The Universe Within

Neil Turok

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781770892255
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Science History

"With [The Universe Within's] deeply thoughtful reflections on the place of science in society, on the need to educate the underserved, and on plenty of other topics rarely addressed in this sort of book, Turok takes you where no physicist has gone before. It's well worth making the journey with him." — TIME Magazine

Winner of the Lane Anderson Award, longlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize, shortlisted for the Libris Award for Non-Fiction and selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book

The most anticipated nonfiction book of the season, this year's Massey Lectures is a visionary look at the way the human mind can shape the future by world-renowned physicist Neil Turok.

Every technology we rely on today was created by the human mind, seeking to understand the universe around us. Scientific knowledge is our most precious possession, and our future will be shaped by the breakthroughs to come.

In this personal, visionary, and fascinating work, Neil Turok, Director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, explores the transformative scientific discoveries of the past three centuries -- from classical mechanics, to the nature of light, to the bizarre world of the quantum, and the evolution of the cosmos. Each new discovery has, over time, yielded new technologies causing paradigm shifts in the organization of society. Now, he argues, we are on the cusp of another major transformation: the coming quantum revolution that will supplant our current, dissatisfying digital age. Facing this brave new world, Turok calls for creatively re-inventing the way advanced knowledge is developed and shared, and opening access to the vast, untapped pools of intellectual talent in the developing world. Scientific research, training, and outreach are vital to our future economy, as well as powerful forces for peaceful global progress.

Elegantly written, deeply provocative, and highly inspirational, The Universe Within is, above all, about the future -- of science, of society, of ourselves.

INDEX

Aberdeen, University of, 31, 36, 251

Africa, 7, 31; mathematics/science in, 8, 159; need for scientific education in, 156–67

African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), 160–67; success stories of, 163, 164–65

African National Congress (ANC), 160

Albert, David, 247

Aldini, Giovanni, 241

Alexander the Great, 55

algebra, 32, 197; complex numbers in, 74–77, 168–69, 170; and Euler’s formula, 75–76, 170; and inclusion of i, 73–74, 93, 170; Noether’s work in, 181; Renaissance books on, 73, 74

Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham): Book of Optics, 17

Alpher, Ralph, 127–28, 130

Amazon.com, 204

Ampère, André-Marie, 44–45

analog vs digital technology, 203, 230–33, 237–39

Anaximander, 9, 52–55, 153, 202, 205, 207

Anderson, Carl D., 173

Anderson, Philip, 174

Andromeda Galaxy, 105

apartheid, in South Africa, 1–3, 21–22, 157–58; end of, 3, 160

Apollo 11 mission, 22, 129

Apollo 13 mission, 23

Archimedes, 18, 98

Aristotle, 25, 52

arithmetic, 8, 10, 74, 269n9

Armstrong, Neil, 22

art: and geometry, 16, 17. See also Leonardo da Vinci; Raphael

Aspect, Alain, 90

astronomers, 25, 122, 126, 123–24, 134–35, 157, 245

astronomy, 8, 10, 98, 129; and discovery of dark matter, 134–35; and heliocentric universe, 20–21, 25, 100; Hubble’s work in, 123–24; Maxwell’s work and, 36; Newton’s work and, 24–25, 29–30

AT&T, 128, 214. See also Bell Labs

atomic bomb, 10, 116, 125–26

Australian National University, 137

Babylon, 8, 18

background radiation. See radiation, cosmic microwave

Bardeen, John, 216–17

Bayes, Thomas, 32

Bell, Alexander Graham, 35, 213–14

Bell, John, 51. See also Bell’s Theorem

Bell Labs (New Jersey), 128, 129, 214–16, 220, 234

Bell Rock Lighthouse (Scotland), 32

Bell’s Theorem, 83–91, 233–34; illustration of, 85–90

Bible, 1–2, 24

big bang theory, 103–6, 136, 200–1, 228, 236; background radiation and, 127–30, 214; dark matter and, 134–35, 138; Lemaître’s proposal of, 124–25, 228; singularity and, 97, 122–25, 142–50, 200, 207–9; theory of inflation and, 106–10, 136, 139–52; Weinberg’s book on, 247–48. See also singularity, at moment of big bang

Biot-Savart law, 44

Bohm, David: hidden variable theory of, 83–84

Bohr, Niels, 58–59, 76, 126, 197, 199; on Dirac, 185; and quantization of atomic structure, 58, 70–72, 76, 124;
at Solvay Conference, 58–59, 80–81; and wave-particle duality, 80

Bolt, Usain, 49

Boltzmann, Ludwig: equipartition principle of, 65–66

Bombelli, Rafael: Algebra, 74

Borges, Jorge Luis, 223

Born, Max, 57, 58, 59, 180, 199; on general relativity, 119; and matrix mechanics, 58; on Planck, 61; on Schrödinger’s wavefunction, 76–77

Brahe, Tycho, 25

Brattain, Walter, 216

Brin, Sergey, 166

Brout, Robert, 174

Bryn Mawr College, 180

calculus, 26, 43, 101

California, University of: at Berkeley, 133, 137; at Santa Barbara, 219

Cambridge University, 31; author’s tenure at, 96–97, 98, 143, 151–52, 160, 161; cosmology workshop at, 106, 136; Di...

Table of contents

• Openers
• AUTHOR’S NOTE
• ONE
• TWO
• {PHOTO INSERT}
• THREE
• FOUR
• FIVE
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Publisher