Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe
Victor J. Stenger
Language: English
Pages: 167
ISBN: B01K0Q2WKE
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book begins with a discussion of the meaning of order and examples of orderly patterns generated by chance. (Play enough poker hands, Stenger writes, and one day you will be dealt four aces.) Subsequent chapters introduce readers to the unique perspective of the universe provided by physics, with historical and philosophical material intertwined with a systematic but non-technical presentation of basic physics. This leads to a description of the basic structure of the universe and the way in which symmetries of space, time, and inner dimensions account for the "laws" obeyed by particles. The origin of the universe is then described as a chance event, with space, time, matter, and the laws of nature the result of a spontaneous process of symmetry-breaking. Focusing on the question of planned versus unplanned origin, Stenger shows that the issue is not philosophical but scientific and that order can and does happen every day - by chance.
Black Holes: A Very Short Introduction
Hunting and Imaging Comets (Patrick Moore's Practical Astronomy Series)
Discours sur l'origine de l'univers
Will be. That is, we can predict precisely where it will be at any later time. If this can be done for one atom, it can be done for all the atoms in a body, and for each body in the universe, from a virus to a human to a galaxy. Of course, the practical ability to predict everything that happens in the world was never achieved by Newton or his successors, but proponents of the mechanical universe would explain that this is only because of computational inadequacy. Someday, with sufficiently.
Bridges and machines and to compute the orbits of comets and space vehicles. We must be careful, however, not to apply it to situations where it gives the wrong results. Most, but not all, of these situations occur on the submicroscopic scale of atoms and nuclei. Like most of the giants of early twentieth-century physics, Bohr was still a young man in his twenties when he made his unique contribution to that revolutionary era. People had realized that atomic spectra and the Balmer formula must.
That these bosons are really just different states of a single fundamental boson. For a while many physicists found it hard to believe that the massless photon is equivalent to W and Z bosons, which are heavier than silver atoms. Many still are incredulous, but there is no denying the success of Electroweak Unification. Currently not a single piece of experimental data is inconsistent with the quantitative and qualitative predictions of the theory. Even physicists sometimes have problems of.
Each new improvement. Computers still have trouble with certain tasks, such as human vocal language recognition. However, computers are not human, and their own languages are in many ways superior to cumbersome, ambiguous, randomly developed human tongues. The problem with human language recognition is on the human side, not the computer side. Our spoken sounds and written words are too illogical and ambiguous. If there is anything we do that computers cannot, be patient. In time they will do it.
Expanding forever. Pair Production/Annihilation. The creation or destruction of a particle-antiparticle pair, such as electron-positron. Parity. The mathematical operation of changing the handedness of a physical system. Parity Violation. The observation that the mirror image of a natural process is not always fundamentally equivalent to the original process. Particle-Antiparticle Conjugation. See Charge Conjugation. Photoelectric Effect. The emission of electrons from a material when it.