The sixth and final in a series of lectures by John Conway on the “Free Will Theorem,” will take place tonight at 8:00 PM in McDonnell Hall, room A02 on the Princeton University campus.

The subject of tonight’s lecture is The Theorem’s Implications for Science and Philosophy. In physics, Conway shows us, it the Free Will Theorem shows that there can be no mechanistic explanation for the “collapse of the wave function,” and so provides the strongest refutation of the “hidden variable” theories. Philosophically, Conway shows us the theorem leads us to infer that the future really is affected by free will decisions.

Earlier lectures in this series are available for online viewing here.

These lectures are sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, Princeton University, and Princeton University Press. They present the work of Conway and Simon Kochen which asserts that if experimenters have free will, then so do elementary particles. The Press will publish a forthcoming book on the same subject called The Free Will Theorem. For more information about the lectures, please visit the Princeton site.

The image here is a visual representation of what the lecturers present as an airtight mathematical theorem that rests on what they say are three unassailable axioms which happen to rhyme — spin, fin and twin.