Physics Philosophy

In this unscripted recording, renowned astrophysicist Dr. Richard Berendzen takes you on a journey through space and time that is captivating from the moment he begins to speak. Enjoy the best of both worlds: an expert's knowledge in a user-friendly format!

The question of how falling cats land on their feet has intrigued humans since at least the middle of the 19th century. In this playful and eye-opening history, physicist, and cat parent Gregory Gbur explores how attempts to understand the cat-righting reflex have provided crucial insights into puzzles in mathematics, geophysics, neuroscience, and human space exploration....

Physics informs our understanding of how the world works - but more than that, key breakthroughs in physics have transformed everyday life. We journey back to 10 separate days in history to understand how particular breakthroughs were achieved, meet the individuals responsible and see how each breakthrough has influenced our lives.

The message of modern physics is that physical reality has, at its frontiers, all the aspects of a transcendent order. At the foundation of things, elementary particles can exert instantaneous long-distance influences on each other, can be meaningfully said to have mind-like properties, and can exist in states which are, as Heisenberg wrote, "not quite real, but between the idea of a thing and a real thing."

In the evolution of science and technology, laws governing exceptional creativity and innovation have yet to be discovered. The historian Thomas Kuhn, in his influential study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, noted that the final stage in a scientific breakthrough such as Albert Einstein's theory of relativity - that is, the most crucial stage - was "inscrutable". The same is still true half a century later.

This short, smart book tells you everything you need to know about "nothing". What remains when you take all the matter away? Can empty space - "nothing" - exist? To answer these questions, eminent scientist Frank Close takes us on a lively and accessible journey that ranges from ancient ideas and cultural superstitions to the frontiers of current research, illuminating the story of how scientists have explored the void and the rich discoveries they have made there.

Time is the most commonly used noun in the English language; it's always on our minds, and it advances through every living moment. But what is time exactly? Do children experience it the same way adults do? Why does it seem to slow down when we're bored and speed by as we get older? How and why does time fly? In this witty and meditative exploration, award-winning author and New Yorker staff writer Alan Burdick takes listeners on a personal quest to understand how time gets in us and why we perceive it the way we do.

A mind-bending exploration of gravity, the universe's greatest mystery. What is gravity? Nobody knows - and just about nobody knows that nobody knows. How something so pervasive can also be so mysterious, and how that mystery can be so wholly unrecognized outside the field of physics, is one of the greatest conundrums in modern science. But as award-winning author Richard Panek shows in this groundbreaking book, gravity is a cold case that we are closer to cracking than ever - and whose very investigation has yielded untold truths about the cosmos and humanity itself.

Does science have all the answers? Can it even deal with abstract reasoning that reaches beyond the world experienced by us? How can we be so sure that the physical world is sufficiently ordered to be intelligible to humans? How is it that mathematics, a product of human minds, can unlock the secrets of the physical universe? Are all such questions to be ruled out as inadmissible if science cannot settle them? Metaphysics has traditionally been understood as reasoning beyond the reach of science, sometimes even claiming realities that are beyond its grasp.

David A. Grandy's book moves from the scientific to the existential, from Einstein to Merleau-Ponty, from light as a phenomenon to light as that which is constitutive of reality. To measure the speed of light is to measure something about the way we are measured or blended into the cosmos, and that universal blending predetermines our measurement of light speed in favor of a universal or constant value.

Most people have heard about quantum physics and its remarkable, well-nigh bizarre claims. And most people would assume that quantum reality describes a world quite different from ours. In this book, David A. Grandy shows that one can find quantum puzzles, or variations thereof, in the backyard of everyday experience.

Written for both the layman and the professional scientist, The Dimensional Structure of Consciousnessopens an astounding world and points out that further progress of science depends upon a transcendence of the material world. Samuels Avery opens a 'Pandora's box'... and presents a 'through the looking glass' glimpse of the structure of consciousness as the basis of our human experience. Written by Samuel Avery, author of The Buddha and the Quantum.

In these brilliant essays, Lightman explores the emotional life of science, the power of imagination, the creative moment, and the alternate ways in which scientists and humanists think about the world. Along the way, he provides in-depth portraits of some of the great geniuses of our time, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Edward Teller, and astronomer Vera Rubin. Thoughtful, beautifully written, and wonderfully original, A Sense of the Mysterious confirms Alan Lightman's unique position at the crossroads of science and art.

Both pseudoscience and science fiction (SF) are creative endeavors that have little in common with academic science, beyond the superficial trappings of jargon and subject matter. The most obvious difference between the two is that pseudoscience is presented as fact, not fiction. This engaging and well-researched audiobook explores a wide range of intriguing similarities and differences between pseudoscience and the fictional science found in SF.

Der Nobelpreisträger Max Planck (1858 bis 1946) war nicht nur einer der bedeutendsten Physiker, sondern auch ein Philosoph, der unablässig nach Antworten auf grundlegende, weit über die Physik hinausgehende philosophische Fragen gesucht hat. In zahlreichen Vorträgen, gern dabei Goethe zitierend, hat er die Ergebnisse seines Nachdenkens über den Glauben, die Wissenschaft und die Willensfreiheit einer breiten Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht.

Alle Welt redet davon, die Natur zu schützen. Um dies zu können, müssten wir zumindest erfahren können, was Natur ist und sie uns bedeutet. Dieses Gespür ist uns abhandengekommen. Der renommierte Physiker Ulf Danielsson zeigt den blinden Fleck der modernen Naturwissenschaften: Wissenschaftler rechnen und rechnen, aber der Mensch, mit all seinen Sinnen, spielt keine Rolle mehr in den Naturwissenschaften. Doch dabei ist das Universum keinesfalls nur Mathematik. Wir leben in Welt und Weltall, aber nicht in den abstrakten Gleichungen. Wir sind Lebewesen und keine Maschinen.

As smartphones, supercomputers, supercolliders, and AI propel us into an ever more unfamiliar future, How to Speak Science takes us on a rollicking historical tour of the greatest discoveries and ideas that make today's cutting-edge technologies possible. Wanting everyone to be able to "speak" science, YouTube science guru Bruce Benamran explains - as accessibly and wittily as in his acclaimed videos - the fundamental ideas of the physical world: matter, life, the solar system, light, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, and much more.

This entertaining account, offering a plethora of little known facts and insights from previously classified military projects, shows how the real-world science of the Cold War followed in the footsteps of SF - and how the two together changed our perception of both science and scientists, and paved the way to the world we live in today.

Allgemeinwissen: Mit spannenden, unterhaltsamen und breit gefächerten Fakten Wissen erweitern und in jedem Gespräch glänzen. Wozu Wissen, wenn ich doch jederzeit googeln kann? Dieser Gedanke ist verlockend, aber: Nur wer Dinge selbst weiß, kann sich ein kluges, zusammenhängendes Bild von der Welt machen – und ganz nebenbei in jedem Party-Talk punkten.

Is there such a thing as a fundamental reality, something which was around before our universe came into existence and which will still remain when all matter, time, and space itself ultimately disappear? Something fundamental which, in turn, can make space and time and matter arise from seemingly nothing? Under most cosmological and physical models, the last known remnants of reality are the disembodied laws of mathematics - beyond which it is extremely difficult to probe further.