Download or read book A Fortunate Universe written by Geraint F. Lewis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-06 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last forty years, scientists have uncovered evidence that if the Universe had been forged with even slightly different properties, life as we know it - and life as we can imagine it - would be impossible. Join us on a journey through how we understand the Universe, from its most basic particles and forces, to planets, stars and galaxies, and back through cosmic history to the birth of the cosmos. Conflicting notions about our place in the Universe are defined, defended and critiqued from scientific, philosophical and religious viewpoints. The authors' engaging and witty style addresses what fine-tuning might mean for the future of physics and the search for the ultimate laws of nature. Tackling difficult questions and providing thought-provoking answers, this volumes challenges us to consider our place in the cosmos, regardless of our initial convictions.

Download or read book The Universe of Things written by Steven Shaviro and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the rediscovery of Alfred North Whitehead’s work to the rise of new materialist thought, including object-oriented ontology, there has been a rapid turn toward speculation in philosophy as a way of moving beyond solely human perceptions of nature and existence. Now Steven Shaviro maps this quickly emerging speculative realism, which is already dramatically influencing how we interpret reality and our place in a universe in which humans are not the measure of all things. The Universe of Things explores the common insistence of speculative realism on a noncorrelationist thought: that things or objects exist apart from how our own human minds relate to and comprehend them. Shaviro focuses on how Whitehead both anticipates and offers challenges to prevailing speculative realist thought, moving between Whitehead’s own panpsychism, Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and the reductionist eliminativism of Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier. The stakes of this recent speculative realist thought—of the effort to develop new ways of grasping the world—are enormous as it becomes clear that our inherited assumptions are no longer adequate to describe, much less understand, the reality we experience around us. As Shaviro acknowledges, speculative realist thought has its dangers, but it also, like the best speculative fiction, holds the potential to liberate us from confining views of what is outside ourselves and, he believes, to reclaim aesthetics and beauty as a principle of life itself. Bringing together a wide array of contemporary thought, and evenhandedly assessing its current debates, The Universe of Things is an invaluable guide to the evolution of speculative realism and the provocation of Alfred North Whitehead’s pathbreaking work.

Download or read book NightWatch written by Terence Dickinson and published by Firefly Books. This book was released on 1998 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical guide to viewing the universe.

Download or read book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe written by Sean Carroll and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-09-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Most appealing... technical accuracy and lightness of tone... Impeccable.”—Wall Street Journal “A porthole into another world.”—Scientific American “Brings science dissemination to a new level.”—Science The most trusted explainer of the most mind-boggling concepts pulls back the veil of mystery that has too long cloaked the most valuable building blocks of modern science. Sean Carroll, with his genius for making complex notions entertaining, presents in his uniquely lucid voice the fundamental ideas informing the modern physics of reality. Physics offers deep insights into the workings of the universe but those insights come in the form of equations that often look like gobbledygook. Sean Carroll shows that they are really like meaningful poems that can help us fly over sierras to discover a miraculous multidimensional landscape alive with radiant giants, warped space-time, and bewilderingly powerful forces. High school calculus is itself a centuries-old marvel as worthy of our gaze as the Mona Lisa. And it may come as a surprise the extent to which all our most cutting-edge ideas about black holes are built on the math calculus enables. No one else could so smoothly guide readers toward grasping the very equation Einstein used to describe his theory of general relativity. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing that will resonate across cultural and generational boundaries for many years to come.

Download or read book A Realistic Universe written by John Elof Boodin and published by . This book was released on 1950 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Probable Impossibilities written by Alan Lightman and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams tackles "big questions like the origin of the universe and the nature of consciousness ... in an entertaining and easily digestible way” (Wall Street Journal) with a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between. Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab? Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang. Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.

Download or read book The Skeptics Guide to the Universe written by Dr. Steven Novella and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An all-encompassing guide to skeptical thinking from podcast host and academic neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine Steven Novella and his SGU co-hosts, which Richard Wiseman calls "the perfect primer for anyone who wants to separate fact from fiction." It is intimidating to realize that we live in a world overflowing with misinformation, bias, myths, deception, and flawed knowledge. There really are no ultimate authority figures-no one has the secret, and there is no place to look up the definitive answers to our questions (not even Google). Luckily, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is your map through this maze of modern life. Here Dr. Steven Novella-along with Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein-will explain the tenets of skeptical thinking and debunk some of the biggest scientific myths, fallacies, and conspiracy theories-from anti-vaccines to homeopathy, UFO sightings to N- rays. You'll learn the difference between science and pseudoscience, essential critical thinking skills, ways to discuss conspiracy theories with that crazy co- worker of yours, and how to combat sloppy reasoning, bad arguments, and superstitious thinking. So are you ready to join them on an epic scientific quest, one that has taken us from huddling in dark caves to setting foot on the moon? (Yes, we really did that.) DON'T PANIC! With The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, we can do this together. "Thorough, informative, and enlightening, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe inoculates you against the frailties and shortcomings of human cognition. If this book does not become required reading for us all, we may well see modern civilization unravel before our eyes." -- Neil deGrasse Tyson "In this age of real and fake information, your ability to reason, to think in scientifically skeptical fashion, is the most important skill you can have. Read The Skeptics' Guide Universe; get better at reasoning. And if this claim about the importance of reason is wrong, The Skeptics' Guide will help you figure that out, too." -- Bill Nye

Download or read book A Realistic Universe written by John Elof Boodin and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Our Mathematical Universe written by Max Tegmark and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Tegmark leads us on an astonishing journey through past, present and future, and through the physics, astronomy and mathematics that are the foundation of his work, most particularly his hypothesis that our physical reality is a mathematical structure and his theory of the ultimate multiverse. In a dazzling combination of both popular and groundbreaking science, he not only helps us grasp his often mind-boggling theories, but he also shares with us some of the often surprising triumphs and disappointments that have shaped his life as a scientist. Fascinating from first to last—this is a book that has already prompted the attention and admiration of some of the most prominent scientists and mathematicians.

Download or read book The Invisible Universe Disclosed Or The Real Plan and Government of the Universe written by Henry Coleman Johnson and published by . This book was released on 1843 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Realistic Decision Theory written by Paul Weirich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within traditional decision theory, common decision principles -- e.g. the principle to maximize utility -- generally invoke idealization; they govern ideal agents in ideal circumstances. In Realistic Decision Theory, Paul Weirch adds practicality to decision theory by formulating principles applying to nonideal agents in nonideal circumstances, such as real people coping with complex decisions. Bridging the gap between normative demands and psychological resources, Realistic Decision Theory is essential reading for theorists seeking precise normative decision principles that acknowledge the limits and difficulties of human decision-making.

Download or read book Fiction in the Quantum Universe written by Susan Strehle and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this outstanding book Susan Strehle argues that a new fiction has developed from the influence of modern physics. She calls this new fiction actualism, and within that framework she offers a critical analysis of major novels by Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, William Gaddis, John Barth, Margaret Atwood, and Donald Barthelme. According to Strehle, the actualists balance attention to questions of art with an engaged meditation on the external, actual world. While these actualist novels diverge markedly from realistic practice, Strehle claims that they do so in order to reflect more acutely what we now understand as real. Reality is no longer "realistic"; in the new physical or quantum universe, reality is discontinuous, energetic, relative, statistical, subjectively seen, and uncertainly known_all terms taken from new physics. Actualist fiction is characterized by incompletions, indeterminacy, and "open" endings unsatisfying to the readerly wish for fulfilled promises and completed patterns. Gravity's Rainbow, for example, ends not with a period but with a dash. Strehle argues that such innovations in narrative reflect on twentieth-century history, politics, science, and discourse.

Download or read book A Realistic Universe An Introd to Metaphysics written by John Elof Boodin and published by Palala Press. This book was released on 2016-05-07 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Download or read book The Journal of Philosophy Psychology and Scientific Methods written by and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 844 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Journal of Philosophy Psychology and Scientific Methods written by and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Journal of Philosophy written by and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 1092 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers topics in philosophy, psychology, and scientific methods. Vols. 31- include "A Bibliography of philosophy," 1933-

Download or read book Realistic Universe written by John Elof Boodin and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: