Experiments Against Reality

Download or read book Experiments Against Reality written by Roger Kimball and published by Ivan R. Dee Publisher. This book was released on 2000 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kimball explores the literary and philosophical underpinnings of modernity as well as the state of our culture today.

Download or read book The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes written by Donald Hoffman and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-08-13 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can we trust our senses to tell us the truth? Challenging leading scientific theories that claim that our senses report back objective reality, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman argues that while we should take our perceptions seriously, we should not take them literally. From examining why fashion designers create clothes that give the illusion of a more “attractive” body shape to studying how companies use color to elicit specific emotions in consumers, and even dismantling the very notion that spacetime is objective reality, The Case Against Reality dares us to question everything we thought we knew about the world we see.

Download or read book Love and Other Thought Experiments written by Sophie Ward and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This impressive debut novel, longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, takes its premise and inspiration from ten of the best-known thought experiments in philosophy—the what-ifs of philosophical investigation—and uses them to talk about love in a wholly unique way. Married couple Rachel and Eliza are considering having a child. Rachel wants one desperately, and Eliza thinks she does, too, but she can't quite seem to wrap her head around the idea. When Rachel wakes up screaming one night and tells Eliza that an ant has crawled into her eye and is stuck there, Eliza initially sees it as a cry for attention. But Rachel is adamant. She knows it sounds crazy—but she also knows it's true. As a scientist, Eliza is skeptical. Suddenly their entire relationship is called into question. What follows is a uniquely imaginative sequence of ten interconnecting episodes—each from a different character's perspective—inspired by some of the best-known thought experiments in philosophy. Together they form a sparkling philosophical tale of love lost and found across the universe.

Download or read book Fools' Experiments written by Edward M. Lerner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An artificial life-form escapes onto the Internet, causing disasters far worse than those created by any virus, eventually getting into our missile launch programs and threatening to destroy humanity.

Download or read book Through Two Doors at Once written by Anil Ananthaswamy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual adventure story of the "double-slit" experiment, showing how a sunbeam split into two paths first challenged our understanding of light and then the nature of reality itself--and continues to almost two hundred years later. Many of science's greatest minds have grappled with the simple yet elusive "double-slit" experiment. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and in doing so opposed Isaac Newton. Nearly a century later, Albert Einstein showed that light comes in quanta, or particles, and the experiment became key to a fierce debate between Einstein and Niels Bohr over the nature of reality. Richard Feynman held that the double slit embodies the central mystery of the quantum world. Decade after decade, hypothesis after hypothesis, scientists have returned to this ingenious experiment to help them answer deeper and deeper questions about the fabric of the universe. How can a single particle behave both like a particle and a wave? Does a particle exist before we look at it, or does the very act of looking create reality? Are there hidden aspects to reality missing from the orthodox view of quantum physics? Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double slit? With his extraordinarily gifted eloquence, Anil Ananthaswamy travels around the world and through history, down to the smallest scales of physical reality we have yet fathomed. Through Two Doors at Once is the most fantastic voyage you can take.

Download or read book World as Laboratory written by Rebecca Lemov and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2006-11-28 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deeply researched, World as Laboratory tells a secret history that's not really a secret. The fruits of human engineering are all around us: advertising, polls, focus groups, the ubiquitous habit of "spin" practiced by marketers and politicians. What Rebecca Lemov cleverly traces for the first time is how the absurd, the practical, and the dangerous experiments of the human engineers of the first half of the twentieth century left their laboratories to become our day-to-day reality.

Download or read book The Magic of Reality written by Richard Dawkins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author addresses key scientific questions previously explained by rich mythologies, from the evolution of the first humans and the life cycle of stars to the principles of a rainbow and the origins of the universe.