on topics ranging from science and mathematics to religion, art, and history. He received his PhD degree from Yale University, has been granted more than 800 US patents, and has more than 180,000 X (formerly Twitter) followers. For many years, he was an IBM researcher and inventor and editor-in-chief of the IBM Journal of Research and Development. He is the author of many other books including Death and the Afterlife, The Physics Book, and The Math Book, which won the Neumann Prize. Clifford lives in New York.

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