“A ride through the history of world-changing scientific ideas. Pickover pays homage to the great minds who have laid bare the mathematical machinery whirring just beneath the skin of reality. An impressively researched tour de force.” -Marcus Chown, author of The Quantum Zoo
Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them
Oxford University Press, April 2008 / ISBN 0195336119
Albert Einstein once remarked that “the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” Indeed, we appear to live in a cosmos that can be described or approximated by compact mathematical expressions and physical laws. In this book, Pickover discusses landmark laws of nature that were discovered over 22 centuries and whose ramifications have profoundly altered our everyday lives and understanding of the universe. The laws enable humanity to create and destroy -- and sometimes they change the very way we look at reality itself.
Centuries ago, most of the lawgivers saw God’s hand in nature’s laws. In fact, Isaac Newton had once thought of the Universe as “God’s Sensorium” in which the objects in the Universe -- their motions and their transformations -- were the thoughts of God, literally the activities of His mind. God’s thoughts were grand, and the speed at which God thought determined the pace of the universe’s evolution. Because the laws of nature provide a framework in which to explore the nature of reality, and because laws allow scientists to make predictions about the universe, the discoveries of the laws are among humanity’s greatest noetic, or intellectual, achievements.
Come along on amazing adventures with these passionate, brilliant, and sometimes eccentric scientists as they sought, discovered, and tested elegant formulations of phenomena at the heart of reality. In the end, these lawgivers changed the way we imagine and categorize our universe.
Publication date is April 2008.
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