{"id":61,"date":"2026-06-09T12:56:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T12:56:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/?p=61"},"modified":"2026-06-09T13:17:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T13:17:50","slug":"phd-time-and-tel-aviv-of-the-late-80s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/phd-time-and-tel-aviv-of-the-late-80s\/","title":{"rendered":"PhD time and Tel-Aviv of the late 80s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After army service I started an MSc in physics on combining the quantum and relativity theory (the two most advanced theories that deal with the physical laws at the smallest and the largest scale, and which, so far seem to clash) with Prof. Larry\u00a0Horwitz<\/a>\u00a0at Tel-Aviv University. Larry (retired but still research active) was a wonderful and dedicated guide. His idea was that particles are probability waves in space-time (not just is space), and more importantly that this space-time wave can change within a deeper time-dimension. This is slightly reminiscent of Sci.Fi. stories in which a full history is changed into a new full history (lots of this in\u00a0Fringe<\/a>, for example).\u00a0 I wrote a thesis on this and even a peer reviewed article with Larry (who, I believe did most of it). I was quite confused though; we live in time (not in deep-time), so it was hard for me to grasp how all the changes in deep-time translate into what we perceive in our-time (in this theory a particle can go back and forth in time, and each time at a different location, and thus appears as several particles). There may have been a way to understand this, but I tried other directions. String theory started to become the big thing, and I struggled with it for some time. After a while I felt frustrated as I started to lose my intuition about how the mathematical equations relate to the physical observables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As at that time physicists started to explore the dynamics of neural networks and I just read a quite inspiring book by Hofstadter and Dennett called, the\u00a0Mind\u2019s I,<\/a>\u00a0about the nature and puzzles of Consciousness, I started a PhD on this, with Prof.\u00a0David Horn<\/a>. We explored some variants of the\u00a0Hopfield model<\/a>. The main idea here was to add dynamics to that model (which otherwise was converging to attractors that correspond to stored memories) to mimic free thoughts and associations. I was starting to take courses in Cognitive Psychology (with Shua Tsal on attention and\u00a0Dan Zakay<\/a>\u00a0on decision-making) and worked for some time in the lab of Prof.\u00a0Dov Sagi<\/a>\u00a0on visual psychophysics and I started to apply those models to\u00a0dynamic processes in decision-making<\/a>\u00a0and in\u00a0perception.<\/a>\u00a0 At this time, I started (together with my colleague\u00a0Eytan Ruppin<\/a>) to think about implications of neural (non-linear) dynamics to the problem of Free-Will. Those were also the times of the Tel-Aviv parties (Alona Daniel\u2019s song \u201con rooftops of Tel-Aviv\u201d just came out; I remember some wild parties on roofs and other strange places; thanks to Shaul for some of those). We (a group of TAU students and few other friends) had also a weekly football time, which was great fun until I torn a knee ligament. It was also the time of rock concerts (Deep Purple, at Park Yarkon, etc).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After army service I started an MSc in physics on combining the quantum and relativity theory (the two most advanced theories that deal with the physical laws at the smallest and the largest scale, and which, so far seem to clash) with Prof. Larry\u00a0Horwitz\u00a0at Tel-Aviv University. Larry (retired but still research active) was a wonderful … Continue reading “PhD time and Tel-Aviv of the late 80s”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":171,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/171"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions\/79"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.socsci.tau.ac.il\/mu\/marius\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}