Cover of The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless

For a thousand years, infinity has proven to be a difficult and illuminating challenge for mathematicians and theologians. It certainly is the strangest idea that humans have ever thought. Where did it come from and what is it telling us about our Universe? Can there actually be infinities? Is matter infinitely divisible into ever-smaller pieces? But infinity is also the place where things happen that don't. All manner of strange paradoxes and fantasies characterize an infinite universe. If our Universe is infinite then an infinite number of exact copies of you are, at this very moment, reading an identical sentence on an identical planet somewhere else in the Universe.

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Now Infinity is the darling of cutting edge research, the measuring stick used by physicists, cosmologists, and mathematicians to determine the accuracy of their theories. From the paradox of Zeno's arrow to string theory, Cambridge professor John Barrow takes us on a grand tour of this most elusive of ideas and describes with clarifying subtlety how this subject has shaped, and continues to shape, our very sense of the world in which we live. The Infinite Bookis a thoroughly entertaining and completely accessible account of the biggest subject of them all-infinity.

Audience
adult
Length
medium · 352 pages

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Liked The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

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“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

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