Probable Impossibilities: Musings on Beginnings and Endings
- Book
- Feb 9, 2021
- #Philosophy #Math
From the acclaimed author of Einstein's Dreams, a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities--and impossibilities--of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the co...
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Number of Pages: 208
ISBN: 152474901X
ISBN-13: 9781524749019
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Maria Popova @MariaPopova
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2022
- Curated in Favorite Books of 2021
The poetic physicist Alan Lightman sieves four centuries of scientific breakthroughs, from Kepler’s revolutionary laws of planetary motion to the thousands of habitable exoplanets discovered by NASA’s Kepler mission, to estimate that even with habitable planets orbiting one tenth of all stars, the faction of living matter in the universe is about one-billionth of one-billionth: If all the matter in the universe were the Gobi desert, life would be but a single grain of sand.