Jamie Portsmouth

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Early in 1995 we were on a roll with new product development and began looking into other areas for research and possible products.  Our good friend and amazing Physics student Jamie Portsmouth was thinking of coming to Boston from England over the summer and was looking for something to keep him in beer over the summer.  Synthetic diamonds of gem quality were just appearing and there was considerable worry over them in the gem world.  Putting two and seven together we came up with a potential project of a new diamond tester which would differentiate natural from synthetic stones.  It makes for some interesting reading, even if we never turned it into a product.

 

On summit of Mt. Chocorua, NH (Jamie is on far right with, from left to right, Gang (Carl) Chen, Fonnet Bleeker, Paul Konkola)

The big questions (From Jamie's website)
bulletDoes the physical world exist?
bulletDoes a god exist?
bulletDo I have free will?
bulletDo other people have minds?
bulletIs my red your red?
bulletWhat is consciousness?
bulletWhere do I wake up after I die?
bulletCan a machine be conscious? A
bulletre evil, beauty, truth purely subjective?
bulletWhy is mathematics consistent?
bulletWhere does logic come from?
bulletDo mathematical ideas and objects exists outside our minds?
bulletAre theorems infallible?
bulletWhy do mathematical rules model nature so well?
bulletWhat causes the collapse of the wavefunction (if it does)?
bulletHow does quantum mechanics go over to the classical limit?
bulletWhat is spacetime like on the Planck scale?
bulletAre there more than four dimensions?
bulletIs this the only universe?
bulletWhat is the ultimate fate of our universe?
bulletWhat is turbulence?
bulletWhat is a strange attractor?
bulletWhat is a particle?
bulletWhat is a gauge theory?
bulletWill M-theory give me all the answers?
bulletHow does the brain work?
bulletHow did the brain evolve?
bulletHow did life begin?
bulletIs the anthropic principle valid?
bulletIs there other life in our galaxy/universe?
bulletWhat does a kumquat taste like?
bulletWhat is it like to get divorced?
bulletIs it like something to be a city, a country, a planet?
bulletCould one grow a baby from a set of chromosomes?
bulletWhen will a machine pass the Turing test?
bulletAre some people more important than others?
bulletWhat does it mean to be "smart"?
bulletWhat makes a joke funny?
bulletWhat are the next one thousand years going to be like?

 

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