John D. Barrow

The Infinite Book

A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

For a thousand years, infinity has proven to be a difficult and illuminating challenge for mathematicians and theologians. It certainly is the strangest idea that humans have ever thought. Where did it come from and what is it telling us about our Universe? Can there actually be infinities? Is matter infinitely divisible into ever-smaller pieces? But infinity is also the place where things happen that don't. All manner of strange paradoxes and fantasies characterize an infinite universe. If our Universe is infinite then an infinite number of exact copies of you are, at this very moment, reading an identical sentence on an identical planet somewhere else in the Universe. Now Infinity is the darling of cutting edge research, the measuring stick used by physicists, cosmologists, and mathematicians to determine the accuracy of their theories. From the paradox of Zeno's arrow to string theory, Cambridge professor John Barrow takes us on a grand tour of this most elusive of ideas and describes with clarifying subtlety how this subject has shaped, and continues to shape, our very sense of the world in which we live. The Infinite Book is a thoroughly entertaining and completely accessible account of the biggest subject of them all-infinity.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Seitenzahl: 354
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. September 2006
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 203mm x 132mm x 19mm
• Gewicht: 395g
• ISBN-13: 9781400032242
• ISBN-10: 1400032245
• Artikelnr.: 21608400

Autorenporträt

John Barrow

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
1 Much Ado about Everything
The Rough Guide to Infinity
Intimations of the Infinite
Zeno Hour
2 Infinity, Almost and Actual, Fictitious and Factual
Darkness at Noon
A Purely Aristotelian Relationship
Infinity and God
A Little Kant
3 Welcome to the Hotel Infinity
Hotels
Experiences of the Hotel Infinity
The Hotel Infinity’s Accounts
4 Infinity Is Not a Big Number
An Immaculate Misconception
Albert of Saxony’s Paradox
Galileo’s Paradox
Cadmus and Harmonia
Terminator 0, 1⁄2, and 1
Countable Infinities
Uncountable Infinities
The Towering Infinito
5 The Madness of Georg Cantor
Cantor and Son
The Chronicle of Kronecker
Cantor, God, and Infinity – the Trinity with Affinity
All’s Sad that Ends Bad
6 Infinity Comes in Three Flavours
Triple Top
Let’s Get Physical
Naked Infinities
The Great Blue Yonder
Infinity on the Back Foot
7 Is the Universe Infinite?
Everything That Is
Cosmology Goes Underground
Bent Universes
The Problem of Topology
The Problem of Uniformity
The Problem of Acceleration
Where Does This Leave Us?
The Shining
8 The Infinite Replication Paradox
A Universe Where Nothing Is Original
The Great Escape
The Temporal Version – Been There, Done That
The Never-ending Story
The Ethics of the Infinite
9 Worlds Without End
Other Worlds in History
Out of This World
Inflation – Here, There, and Everywhere
Conscious Interventions – Men in Black
Simulated Universes
How Should We Then Live?
10 Making Infinity Machines
Super-tasks
Rubbing Thomson’s Lamp
Some Norse Code
The End-game Problem
Relativity and the Amazing Shrinking Man
A Matter of Timing
Newtonian Super-tasks
Relativistic Super-tasks
Big Bangs and Big Crunches
11 Living Forever
Childhood’s End
The Sociology of Eternity
The Problem-Page of the Unending Future
The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten
Incestuous Time Travel
The Grandmother Paradox
Consistent Histories
Tourists From the Future Time Travellers in the Financial World:
Perpetual Money Machines
Why You Can’t Change the Past
Infinity – Where Will It All End?
Notes
Index