by Eric Boyd

I had never met nor seen John Conway before October 19, but I had heard several stories of his crazy antics from a year ago:  crawling under chairs; challenging students to strategy games and beating the pants off him, pulling off his own shirt for no apparent reason and the like.  He sounded nuts.  But a lot of smart people are nuts.
Lucky for us, his shirt stayed on this time, and he fairly concisely and understandably proceeded to explain to those listening that he had done work to prove mathematically that if experimenters have free will that this necessarily implies certain particles have free will.  And in an hour and a half, as far as I could tell, he had most of us believing he was right.
Conway's central argument hinged on three axioms he called FIN, SPIN and TWIN, each of which was based on some sort of scientific evidence.  The first axiom, FIN, based on the theory of relativity, states that there is a finite upper bound to the speed at which physical

influences (FIN) can be propagated.  For example, according to relativity, physical influences cannot travel faster than the speed of light.  However, Conway's proof only requires some upper bound, not necessarily the speed of light.  Although, as Conway was ready to point out, this was the least verifiable of the three axioms, he stated that there is no evidence in any form that suggests it to be false and that, if it were false, human beings would
probably have found it by now.
The second axiom, SPIN, is based on Quantum theory and states that if you measure the squared speed of spin 1 particles in three perpendicular directions, you always get two 1's and a 0 (i.e. a triple of the form (a, b, c) with a, b or c equal to 0 and the other two equal to 1 in some order.  The spin of these particles is usually measured as plus or minus 1 or 0, but since the experiment only requires the speed squared, we can write the triple as described above.  This axiom has, to some extent, been experimentally
tested and verified.

                                                              7