9,59 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
A mind-warping excursion into the wildly improbable truths of science. Echoing Sherlock Holmes' famous dictum, John Gribbin tells us: 'Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is certainly possible, in the light of present scientific knowledge.' With that in mind, in his sequel to the hugely popular Six Impossible Things and Seven Pillars of Science, Gribbin turns his attention to some of the mind-bendingly improbable truths of science. For example: We know that the Universe had a beginning, and when it was – and also that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up. We can detect ripples in space that are one ten-thousandth the width of a proton, made by colliding black holes billions of light years from Earth. And, most importantly from our perspective, all complex life on Earth today is descended from a single cell – but without the stabilising influence of the Moon, life forms like us could never have evolved.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
Praise for Six Impossible Things
‘[A]n accessible primer on all things quantum … rigorous and chatty.’
Sunday Times
‘Gribbin has inspired generations with his popular science writing, and this, his latest offering, is a compact and delightful summary of the main contenders for a true interpretation of quantum mechanics. … If you’ve never puzzled over what our most successful scientific theory means, or even if you have and want to know what the latest thinking is, this new book will bring you up to speed faster than a collapsing wave function.’
Jim Al-Khalili
‘Gribbin gives us a feast of precision and clarity, with a phenomenal amount of information for such a compact space. It’s a TARDIS of popular science books, and I loved it. … This could well be the best piece of writing this grand master of British popular science has ever produced, condensing as it does many years of pondering the nature of quantum physics into a compact form.’
Brian Clegg, popularscience.co.uk
‘Elegant and accessible … Highly recommended for students of the sciences and fans of science fiction, as well as for anyone who is curious to understand the strange world of quantum physics.’
Forbes
Praise for Seven Pillars of Science
‘[In] the last couple of years we have seen a string of books that pack bags of science in a digestible form into a small space. John Gribbin has already proved himself a master of this approach with his Six Impossible Things, and he’s done it again … [Seven Pillars of Science is] light, to the point and hugely informative. … It packs in the science, tells an intriguing story and is beautifully packaged.’
Brian Clegg, popularscience.co.uk
EIGHT IMPROBABLE POSSIBILITIES
The Mystery of the Moon, and Other Implausible Scientific Truths
JOHN GRIBBIN
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Gribbin’s numerous bestselling books include In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, The Universe: A Biography, 13.8: The Quest to Find the True Age of the Universe and the Theory of Everything, and Out of the Shadow of a Giant: How Newton Stood on the Shoulders of Hooke and Halley.
His most recent book is Seven Pillars of Science: The Incredible Lightness of Ice, and Other Scientific Surprises. His earlier title, Six Impossible Things: The ‘Quanta of Solace’ and the Mysteries of the Subatomic World, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize for 2019.
He is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, and was described as ‘one of the finest and most prolific writers of popular science around’ by the Spectator.
For Steve Guest, who appreciates things like this!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once again, I am grateful to the Alfred C. Munger Foundation for financial support, and to the University of Sussex for providing a base and research facilities.
As with all my books, Mary Gribbin ensured that I did not stray too far into the thickets of incomprehensibility, and on this occasion Improbability Eight owes a particular debt to her. The mistakes, of course, are all mine.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A solar eclipse
The radio telescope that Penzias and Wilson used to discover the CMB
Vera Rubin
The LIGO detection site at Livingston, Louisiana
Ernst Mach
A ‘butterfly’ diagram
Lynn Margulis
Milutin Milankovitch
xv
‘When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet, Arthur Conan Doyle
PREFACE
What Do We Know?
Science deals with the unknown. My non-scientist friends sometimes offer sympathy when what is perceived as the ‘failure’ of a scientific theory makes headline news. This happened recently with the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up, and that our simple Big Bang model needs modification. ‘You must be very disappointed,’ they say, ‘that your beautiful theory is wrong.’ Not at all! Good scientists are delighted when new evidence hints that new ideas are needed to explain what is going on in the world. New ideas are the lifeblood of science, and if all our theories were perfect descriptions of the world (by which I mean everything there is, not just planet Earth), there would be nothing left for scientists to do.
You might be surprised that there is anything much for science to do at all. Given how much we already know about how the world works, what is there left to discover? But a warning lesson from history cautions against such complacency. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was a widespread feeling among physicists that with Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity and James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism they had all the tools they needed to describe the world, and that no new fundamental discoveries remained to be made. In 1894 A.A. Michelson, an American physicist remembered for his work on measuring the speed of light, said:
While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice. It is here that the science of measurement shows its importance – where quantitative work is more to be desired than qualitative work. An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
It was just as well he put in the opening caveat, because hot on the heels of that remark came the discovery of radioactivity, the special and general theories of relativity, and quantum physics. Definitely marvels even more astonishing than those of the past. Scientists have learned never to say that all that remains is to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of their favoured theories.
How can there be more to be discovered when so much is already known? An analogy may help. Pretend that everything we know about the world is represented by the area inside a small circle drawn on a large, flat piece of paper. Everything we know is inside the circle, everything we don’t know is outside. As we discover more about how the world works, the circle gets bigger. But as it does so, the circumference of the circle, the boundary between what we know and what we don’t know, also gets bigger. As the Lovin’ Spoonful song ‘She is Still a Mystery’ puts it, ‘the more I see, the more I see there is to see’. There will be plenty of work for scientists in the foreseeable future. And that work proceeds by setting up hypotheses (or guesses) about how the world works, then carrying out experiments or making observations to eliminate the incorrect guesses.
Are relativists delighted when a new observation of the Universe confirms, as the headline writers like to put it, that ‘Einstein Was Right’? Only up to a point. What would be really exciting for them would be an observation which showed that the general theory of relativity is good as far as it goes, but that it may not be right everywhere and all the time. That is why such experiments are carried out. Not to ‘prove Einstein was right’ but in the hope of finding out the conditions, or places, in the Universe where Einstein’s theory might be wrong.
So in spite of what popular media may tell you, good scientists do not carry out experiments in order to prove their pet theory is right.* They carry out experiments in order to find where the theory fails, which tells them where new discoveries can be made (and, if you care about such things, where Nobel Prizes might be won).
As Richard Feynman famously pointed out:
If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.
This is the scientific equivalent of Conan Doyle’s dictum. It is by experiment (or observation) that scientists eliminate the impossible. Thomas Henry Huxley called this ‘The great tragedy of science – the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.’
But a good scientist doesn’t go quite as far as Doyle does. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left is certainly possible, in the light of present knowledge, but may not be the ultimate truth. It may yet, in its turn, be slain by an ugly fact. It is with that in mind that we should turn our attention to some of the improbable (in the light of present knowledge) truths of science.
