Science Without Limits

Author : Noson S. Yanofsky
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 026252984X
Total Pages : 419 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Outer Limits of Reason written by Noson S. Yanofsky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.

Author : Marcelo Gleiser
Publisher : Civitas Books
ISBN 13 : 0465031714
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Island of Knowledge written by Marcelo Gleiser and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why discovering the limits to science may be the most powerful discovery of allHow much can we know about the world? In this book, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, like religion, is fundamentally limited as a tool for understanding the world. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we face the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know. Gleiser shows that by aband.

Author : John Horgan
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465050859
Total Pages : 368 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The End Of Science written by John Horgan and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.

Author : James S. Perlman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.1W/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Science Without Limits written by James S. Perlman and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the role of the scientist in the process of understanding the world, and a reexamination of scientific objectivity, model building, and the place of scientists in the hierarchy of natural systems.

Author : Hart, Susan
Publisher : McGraw-Hill Education (UK)
ISBN 13 : 033521259X
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Learning Without Limits written by Hart, Susan and published by McGraw-Hill Education (UK). This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores ways of teaching that are free from determinist beliefs about ability. In a detailed critique of the practices of ability labelling and ability-focussed teaching, Learning without Limits examines the damage these practices can do to young people, teachers and the curriculum. Drawing on a research project at the University of Cambridge, the book features nine vivid case studies (from Year 1 to Year 11) that describe how teachers have developed alternative practices despite considerable pressure on them and on their schools and classrooms.

Author : Stanley L. Jaki
Publisher : Intercollegiate Studies Institute
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Limits of a Limitless Science written by Stanley L. Jaki and published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute. This book was released on 2000 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new collection of writings from America's foremost authority on the relationship between science and religion, Templeton Prize-winner Stanley L. Jaki, is an incisive overview of the intersection of science with the most fundamental areas of human culture.

Author : Patrick A. Heelan
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520908090
Total Pages : 399 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science written by Patrick A. Heelan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, world-building act, and is therefore never absolute or finished.

Author : John C. Sparks
Publisher : AuthorHouse
ISBN 13 : 1418441244
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Calculus Without Limits written by John C. Sparks and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2004-06 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First time author Ledesma sets his adventure tale in early America. Antonios' travels and adventures carry him across two continents, Europe and America in his quest for a new life. He leaves the safety and love of his family in Italy for uncertain life in a far off land. His dreams, anxieties and fears are borne out as he encounters and conquers the harsh strange and challenging world that surrounds him. Each tantalizing adventure brings our hero closer to maturity, self-esteem and the molding of his character. He experiences love; fear and death on his long journey and witnesses the history that shaped early America. 1n 1846 he becomes an early pioneer by joining a wagon train bound for California. During the trip he experiences encounters with Indians, death, accidents and newly establishes a long lasting friendship. He wanders around California finding romance and land. He eventually starts a grape vineyard and establishes himself as a rancher, husband and father. His life in early California is entwined with such history making events as the Gold Rush, statehood, the Pony Express, building of the Transcontinental Railroad and many more historical events. Reading this heart warming young mans story will enrich the readers to understand the personal triumphs, hardships and the west's rich history

Author : John L. Casti
Publisher : Addison-Wesley Longman
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Boundaries And Barriers written by John L. Casti and published by Addison-Wesley Longman. This book was released on 1996-09-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are there scientific problems that cannot be solved? Mathematics is riddled with such problems, but can we pose analogous questions outside of mathematics? Does nature itself impose fundamental limits on our knowledge of the universe? Despite the work of some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, no one really knows.In May 1995 this profound and far-reaching concern brought together a small but select group of scientists in a remote scientific outpost in Abisko, Sweden, a village far north of the Arctic Circle. Boundaries and Barriers captures the spirit—and the content—of the talks given at the meeting. Included are contributions by John Barrow on the limits of science, John Casti on the search for the “unknowable” in science, James Hartle on quantum cosmology, Harold Morowitz on complexity and epistemology, and six more fascinating chapters that illuminate the possible limits to what we can know by using the tools of science. The issues discussed here challenge the very foundations of science, but the conclusions are optimistic. When the dust clears, science remains standing-our best bet for understanding the way the world works.

Author : A. K. Dewdney
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 0471652423
Total Pages : 234 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Beyond Reason written by A. K. Dewdney and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2004-05-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mind-bending excursion to the limits of science and mathematics Are some scientific problems insoluble? In Beyond Reason, internationally acclaimed math and science author A. K. Dewdney answers this question by examining eight insurmountable mathematical and scientific roadblocks that have stumped thinkers across the centuries, from ancient mathematical conundrums such as "squaring the circle," first attempted by the Pythagoreans, to G?del's vexing theorem, from perpetual motion to the upredictable behavior of chaotic systems such as the weather. A. K. Dewdney, PhD (Ontario, Canada), was the author of Scientific American's "Computer Recreations" column for eight years. He has written several critically acclaimed popular math and science books, including A Mathematical Mystery Tour (0-471-40734-8); Yes, We Have No Neutrons (0-471-29586-8); and 200% of Nothing (0-471-14574-2).