notes on realms
Sean Carroll, THE BIG PICTURE (review here)
He calls his idea “poetic naturalism” :
There are many ways of talking about the world.
All good ways of talking must be consistent with one another and with the world.
Our purposes in the moment is to determine the best way of talking.
also in this book: complexity as an interplay between emergence and entropy
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Brian Greene, UNTIL THE END OF TIME (review here.)
His is the idea of nested stories to understand reality at various scales
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Frank Wilczek, FUNDAMENTALS: TEN KEYS TO REALITY (review here)
He discusses “complementarity.”
⦁ This is how one thing can have different properties when viewed from different perspectives.
⦁ E.g. simple and complex, logical and weird, lawful and chaotic. First observed in quantum mechanics, how both position and velocity cannot be measured simultaneously.
⦁ Another example is the use of levels of description. You don’t describe everything in terms of atoms; you describe many things in terms of emergent properties like density, pressure, and temperature, or at human scales with models of psychology and economics. Thus there will never be a “theory of everything” or “the end of science.”
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Steven Weinberg, TO EXPLAIN THE WORLD (review here)
From my summary: The key theme is that The progress of science has been largely a matter of discovering what questions should be asked. It took centuries to realize that it was never fruitful to ask what motions are natural, or what is the purpose of this or that physical phenomenon.
You ask how things work, what function they have, and you “understand” something when you can predict its future outcomes.
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Marcus du Sautoy, THE GREAT UNKNOWN: SEVEN JOURNEYS TO THE FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE
Not yet read. His seven: Chaos; Matter; Quantum Physics; The Universe; Time; Consciousness; Infinity.
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Hakeem Oluseyi, WHY DO WE EXIST: THE NINE REALMS OF THE UNIVERSE THAT MAKE YOU POSSIBLE
Not yet read. His realms: Middle realm; realm of life; cosmological realm; dark realm; quantum realm; temporal realms; multiverse realm; realms beyond horizons; real of imagination.
