April 16, 2004
Currently reading "Impossibility"
Subtitled "The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits", this is a whistlestop tour around the very edges of what we know - and, indeed, what we can know...
 | I've enjoyed John D. Barrow's books since I read "The World Within the World" at college, and this one (although a few years old now) highlights issues and raises questions that other popular science writers might shy away from or gloss over. Particularly mind-expanding is his explanation of what we can and cannot ever discover about the Universe. |
That's Universe with a big 'U', i.e. everything that is, rather than the paltry visible universe (visible to us, that is) to which we are limited by the speed of light. We simply may never be able to prove some of the conjectures of physics / cosmology about the nature of the Universe, even - if 'inflation' due to gravity becoming temporarily repulsive occurred in the early stages of growth of our portion of it - whether it had a beginning or not!
Look out for the graph charting the growth in complexity of computers versus the (neuronal) complexity of the human brain.
Posted by lankyphil at April 16, 2004 09:46 PM | TrackBackComments