E-Book Overview
Through more than fifty Koans—pleasingly paradoxical vignettes following the ancient Zen tradition—leading physicist Anthony Aguirre takes the reader across the world from West to East, and through ideas spanning the age, breadth, and depth of the Universe.Using these beguiling Koans (<em>Could there be a civilization on a mote of dust? How much of your fate have you made? Who cleans the universe?) and a flair for explaining complex science, Aguirre covers cosmic questions that scientific giants from Aristotle to Galileo to Heisenberg have grappled with, from the meaning of quantum theory and the nature of time to the origin of multiple universes.A playful and enlightening book,<em>Cosmological Koansexplores the strange hinterland between the deep structure of the physical world and our personal experience of it, giving readers what Einstein himself called “the most beautiful and deepest experience” anyone can have: a sense of the mysterious.
E-Book Content
A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality ANTHONY AGUIRRE CONTENTS A Map of the Journey Introduction Part 1 The Path Laid Out before Us 1 The Arrow (1630) 2 Setting Sail (1610) 3 Being Time (1630) 4 The Tower (1608) 5 A Perfect Map (1617) 6 The Cosmic Now (now) 7 Drifting Dreams of Venice (1609) 8 Choose Your Path (1612) 9 Taking the Leap (1612) Part 2 An Uncertain Trail through Treacherous Terrain 10 Releasing the Djinn (1610) 11 Many Paths Make the Road (1617) 12 Sufficient Reason for a Roll of the Dice (1611) 13 Through the Gates (1612) 14 Splitting the World (1624) 15 What Cannot Be Known (1627) 16 What We Talk about When We Talk about Free Will (1610) 17 The Mind of Ming (1618) 18 A Halting Problem (1610) Part 3 Torn Apart and Reassembled 19 Instructions from the Cook (1625) 20 Nothing Is Lost (now and then) 21 Being and Knowingness (1610) 22 Each Morning Is the Universe (1612) 23 Wandering in the Desert (1610) 24 A Hundred Thousand Million Kalpas (1612) 25 Mountains and Mist (1612) 26 Hazy Bifurcations in Decohered Histories (1610) Part 4 Lofty Peaks with Endless Views 27 Beneath the Firmament (1608) 28 Celestial Spheres (1611) 29 Through the Looking Glass (1608) 30 Theodicy (1610) 31 The Floating Gardens (1611) 32 The Painting in the Cave (1613) 33 A Dialogue concerning Infinitely Many Things (1608) 34 Sickness unto Death (1615) 35 An Honored Guest (1611) Part 5 Who Am I? Don’t Know! 36 Who Sleeps, Perchance to Dream? (unknown) 37 A Simple Arrangement of Some Bits (1610) 38 What Survives (1627) 39 The Ice Garden (1621) 40 An Unfettered Mind (1612) 41 The Simulation Argument (unknown) 42 Time and Free Will (1624) 43 An Arc of Recohering Trajectories (1610–1641) Part 6 Form Is Emptiness; Emptiness Is Form 44 What Is It You Sail In? (1620) 45 The Clear Blue Sky (1614) 46 At the Foundation (1620) 47 The Great Inheritance (1611) 48 A Long Hidden Game (1629) 49 The Mind-Only School (1619) 50 East and West (1630) 51 The Arrow (1630) Acknowledgments Notes A MAP OF THE JOURNEY INTRODUCTION One afternoon some years ago, I was walking through the snow and thinking about other universes. This goes a bit beyond the minimal job description of a professional cosmologist, but pondering at least our universe is definitely a requirement, and on this particular day I was thinking about other ones. More specifically, I was turning over in my mind the fact that the hospitality provided by our universe depends on many extremely special things. For example, if the electric repulsion between protons in the nuclei of atoms were just a bit stronger, then those atoms, and hence chemistry, and hence life itself, could not apparently exist. And there are many other such “coincidences.” I had convinced myself that there were four—and pretty much