The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science by Marcus du Sautoy (PDF)

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“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 BrysonBrain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the YearEvery 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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “I felt I was being carried off on a wonderful journey, a thrilling research expedition to the teasing and mysterious boundaries of scientific knowledge, and I never wanted to turn back. Du Sautoy is a masterful and friendly guide to these remotest regions. His explanations are clear, vivid, and above all patient, but he also writes with a personal excitement and a self-depricating wit, which gives this a remarkable freshness and intimacy. The book has an extraordinary one-to-one feel and challenges you to think for yourself. It is absolutely fascinating throughout, and I really loved it.”—Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder “Each spiraling investigation begins with an object: casino dice kick-start a foray into probability; a wristwatch propels us into grappling with time. A dazzling journey, vivified by conversations with the likes of neuroscientist Christof Koch on psychophysics and cosmologist Max Tegmark on the mathematical Universe.” —Nature “A fascinating book on the limits of scientific knowledge.” —The Economist “An intriguing bird’s-eye view of the landscape of unknowability.” —The Wall Street Journal “An engaging, personal, and highly user-friendly voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world.” —Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dream and The Accidental Universe “I admire and envy the clarity and authority with which Marcus du Sautoy addresses a range of profound issues. His book deserves a wide readership.” —Martin Rees, British Astronomer Royal and author of Before the Beginning “He has a gift for making the most abstruse concepts understandable. You’ll feel smarter with every page.”—Mail On Sunday “The book reviews some of the great puzzles challenging science in chaos theory, quantum mechanics, cosmology, the nature of time, the origins of human consciousness and the limits of the universe… An absorbing entry into the genre of ‘what science hasn’t figured out yet’” —Forbes “The prominent mathematician, writer and broadcaster boldly squares up to what he calls the seven “edges” of human knowledge, topics that range from the nature of time to the mysteries of human consciousness… His take is refreshing, not least because along his journey he exposes with humility his own confusions, apprehensions and concerns. And there is plenty to be both baffled and enlightened about. Does a multiverse exist? Are leptons and quarks where the subatomic buck stops? And is an infinite set of even numbers bigger than an infinite set that also includes odd ones?”—The Observer “Brilliant and fascinating. No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting.” —Bill Bryson, author of A Short History of Nearly Everything “There is no better guide than Marcus du Sautoy to provide a panoramic view of the boundaries of knowledge.” —Robbert Dijkgraaf, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton “Du Sautoy makes a lucid and beguiling companion as he guides us along the byways of contemporary science.” —The Guardian “[Some] believe we have had enough of experts, but what we really need is the right sort of experts—ones who can explain tricky concepts without coming across as know-it-alls. Step forward Marcus du Sautoy, who devotes an entire book to what we cannot know, from predicting a simple dice roll to the vagaries of quantum mechanics.” —Sunday Times “A delicious addition to the ‘Big Question’ genre.” —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) “This brilliant, well-written exploration of our universes’ biggest mysteries will captivate the curious and leave them pondering ‘natural phenomena that will never be tamed and known.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) “Admirably compact and conversational for such wide-ranging subject matter . . . Those eager to have their minds stretched will find this a rewarding and stimulating experience.” —Booklist About the Author Marcus du Sautoy is the Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position previously held by Richard Dawkins, and the bestselling author of The Music of the Primes. He has received the Berwick prize, given to Britain’s most outstanding young mathematician, and the Royal Society’s Faraday Prize for excellence in communicating science. Amember of a theatre group who is speaks frequently about the ties between art and science, he contributed thoughts on time to Simon McBurney’s Encounter and created the codes for Lauren Child’s Ruby Redfort detective series. He has written and presented more than a dozen popular television series, including The Story of Maths, The Code, and Music of the Primes. He was made an Officer of the British Empire by the Queen for his services to Science. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. “Everyone by nature desires to know.”—Aristotle, MetaphysicsEvery week, headlines announce new breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, new technologies that will transform our environment, new medical advances that will extend our lives. Science is giving us unprecedented insights into some of the big questions that have challenged humanity ever since we’ve been able to formulate them. Where did we come from? What is the ultimate destiny of the universe? What are the building blocks of the physical world? How does a collection of cells become conscious?In the last ten years alone we’ve landed a spaceship on a comet, built robots that can create their own language, used stem cells to repair the pancreas of diabetic patients, discovered how to use the power of thought to manipulate a robotic arm, and sequenced the DNA of a 50,000-year-old cave girl. Science magazines are bursting with the latest breakthroughs emerging from the world’s laboratories. We know so much more.Science is our best weapon in our fight against fate. Instead of giving in to the ravages of disease and natural disaster, we have created vaccines to combat deadly viruses like polio and Ebola. As the world’s population continues to escalate, scientific advances provide the best hope of feeding the 9.6 billion people who are projected to be alive in 2050. Science warns us about the deadly impact we are having on our environment and gives us the chance to do something about it before it is too late. An asteroid might have wiped out the dinosaurs, but science is our best shield against any future direct hits. In the human race’s constant battle with death, science is its best ally.Science is king not only when it comes to our fight for survival but also in improving our quality of life. We are able to communicate with friends and family across vast distances. We have created virtual worlds to which we can escape in our leisure time and can re-create in our living rooms the great performances of Mozart, Miles, and Metallica at the press of a button.The desire to know is programmed into the human psyche. Early humans with a thirst for knowledge were the ones who survived to transform their environment. Those not driven by that craving were left behind. Evolution has favored the mind that wants to know the secrets of how the universe works. The adrenaline rush that accompanies the discovery of new knowledge is nature’s way of telling us that the desire to know is as important as the drive to reproduce. As Aristotle suggested in the opening line of Metaphysics, understanding how the world works is a basic human need.When I was a schoolkid, science very quickly captivated me. I fell in love with its extraordinary power to reveal the workings of the universe. The fantastic stories that my science teachers told me seemed even more fanciful than the fiction I’d been reading at home. I persuaded my parents to buy me a subscription to New Scientist and devoured Scientific American in our local library. I hogged the television each week to watch episodes of Horizon and Tomorrow’s World. I was captivated by Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Jonathan Miller’s Body in Question. Every Christmas, the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures provided a dollop of science alongside our family turkey. My stocking was stuffed with books by George Gamow and Richard Feynman. It was a heady time, with new breakthroughs announced each week.Alongside these stories of discovery, I began to get fired up by the untold tales. What we knew lay in the past but we didn’t yet know the future, my future. . I became obsessed with the puzzle books of Martin Gardner that my math teacher gave me. The excitement of wrestling with a conundrum and the sudden release of euphoria as I cracked each puzzle got me addicted to the drug of discovery. Those puzzles were my training ground for the greater challenge of tackling questions that didn’t have an answer in the back of the book. It was the unanswered questions, the mathematical mysteries and scientific puzzles that no one had cracked, that would become the fuel for my life as a scientist.It is quite extraordinary how much more we have understood about the universe even in the half century that I’ve been alive. Technology has extended our senses so we can see things that were beyond the conception of the scientists who excited me as a kid. A new range of telescopes that look out at the night sky enabled us to discover planets like Earth that could be home to intelligent life. They have revealed the amazing fact that three quarters of the way into the lifetime of our universe, its expansion started to accelerate. I remember reading as a kid that we were in for a big crunch, but now it seems that we have a completely different future awaiting us.Particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have allowed us to penetrate the inner workings of matter itself, revealing new particles—like the top quark discovered in 1994 and the Higgs boson discovered in 2012—that were bits of speculative mathematics when I was reading my New Scientist at school. And since the early ’90s the fMRI scanner has allowed us to look inside the brain and discover things that were not even considered part of the remit of science when I was a kid back in the ’70s. The brain was the preserve of philosophers and theologians, but today technology can reveal when you are thinking about Jennifer Aniston or predict what you are going to do next even before you know it yourself.Biology has seen an explosion of breakthroughs. In 2003 it was announced that scientists had mapped an entire human DNA sequence consisting of 3 billion letters of genetic code. In 2011 the complete neuronal network of the C. elegans worm was published, providing a complete picture of how the 302 neurons in the worm areconnected. Chemists, too, have been breaking new territory. A totally new form of carbon was discovered in 1985, which binds together like a football, and chemists surprised us again in 2003 by creating the first examples of graphene, showing how carbon can form a honeycomb lattice one atom thick.In my lifetime the subject to which I would eventually dedicate myself, mathematics, has seen some of the great enigmas finally resolved: Fermat’s Last Theorem and the Poincaré conjecture, two challenges that had outfoxed generations of mathematicians. New mathematical tools and insights have opened up hidden pathways to navigate the mathematical universe. Keeping up with all these new advances, let alone making your own contribution, is a challenge inits own right.A few years ago I got a new job title to add to my role as a professor of mathematics at Oxford: the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. There seems to be a belief that with such a title I should know it all. People ring me up expecting me to know the answer to every scientific question. Shortly after I’d accepted the job, the Nobel Prize for medicine was announced. A journalist called, hoping for an explanation of the breakthrough that was being rewarded: the importance of telomeres.Biology has never been my strong point, but I was sitting in front of my computer screen and so I’m embarrassed to admit I got the Wikipedia page up on telomeres and, after a quick scan, proceeded to explain authoritatively that they are the bit of genetic code at the end of our chromosomes that controls aging, among other things.The technology we have at our fingertips has increased that sense thatwe have the potential to know anything. Tap any question into a search engine and the device seems to predict, even before you finish typing, what you want to know and provides a list of places to find the answer.But understanding is different from a list of facts. Is it possible for any scientist to know it all? To know how to solve nonlinear partial differential equations? To know how SU(3) governs the connection between fundamental particles? To know how cosmological inflation gives rise to the state of the universe? To know how to solve Einstein’s equations of general relativity or Schrödinger’s wave equation? To know how neurons and synapses trigger thought? Newton, Leibniz, and Galileo were perhaps the last scientists to know all that was known.I must admit that the arrogance of youth infused me with the belief that I could understand anything that was known. With enough time, I thought, I could crack the mysteries of mathematics and the universe, or at least master the current lay of the land. But increasingly, I am beginning to question that belief, to worry that some things will forever remain beyond my reach. Often my brain struggles to navigate the science we currently know. Time is running out to know it all.My own mathematical research is already pushing the limits ofwhat my human brain feels capable of understanding. I have been working for more than ten years on a conjecture that remains stubbornly resistant to my attempts to crack it. My new role as the Professorfor the Public Understanding of Science has pushed me outside the comfort zone of mathematics into the messy concepts of neuroscience, the slippery ideas of philosophy, the unfounded theories of physics. It has required a way of thinking that is alien to my mathematical mode of thought, which deals in certainties, proofs, and precision. My attempts to understand everything currently regarded asscientific knowledge has severely tested the limits of my own ability to understand.We stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton famously declared. And so my own journey to the frontiers of knowledge has pushed me to explore how others have articulated their work, to listen to lectures and seminars by those immersed in the field I’m trying to understand, and to talk to those pushing the boundaries of what is known, questioning contradictory stories and consulting the evidence recorded in scientific journals. How much can you trust any of these stories? Just because the scientific community accepts a story as the current best fit doesn’t mean it is true. Time and again, history reveals the opposite to be the case, and this must always act as a warning that current scientific knowledge is provisional. Mathematics has a slightly different quality, as a proof provides the chance to establish a more permanent state of knowledge. But even when I am creating a new proof, I will often quote results by fellow mathematicians whose proofs I haven’t checked myself. To do so would mean running in order to keep still.For any scientist the real challenge is not to stay within the secure garden of the known but to venture out into the wilds of the unknown. That is the challenge at the heart of this book. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The book examines seven areas, “Edges” as Oxford University Professor du Sautoy puts it for what we can, and at least at the present, cannot know. These “Edges” are Chaos, Matter, Quantum Physics, the Universe, Time, Consciousness and Infinity.. This is a good range of topics for those interested in the questions of what humanity can, and cannot, know. While I am a layman, and not a scientist, I have read enough in the area to recognize that the professor provides a largely comprehensive overview of these topics. So, with one caveat on Quantum Physics that I’ll mention later, I can recommend the book for its treatment of these matters.The book has three notable characteristics that, in my experience, set it apart from other popular science books. First, Dr. du Sautoy is, by his own admission, captivated by mathematics. There’s a lot of math in the book. Be prepared. My last formal training in math was a college calculus course which I found only mildly interesting and I can say that the siren song of mathematics never reached my ears. That siren song did reach Dr. du Sautoy’s ears and it’s effect appears in the book. Secondly, God appears as a recurring these in the book. Dr. du Sautoy states that he is an atheist (pg. 416 in the paperback, among other places), but his atheism seems less than complete (once again, see pg. 416 in the book). He introduces Drs. Polkinghorne and Barrow, both mathematicians and physicists, one went into the ministry late in his career and the other is a Christian. For an author of a popular science book, his approach was, in my experience, more continuing and direct than is typical. Lastly, Professor du Sautoy explores the philosophical issue of whether it is even possible to know or to learn everything about the cosmos, our consciousness and all in between. He presents arguments on both sides. You may consider these and decide for yourself.Dr. du Sautoy quotes Martin Rees on page 426: “The preeminent mystery is why anything exists at all. What breathes life into the equations and actualized them in a real cosmos? Such questions lie beyond science; however, they are the province of philosophers and theologians.” The professor notes that he is not sure that he agrees with this observation, but that he is rue that science flourishes when it is shared with other disciplines.The one place in the book where the professor and I parted company was when he began to permit tests on his own brain to examine the issue of consciousness. This is where I concluded for myself that there were some things I was comfortable not knowing about.The one areas of the book where I thought that he didn’t discuss an issue that I believe exists was the effect of consciousness on quantum physics.or quantum mechanics as I hear it more commonly described. I would direct you to “Quantum Enigma: Physics encounters consciousness” by Bruce Rosenblum if you’d like to read more on this topic.For another book on the limits of knowledge, you may wish to read “The Outer Limits of Reason: what science, mathematics and logic cannot tell us” by Noson Yanofsky. This explores some of the same areas as “The Great Unknown.”If you’re interested in the area, Dr. du Sautoy is well worth your time. My comment above about the quantum physics section was the reason for 4 stars. Nonetheless, the book is well written and moves along well. .

⭐OK, so there are “unknowns,” things we don’t know, lots of them, and that’s what drives us to find out, what energizes science (among other human endeavors). But are there genuine “unknowables,” things we don’t know because we can’t know them? Logically, it’s easy: if p is “q is true and unknown,” then we can’t know it (because if we did we would know q is true and then it wouldn’t be unknown). But are there more substantial unknowables? Sautoy explores some potential unknowables, from the size of the universe (infinite or not?) to the very small (divisible or not?) to the nature of consciousness. His treatment is accessible because it is elementary, spiced with anecdotes from various personalities throughout history. The prose is reader-friendly, even when it verges on deep matters (e.g. Godel’s results). It is a book for the amateur, not the scholar, and there are some details that will make some shake their heads. (E.g., his equation of “God” with “the unknowable”–and then his resolute determination not to allow traditional divine attributes such as knowledge, power and the like–seems rather pointless.) –But still: it’s an entertaining read, and one I would recommend.

⭐If I could give this book more stars, I would. This book got my imagination running every time I opened it. Du sautoy has a rich and deep pool of knowledge from which to pull from and consults leading experts in the field he discusses as well. He explains very challenging concepts in a clear and witty way. I particularly liked the “beyond the edge” chapter where he worded eloquently ideas about the limits of the human mind quoting philosophers and scientists who’ve attempted theories in the past, and he states very clear reason for his personal perspective and instead of denying or being disappointed by the human inability to know everything he finds wonder and beauty in it: “whereof we cannot know, there our imagination can play.” I am grateful for the many playgrounds Mr. De Sautoy led me to with this book. I am sure I will return to them often…p.s. Du Sautoy is the chair for the public understanding of science in Britain. Why doesn’t America have a chair of the public understanding of knowledge?!?

⭐I found this book very readable and enlightening. In my experience, many science resources for the non scientists tend to avoid the unknowns of science. They tend to make it seem like we have it all figured out. This book takes on the unknowns.I don’t go into this book expecting to fully understand the concepts. I just expected to get a general view of what is possible and that is what I got. If you are hoping to really understand something quantum physics from this book I think you are going to be disappointed. It is intended to be an entertaining read about the frontiers of science.

⭐As a non-scientist this book was a challenge. Worth every page though. I’d guess that I understood only about 60% of it, but in struggling through it I developed a richer understanding of the scientific method and how it has changed our world. At the same time, the author clearly showed the limits of science and I was left with the belief that ultimately not everything will be knowable. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing for someone who left their religion behind many decades ago. I like the idea that almost certainly there will still be mysteries at the end of time.

⭐I learned from the book, although I did not enjoy reading it. One thing I learned is that human taste in music is a great unknown. I looked up and listened to music the author claimed as his favorite. Easily among the worst music I’ve ever heard.I had believed that someday scientists would solve all the riddles of the universe. I do now realize that is probably not true, but that the pursuit should not be abandoned.

⭐A fascinating walk from the familiar to the limits of knowledge in seven directions: chaos, matter, quantum physics, the universe, time, consciousness and infinity. Having read around some of these topics over the years, I still found plenty in this book to reflect on and enjoy.

⭐David Hilbert setzte zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, in seinem Vortrag auf dem 2. Internationalen Mathematiker Kongress, sein Motto ‘Wir müssen wissen, und wir werden wissen’ vehement dem ‘Ignoramus et ignorabimus’ von du Bois-Reymond entgegen. Mit diesen Fragen beschäftigt sich Marcus du Sautoy in seinem neuesten populär wissenschaftlichen Buch – gibt es Grenzen der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis und gibt es prinzipiell unlösbare Probleme.Um die Grenzen der Erkenntnis abzustecken, lotet der Autor zunächst den aktuelle Stand der Naturwissenschaften und der Mathematik aus. Als Mathematiker holt er sich dabei Rat bei seinen Kollegen aus den Fachbereichen Physik, Kosmologie und Neurowissenschaften, du Sautoy führte dazu insbesondere Interviews mit Bob May, Melissa Franklin, John Polkinghorne, John Barrow, Roger Penrose und Christof Koch. Der Autor sieht sich in Hilberts Tradition, seine Erkenntnisse formuliert er in einem ganz persönlichen Stil, der sich der Ich Erzählperspektive bedient – ungewöhnlich für wissenschaftliche Texte, doch so lädt er den Leser ein, teilzuhaben an seiner Suche. So entstehen sieben Streifzüge zu den brisanten Fragen zu sieben Themen: Chaostheorie, Struktur der Materie, Quantenphysik, Kosmologie, Zeit in der Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, Bewusstsein und Unendlichkeit.Auf eine der Grenzen stieß – ungewollt – bereits H. Poincare, bei seinen fundamentalen Untersuchungen zur Stabilität des Sonnensystems , in seinem Beweis verwendete er den scheinbar elementaren Schluss, dass die Lösung einer Differentialgleichung nur leicht variiert, wenn deren Anfangsbedingen leicht variiert werden. Es stellte sich aber heraus, dass diese Aussage nicht nur nicht leicht beweisbar war, sondern im allgemeinen falsch – viele dynamische System weisen ein sogenanntes chaotisches Verhalten auf. Überzeugende Beweise für dieses Phänomen ergaben sich etwa aus Computer basierten numerischen Berechnung zur Wettervorhersage. Diese extrem sensible Abhängigkeit macht die zeitliche Entwicklung, wiewohl völlig deterministisch, unvorhersagbar.Die Quantenmechanik ersetzt den Determinismus der klassischen Dynamik durch eine deterministische Entwicklung der quantenmechanischen Wellenfunktion, von der man aber nie vollständige Kenntnis erlangen kann – das ist gerade Ausdruck des Unbestimmtheits- Prinzips. Diese verwirrende Konsequenz, die Werner Heisenberg 1927 entdeckte, ist wohl auch einer der Gründe, dass sich Physiker auch heute, nachdem die Quantenmechanik auf eine über 90 jährige Erfolgsgeschichte zurückblicken kann, noch nicht über ihre Interpretationen einig sind.Die (wissenschaftliche) Kosmologie wurde 1917 von Albert Einstein begründet, als er die Folgen seiner gerade geschaffenen Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie für das Universum als ganzes untersuchte. Nach der genauen Vermessung der kosmischen Hintergrundstrahlung mit Hilfe der Satelliten COBE, WMAP und Planck, wurde die Disziplin zur ‘exakten’ Wissenschaft. Aber all diese Beobachtungen können freilich nur Daten über den beobachtbaren Teil des Kosmos liefern, der nach dem gängigen kosmologischen Modell nur einen winziger Bruchteil des gesamten Universums ausmacht. Somit sind Fragen, die sich auf das ganze Universum beziehen, insbesondere ob das Universum unendlich oder endlich ist, wohl gute Kandidaten für ewige ‘Unkowns’, auf deren Suche der Autor ist.Seit den Anfängen der Wissenschaften im Altertum machten sich Menschen auch Gedanken über das Unendliche, viele Denker kamen zu dem Schluss, dass das aktual Unendliche jenseits des menschlichen Fassungsvermögen liege – bis Georg Cantor dieses Problem mathematische bändigte. Allerdings tauchten in seiner ‘naiven’ Mengenlehre alsbald Antinomien auf, doch Hilbert blieb zuversichtlich (“Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können“), dass seine Programm der Axiomatisierung der Grundlagen der Mathematik, diese Schwierigkeiten ein für alle mal beseitigen würde. Doch nach anfänglichen Erfolgen, überraschte Kurt Gödel 1931 die Mathematiker Gemeinde mit seinem Unvollständigkeitssatz, danach enthält jedes formalisierte System eine Aussage, die weder beweisbar noch widerlegbar ist. Später zeigten Gödel und Cohen, dass die Kontinuumshypothese eine solche Aussage ist, die von den Axiomen der Mengenlehre unabhängig ist.Im Schlusskapitel zieht der Autor ein Resümee seiner Suche nach den Grenzen der Erkenntnis, leider wird hier die Diskussion etwas Philosophie- und Theologielastig, da er sich mit einer Gottesdefinition als Antwort auf die Frage “Warum ist etwas als vielmehr nichts“ versucht, einer Variante, die recht an den zweifelhaften ‘God of the gaps’ erinnert. Dabei erwähnt der Autor, dass das Werk auch im Hinblick auf seine neue Aufgabe als Simonyi Professor für ‘Public Understanding of Science’ an der Universität Oxford’ entstand, in dieser Position folgte er 2008 Richard Dawkins nach, und er bemühte sich, nach Dawkins Diskursen über Religion und Gott, wieder die Verbreitung des Interesse an den Wissenschaften zu fördern.Letztlich ist Marcus du Sautoy mit seinem Buch eine schöner Querschnitt durch faszinierende Themen der modernen Physik, Neurobiologie und Mathematik gelungen, auf dessen Hintergrund er schwierigen Fragen nach den ‘Unknows’ dieser Gebiete nachgeht; die erwähnten Abstriche fallen dabei kaum ins Gewicht. Abgerundet wird das Buch mit einer kleinen Bibliographie mit Hinweisen zur weiterführenden Lektüre.

⭐

⭐Marcus du Sautoy takes us on voyage to the limits of science and the knowledge. He is a very knowledgeable guide as he traverses a range of subjects such as chaos theory, the origins of the universe; quantum physics, mathematics and human consciousness. He has very conversational style of writing – you can imagine yourself talking to him over a pint at his favourite pub. A great book for a layperson with an interest in science and its implications for understanding our world.

⭐This book has almost the same content as the book ‘What we cannot know’ by the same author. Only small differences With two different book titles, it is easy to be misled into buying almost the same content twice. Why did the author choose to do that I do not know.

⭐Do not be ripped off as I was. My daughter is studying mathematics and physics so I ordered this book for her birthday only to find out it is just a title change to his previous book what we cannot know. VERY disappointed!!!!!

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