The Great Unknown
Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“An engaging voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dream and The Accidental Universe
“No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting.” —Bill Bryson
Brain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the Year
Every week seems to throw up a new discovery, shaking the foundations of what we know. But are there questions we will never be able to answer—mysteries that lie beyond the predictive powers of science? In this captivating exploration of our most tantalizing unknowns, Marcus du Sautoy invites us to consider the problems in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, and neuroscience that continue to bedevil scientists and creative thinkers who are at the forefront of their fields.
At once exhilarating, mind-bending, and compulsively readable, The Great Unknown challenges us to consider big questions—about the nature of consciousness, what came before the big bang, and what lies beyond our horizons—while taking us on a virtuoso tour of the great breakthroughs of the past and celebrating the men and women who dared to tackle the seemingly impossible and had the imagination to come up with new ways of seeing the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With uncommon grace, this work illuminates the strides and limitations of humans' quest to understand nature via math and science. Du Sautoy (The Music of the Primes), Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, takes readers to seven different "edges" of knowledge and shows why "Newton, Leibniz, and Galileo were perhaps the last scientists to know all that was known." From chaos, which "placed huge limits on what we humans could ever hope to know," to consciousness, to infinity itself, each edge "represents a horizon beyond which we cannot see." Patiently and cleverly explaining basic principles, du Sautoy begins most sections with a simple touchstone and builds from there, deftly rendering otherwise recondite theories: a pair of dice leads to probability, a cello to the nature of matter, a pot of uranium to quantum physics. One-on-one interviews with scientists and du Sautoy's descriptions of his participation in various experiments breathe life into cold data, as when the author perceives his consciousness in another person or observes the illusion of his free will in an fMRI. This brilliant, well-written exploration of our universe's biggest mysteries will captivate the curious and leave them pondering "natural phenomena that will never be tamed and known."
