Cosmological Koans A journey to the heart of physical reality

Anthony Aguirre

Book - 2019

"A leading physicist unravels the mysteries of the universe through pleasingly paradoxical Zen- style vignettes. Cosmological Koans takes a fresh approach to explaining the most mind- bending concepts in physics and cosmology by invoking the ancient Zen tradition of the Koan. Anthony Aguirre presents more than fifty beguiling Koans (Could there be a civilization in a mote of dust? How much of your fate have you made? Who cleans the universe?) that explore the strange hinterland between the deep structure of the physical world and our personal experience of it. With a flair for explaining complex science, Aguirre covers cosmic questions from the nature of time to the origin of multiple universes, and shows how scientific giants from Ari...stotle to Galileo to Heisenberg have grappled with them. A playful and enlightening book, Cosmological Koans gives readers what Einstein himself called "the most beautiful and deepest experience" anyone can have: a sense of the mysterious"--

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Subjects
Genres
Trivia and miscellanea
Published
New York : W.W. Norton & Company, Independent Publishers Since 1923 [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Anthony Aguirre (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvi, 373 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages [363]-373).
ISBN
9780393609219
  • A Map of the Journey
  • Introduction
  • Part 1. The Path Laid Out before Us
  • 1. The Arrow (1630)
  • 2. Setting Sail (1610)
  • 3. Being Time (1630)
  • 4. The Tower (1608)
  • 5. A Perfect Map (1617)
  • 6. The Cosmic Now (now)
  • 7. Drifting Dreams of Venice (1609)
  • 8. Choose Your Path (1612)
  • 9. Taking the Leap (1612)
  • Part 2. An Uncertain Trail through Treacherous Terrain
  • 10. Releasing the Djinn (1610)
  • 11. Many Paths Make the Road (1617)
  • 12. Sufficient Reason for a Roll of the Dice (1611)
  • 13. Through the Gates (1612)
  • 14. Splitting the World (1624)
  • 15. What Cannot Be Known (1627)
  • 16. What We Talk about When We Talk about Free Will (1610)
  • 17. The Mind of Ming (1618)
  • 18. A Halting Problem (1610)
  • Part 3. Torn Apart and Reassembled
  • 19. Instructions from the Cook (1625)
  • 20. Nothing Is Lost (now and then)
  • 21. Being and Knowingness (1610)
  • 22. Each Morning Is the Universe (1612)
  • 23. Wandering in the Desert (1610)
  • 24. A Hundred Thousand Million Kalpas (1612)
  • 25. Mountains and Mist (1612)
  • 26. Hazy Bifurcations in Decohered Histories (1610)
  • Part 4. Lofty Peaks with Endless Views
  • 27. Beneath the Firmament (1608)
  • 28. Celestial Spheres (1611)
  • 29. Through the Looking Glass (1608)
  • 30. Theodicy (1610)
  • 31. The Floating Gardens (1611)
  • 32. The Painting in the Cave (1613)
  • 33. A Dialogue concerning Infinitely Many Things (1608)
  • 34. Sickness unto Death (1615)
  • 35. An Honored Guest (1611)
  • Part 5. Who Am I? Don't Know!
  • 36. Who Sleeps, Perchance to Dream? (unknown)
  • 37. A Simple Arrangement of Some Bits (1610)
  • 38. What Survives (1627)
  • 39. The Ice Garden (1621)
  • 40. An Unfettered Mind (1612)
  • 41. The Simulation Argument (unknown)
  • 42. Time and Free Will (1624)
  • 43. An Arc of Recohering Trajectories (1610-1641)
  • Part 6. Form Is Emptiness; Emptiness Is Form
  • 44. What Is It You Sail In? (1620)
  • 45. The Clear Blue Sky (1614)
  • 46. At the Foundation (1620)
  • 47. The Great Inheritance (1611)
  • 48. A Long Hidden Game (1629)
  • 49. The Mind-Only School (1619)
  • 50. East and West (1630)
  • 51. The Arrow (1630)
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
Review by Booklist Review

Other physicists may seek to understand the universe by using twenty-first-century telescopes and cyclotrons, but Aguirre explores the cosmos by relying on the ancient Buddhist practice of contemplating koans baffling vignettes that open only to those who abandon habitual patterns of thought. In provocative ways, numerous concepts from physics (including inertia, indeterminacy, and simultaneity) surface in the modern koans that Aguirre embeds in a narrative journey from Venice in 1610 to Kyoto in 1650. And by pondering these koans, readers may experience epiphanies clarifying scientific theories of the cosmically large and the subatomically small. A koan that links a newborn baby in India with a supernova in a distant galaxy, for instance, helps readers fathom why astronomers glimpse the beginnings of the universe in radiation just now reaching our planet. But, ultimately, these koans confront readers with the multivalent and mysterious nature of the deepest truths, experienced by the individual consciousness in the living moment, but forever resistant to tidy summary in objective formulas. In contemplating such koans, readers may intuit that what we often dismiss as merely subjective perceptions of choice, identity, time, and mortality actually reflect the foundational structure of the universe. Science and mysticism meld in this physics rendered as fully human life.--Bryce Christensen Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Everything from Newton's laws to the Big Bang are probed in this hit-and-miss pop-physics primer. Aguirre, a physics professor and founder of the Foundational Questions Institute, prefaces bite-sized science lessons with paradoxical Zen koans-"the gateless gate lies open"-and episodes from a fictional picaresque about a 17th-century seeker who travels from Galileo's Italy to China, with stops in a Buddhist temple and the cave of a djinn who subjects him to teleportation experiments and lectures on free will. The science explanations that flow from this lively framing device are uneven. Aguirre presents lucid, thought-provoking discussions of physicists' evolving conceptions of space, time, motion, and forces, up through Einstein's general theory of relativity, and his explorations of cosmic origins and the possibility of this universe being one among many are grandly engaging. But his complicated, murky exposition of quantum physics is not helped by Zen-like flourishes ("If you follow all paths equally, you end up just following a single path. The one true path"). Further disquisitions on mind and ontology-"what does it mean... to be something rather than, say, something else?"-are provocative but inconclusive. Readers will veer between "Whoa!" and "What?" on this sometimes stimulating, sometimes baffling tour of the cosmos. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Aguirre's (physics, Univ. of California-Santa Cruz; cofounder, Foundational Questions Inst.) first book uses Zen-like storytelling as a framing device to explain all areas of physics. Each chapter begins with a journey, making this somewhat reminiscent of Jon Butterworth's Atom Land, which uses the journey metaphor, but in a map-oriented style, to explain physics. Aguirre focuses on the importance (and limitations) of human perception in understanding the physical world, and aims to show how we all can contribute to a shared knowledge. His conversational style makes the complex issues he discusses easier to grasp; however, this is still fairly rigorous for a popular science book. He adds interest by bringing in ideas about the physical world posited by philosophers from ancient Greece to the modern day. VERDICT This intriguing, though dense, account should be of interest to readers interested in a deeper comprehension of the physics of the world in which we live.- Sara R. Tompson, Lawrence, KS © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A physicist and philosopher delivers a provocative set of meditations on the nature of life, the universe, and everything.If you think hard enough about the unlikeliness that you are youto say nothing of the fact that the universe is not only infinite, but also expandingyour head is likely to hurt. All the more so when Aguirre (Physics/Univ. of California-Santa Cruz; co-editor: What Is Fundamental?, 2019, etc.) throws in a monkey wrench on the latter point: "It's got just one glaring flaw: the actual universe that astronomers observe is not like this." Throw in other imponderables worth pondering, as the author doese.g., "if the electric repulsion between protons in the nuclei of atoms were just a bit stronger, then those atoms, and hence chemistry, and hence life itself, could not apparently exist"and the throbbing temple threatens to explode. Some of Aguirre's forays into cosmological questions can be as squishy as any New Age guru's, as when he asks us to consider ourselves not just part of the universe, but central to it, but he tempers the fuzziness with some truly engaging questions (and questions, he hints, are vastly more interesting than answers when it comes to matters of the universe). Of what, for instance, are atoms made? The textbook answer is quarks and mesons and electrons and such, but also, Aguirre writes, information. And not just any old information, but information that projects dimensionally, proving Zeno's paradox and Galileo's notion that "there is nothing particularly natural or easy or special about being at rest." Though written with the generalist in mind, Aguirre's arguments can be a little difficult to grok sometimes, which is probably the point: It stands to reason that "quantum reality is somewhat ambiguous," but it gets a little shaky when we ask, since everything is quantum mechanical, why do we die?A delight for readers raised on books like Gdel, Escher, and Bach and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.