Many years ago (getting close to 30 now), while doing my PhD (Voros 1996) in theoretical physics on mathematical extensions to General Relativity – and in particular, on Einstein’s own “unified field theory” – I happened across a book by Jan Schouten (1954) called Ricci-Calculus, which was an introduction (by a mathematician) to tensors and their applications, especially to geometrical thinking and analysis.
Continue reading “The Semi-Symmetric Metric Connection – Part I”
The question asked in the title of this post is one I have been pondering for the most part of a decade now, ever since I saw the image, shown in Figure 1, of the galaxy PGC54559 (popularly known as Hoag’s Object) in 2010, following several months of thinking about what Kardashev Type III civilisations might look like.
Continue reading “Is ‘Hoag’s Object’ an ‘engineered’ galaxy?”
I’ve had a new paper accepted for a special issue of the SAGE journal World Futures Review, on Foresight Education, edited by Peter Bishop. It is yet to be assigned to a volume/issue (UPDATE: it is most likely to be Vol.10, No. 4, Dec 2018), but has had a formal DOI assigned to it to allow for web linking prior to final publication, and is available through SAGE’s OnlineFirst system. I am also allowed to link a version from my University’s research repository, Swinburne ResearchBank. It is an accepted manuscript form, which SAGE allows to be placed in a university repository, rather than the final officially-published version, which they do not. Always look to the pagination of the final published version if you are going to be quoting things from it… Continue reading “Big History and Futures Studies – what a cosmic perfect match!”
The book chapter from which I took the posting on the Futures Cone last February has now been published online by Springer International. It is available to those who have SpringerLink subscriptions (many universities do, so try logging-into your University library and looking for the SpringerLink database) via the doi: link given below. I’ll be checking whether the possibility of self-archiving exists, which means I would be able to deposit a pre-publication (note: not the final) version of the chapter at Swinburne ResearchBank for wider availability. Continue reading “Chapters and an Article”
I mentioned last year that I had made a presentation at the Big History Anthropocene conference held in December 2015 at Macquarie University and organised by the Big History Institute. The presentations from that conference can be viewed on YouTube, with the full playlist available at this URL. They are almost universally terrific — it was one of the most engagingly informative conferences I’ve been to, so I encourage you to dip into the playlist. Continue reading “Quo vadis Humanity?”
Last year I noted that the Master of Strategic Foresight (MSF) — with which I’ve been involved since its inception at Swinburne in 2001 and into which I’ve taught for almost as long (through guest lectures firstly, then as a formal member of teaching staff from 2003) — was being shut down, and was to be taught out over the next year or so. My fellow foresight conspirator for much of that time, Peter Hayward (aka “Captain Foresight”), retired at the end of last year, but not before we were able to celebrate the fact that the MSF had existed at all. That was what we chose to call the “MSF Wake”. Continue reading “Celebrating the Master of Strategic Foresight”
From time to time people ask about the Futures Cone, and how it came about. Here is a brief history of how I came across it before adapting it to suit my use of the concept, and began using an early version of the Futures Cone diagram (i.e., with fewer categories) in 2000 when working as a foresight analyst for Swinburne University (before becoming an academic in the Master of Strategic Foresight). The text in this post is excerpted from a chapter submitted to the Handbook of Anticipation, ed. Roberto Poli (Springer International). The “formal” citation for the chapter/book is:
Voros, J 2017, ‘Big History and anticipation: Using Big History as a framework for global foresight’, in R Poli (ed.) Handbook of anticipation: Theoretical and applied aspects of the use of future in decision making, Springer International, Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-31737-3_95-1,
while the text in this post is from the section of that chapter entitled ‘Types of Alternative Futures’, pp. 10-13, and the “cone” diagram itself is: Fig. 4, p. 11.
Last year a colleague at the International Big History Association (www.ibhanet.org) asked me how futurists work/think. This was for a book she was writing for high school students on Big History. The final chapters of these types of books tend to focus on the future, hence the request for some ideas from someone who does this for a living. I tapped out a quick, off-the-top-of-my-head answer and sent it off. In thinking about how long since I’ve posted here, I thought I’d better get back into gear, especially as there are some ideas to share coming soon… Here is the essence of what I wrote: Continue reading “How Futurists Work/Think”
Here is a Q&A I did with Kathryn Ford, Project Coordinator at the Big History Institute at Macquarie University, for Issue 6 of the BHI newsletter, Threshold 9.
Interestingly, ‘Threshold 9’ (i.e., the ‘next’ Threshold in the 8-so-far main Thresholds of Big History) has been on my research agenda for quite a few years now, so it is a great pleasure to be able to talk more widely about the broader long-term future (as well as Threshold 9) in an issue of BHI’s Threshold 9 😉
I hope you enjoy it. Once the videos from the conference are uploaded, I’ll be writing about and linking to some of them in later posts.
Until then, remember: “keep looking to the future”. (I wonder what that would be in Latin 😉
Big History Institute newsletter Threshold 9 Issue 6: Q&A with a Futurist.
In my futures work, I use a cone diagram (above,* and again below**) to show how our judgements about ideas about the future tend to fall into a number of categories: Continue reading “On examining Preposterous! futures”
On December 21, 2015, a group of graduating students in the Master of Strategic Foresight program that I teach into at Swinburne University presented my colleague Dr Peter Hayward and I with caricatures of our likenesses – Peter was dubbed Captain Foresight, and I was named The Voroscope.
The latter is, of course, a most utterly perfect name for a blog that might seek to examine the whole of the Universe as well as the future, hence the coming-into-being of this blog.
So, welcome to The Voroscope – “an instrument of science and the future,” for examining everything that may exist in the totality of space and time, everywhere and everywhen, from the Hot Big Bang to the Big Chilly Rip, and for examining all manner of potential futures, from the Projected to the Preposterous! – and beyond…
The Voroscope 