A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Clifford A. Pickover (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 6, 2006

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 colofrul 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 Kübler-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?

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

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.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (December 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560259841
• ASIN: B0011A5YCM
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #212,357 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

From my publisher:

Clifford A. Pickover received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is the author of over 30 books on such topics as computers and creativity, art, mathematics, black holes, religion, human behavior and intelligence, time travel, alien life, and science fiction.

Pickover is a prolific inventor with dozens of patents, is the associate editor for several journals, the author of colorful puzzle calendars, and puzzle contributor to magazines geared to children and adults.

WIRED magazine writes, "Bucky Fuller thought big, Arthur C. Clarke thinks big, but Cliff Pickover outdoes them both." According to The Los Angeles Times, "Pickover has published nearly a book a year in which he stretches the limits of computers, art and thought."
The Christian Science Monitor writes, "Pickover inspires a new generation of da Vincis to build unknown flying machines and create new Mona Lisas." Pickover's computer graphics have been featured on the cover of many popular magazines and on TV shows.

His web site, Pickover.Com, has received millions of visits. His Blog RealityCarnival.Com is one of his most popular sites.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Live forever?, December 21, 2006

By 

Paul Moskowitz (Yorktown, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection (Paperback)

Live forever? Isn't that what immortality is all about? Well, yes and no. In this delightful new book by Clifford Pickover, the author explores many routes to immortality. This book continues the explorations that the author began in his previous "Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves." Throughout, he interweaves themes on the nature of reality, people of genius, and of course how to achieve immortality.

Early on, Pickover casts doubt on the thesis that you can achieve immortality by creating a work of literature. He lists a sampling of best-sellers from 1950. Most are not known today. Other more exotic routes to immortality may be through the quantum theory of many worlds. In one of these you may never die. Too bad it is not the one that you live in now. We may all have our thoughts replicated in the storage of a massive computer. Or better yet, there are enough stray electrical impulses in a cubic mile of lime Jell-O to mimic our thought processes so that we might find our eternity there. If this is too mechanistic for you, there remains the religious concept of an afterlife in heaven or perhaps in hell if you do not qualify for heaven.

On every page of this book, you can find a new idea explored. Are we at the beginning or the end of the human species? Can we actually be living in a simulation like that in the "Matrix" movie? Are people with additional fingers smarter? Where are the "missing links" in the record of evolution?

There is a mechanism that Pickover begins to explore at the end of the book. We are all linked to each other by the threads of our relationships. What is the Internet if not an instantiation of a giant network of relationships? I used to think that writing your name on a web page was like writing your name in sand at the beach. However, now I am not so sure. Nothing ever seems to go away on the web. Perhaps, we are now finding our way to immortality in the sum of our ever-increasing Google hits.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the Most Fascinating Books That I've Ever Read!, January 23, 2007

By 

David J. Brown (Ben Lomond, California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection (Paperback)

I really loved *A Beginner's Guide to Immortality*! Clifford Pickover summarized so many thought-provoking and mind-expanding ideas in this book that I thought my head might explode. I simply couldn't put this book down. Every page is bursting with so many creative ideas that I actually had to close my eyes every few minutes just to think about the implications of what he was saying. This book really expanded my perception of reality. Very highly recommended reading!

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Gardens of Gilgamesh, January 28, 2007

By 

Ray Erskins (La Porte, TX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection (Paperback)

In "Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves" Cliff Pickover revealed a side of his personality that was well-camouflaged in his first thirty some-odd books on mathematics, time travel, fractals, aliens, patterns, puzzles, God, etc. Indeed, writing so many books in such a short time may be the root cause of his now irrepressible eclecticism. This latest effort, "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality: Extraordinary People, Aliens Brains, and Quantum Resurrection," has many similarities to SDE&E. Not only is it written with an exuberance that complements the author's multi-dimensional perspective, the prose remains clear and accessible even as Pickover explores the complex reaches of transcendental reality.

One of the highlights of "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" is Chapter 3, "Gilgamesh, God, and the Language of Angels." Pickover confesses that the "Epic of Gilgamesh" is one of his deepest obsessions. And we get a feel for his zeal as he recounts the ancient Mesopotamian king's search for immortality. But there is also a lot of extraneous material in this chapter. It's a virtual Mind Salad of eclecticism. Pickover's brain is fizzing with ideas and impressions, perhaps as a result of his relentless work ethic and voracious reading habits, and they seem to inundate his consciousness as he writes. I find this stimulating. Others may differ, wishing instead for a simpler, more direct narrative line.

At his best, Pickover's mind is encyclopedic -- correction: it's Wikipedic! It's Google-alien! Who else would focus on "The Brain from Planet Arous" in a chapter about Truman Capote? But Pickover does, and it can be fascinating because you get a completely different mental picture once you exit Truman Capote's peculiar oeuvre and enter the zany universe of Fifties science-fiction flicks, of which Pickover is a connoisseur. He loves the movies themselves, but also their filmmakers and the whole idea that some P.T. Barnum showman could make some outrageous, low-budget, horror-show hokum with B-list actors and still turn a tidy profit.

But Pickover can also be deadly serious, and I find this quote from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft, (which also appears in Chapter 3) to be quite haunting:

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We lie on the placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of disassociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

After reading "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" you may suspect that Cliff Pickover actually wants "the human mind to correlate all its contents." Which could be precisely what happens to the most intelligent human beings in the 21st Century anyway. If so, what he has to offer in this book should be of interest to the armchair existentialists. We all want to live forever. But then again, maybe not.