The mathematical universe from Pythagoras to Planck
I first had a quick look, then I started reading it. I couldn't stop. -Gerard 't Hooft (Nobel Prize, in Physics 1999)This is a book about the mathematical nature of our Universe. Armed with no more than basic high school mathematics, Dr. Joel L. Schiff takes you on a foray through some of...
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| Format: | Buch |
| Sprache: | English |
| Veröffentlicht: |
Cham, Switzerland
Springer
[2020]
Chichester, UK Praxis Publishing |
| Schriftenreihe: | Popular science
Springer praxis books |
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| Zusammenfassung: | I first had a quick look, then I started reading it. I couldn't stop. -Gerard 't Hooft (Nobel Prize, in Physics 1999)This is a book about the mathematical nature of our Universe. Armed with no more than basic high school mathematics, Dr. Joel L. Schiff takes you on a foray through some of the most intriguing aspects of the world around us. Along the way, you will visit the bizarre world of subatomic particles, honey bees and ants, galaxies, black holes, infinity, and more. Included are such goodies as measuring the speed of light with your microwave oven, determining the size of the Earth with a stick in the ground and the age of the Solar System from meteorites, understanding how the Theory of Relativity makes your everyday GPS system possible, and so much more. These topics are easily accessible to anyone who has ever brushed up against the Pythagorean Theorem and the symbol p, with the lightest dusting of algebra. Through this book, science-curious readers will come to appreciate the patterns, seeming contradictions, and extraordinary mathematical beauty of our Universe |
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| Beschreibung: | This is a book about the mathematical nature of our Universe. Armed with no more than basic high school mathematics, Dr. Joel L. Schiff takes you on a foray through some of the most intriguing aspects of the world around us. Along the way, you will visit the bizarre world of subatomic particles, honey bees and ants, galaxies, black holes, infinity, and more. Included are such goodies as measuring the speed of light with your microwave oven, determining the size of the Earth with a stick in the ground and the age of the Solar System from meteorites, understanding how the Theory of Relativity makes your everyday GPS system possible, and so much more. These topics are easily accessible to anyone who has ever brushed up against the Pythagorean Theorem and the symbol p, with the lightest dusting of algebra. Through this book, science-curious readers will come to appreciate the patterns, seeming contradictions, and extraordinary mathematical beauty of our Universe Dedication; Acknowledgements; About the Author; Prologue; Preface; 1. The Mystery of Mathematics; Let us be reasonable; All set; Where is Mathematics?; Fine tuning; A blast from the past: Euclid’s geometry; Taking the Fifth further; Pi in the sky; Off to Monte Carlo; Smashed pi; The divine Isoperimetric Inequality; 2. From Here to Infinity; Zeno’s Paradox; Summing Up; In what Universe is this true?; The power of e; Fast money; What is normal?; Multiplying ad infinitum ; 3. Imaginary Worlds; The Strange Case of ; The ‘ ’s have it; The God-like Euler identity; Even more imaginaries – quaternions; But wait, there is more – octonians; The world’s hardest problem – the Riemann Hypothesis ; 4. - Random Universe; Going steady; Brownian Motion; Life is a gamble; The dating game; The world of entropy – order to chaos; Information entropy ; 5. Order from Chaos; Cellular Automata; Life as a game; Infectious disease model – SIR; Mimicking Darwin; One-dimensional CA; The whole is greater than the sum of its parts; Bees and termites; … And ants; Bacteria count; A hive of Mathematics: Fibonacci; Dynamical systems; Messrs. Fatou, Julia and Mandelbrot; The fractal Universe; 6. Mathematics in Space; Faster than a speeding bullet; Down to Earth; Heavens above; Light-years; The great recession; The Universe is flat; Measuring the invisible: Black holes; A galaxy far, far away; 7. - The Unreality of Reality; Miniature Universe; Quantum world; Infinite space; Qubits; It is all relative, Albert; That equation; What time is it anyway?; Matters of gravity; Time in motion; Radiation; Symmetry and groups; 8. The Unknowable Universe; Gödel incompleteness; Halting problem; EMX; Where is it, Dr. - Heisenberg?; Summing up; Appendix I: Being Reasonable; Appendix II: Hyperbolic Geometry and Minkowski Spacetime; Appendix III: The Uncountable Real Numbers; Appendix IV: c2 = c: Square and Line have Same Cardinality; Appendix V: Geometric Series; Appendix VI: Cesàro Sums; Appendix VII: Rotating a Vector via a Quaternion; Appendix VIII: Quaternions q2 = -1; Appendix IX: Riemann Zeta Function; Appendix X: Random Walk Code; Appendix XI: Age of the Solar System; Appendix XII: Chelyabinsk Meteoroid; Appendix XIII: Logic Gates; Appendix XIV: Galaxy Distance via Cepheids; Appendix XV: Time Dilation; Appendix XVI: Expansion of the Universe ; Bibliography; Index ; |
| Beschreibung: | xviii, 303 Seiten Illustrationen 613 grams |
| ISBN: | 9783030506513 |