Description
This book is an astrophysicist's rather lovely rumination on the nature of complexity, chaos and harmony, beauty and truth. Thuan, the author of The Secret Harmony, has a substantial popular following in France as a writer on science. His new book is much broader and richer than the earlier work we published, complementary to it in subject matter but with a similar interest in the interrelationships between science and culture, philosophy, and religion or final values. While the earlier book explained the organization of galaxies and the universe, the present work looks more closely at astrophysical "fine structure," chaos, gravity, strange attractors, fractals, symmetry, superstrings, the strangeness of atoms, the complexity of life, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and physics and also the limits therof. The science is presented soberly and accurately, but the book is suffused with passion and effectively communicates the feelings and values that accompany scientific understanding.
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For 300 years, Trinh Xuan Thuan writes, since the time of Isaac Newton, scientists saw reality as a giant clock--a sterile mechanism in which one part acts on another in a deterministic fashion. But the discoveries of the last few decades have changed all that, conjuring up instead a universe brimming with unpredictability, creativity, and chance. Writing with exceptional grace and clarity, Thuan vividly describes these important scientific discoveries, intriguing new theories about chaos, gravity, strange attractors, fractals, symmetry, superstrings, and the strangeness of atoms. Equally important, he reveals how these discoveries have shaped our view of the universe--for instance, how quantum mechanics brought indeterminism to the subatomic universe. Thuan deftly describes quantum mechanics, discusses its relationship to the theories of relativity (which deal inability to accept it. Indeed, throughout Chaos and Harmony, he makes clear as never before the mind-bending ideas of modern physics, such as the effect of gravity on time (it slows it down), the impossibility of crossing the speed-of-light barrier (it would actually reverse time), the role of fractals as "the language of nature," and the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in understanding the universe. From the subatomic world to the vast realm of quasars and galaxies, from the nature of mathematics to the fractal characteristics of the human circulatory system, Trinh Xuan Thuan takes us on a breathtaking tour of the universe. With striking examples and clear, plain language, he shows how science has actually restored mystery to the world around us--a world of symmetry and chaos, contingency and creativity.
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