- 312 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
'Why is there a world rather than nothing at all?' remains the most curious and most enduring of all metaphysical mysteries. Moving away from the narrower paths of Christopher Hitchens, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, the celebrated essayist Jim Holt now enters this fascinating debate with his broad, lively and deeply informed narrative that traces all our efforts to grasp the origins of the universe.With sly humour and a highly original personal approach Holt takes on the role of cosmological detective. Suggesting that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God and the Big Bang, he tracks down, among others, an eccentric Oxford philosopher, a Nobel Laureate physicist, a French Buddhist monk, and John Updike just before he died, to pursue this cosmic puzzle from every angle. As he pieces together a solution - while offering useful insights into time, consciousness, and eternity - he sheds fascinating new light on the meaning of existence.A New York Times bestseller on first publication, this new paperback edition provides a much-needed new take on history's greatest conundrum, in the vein of previous bestsellers like Michael Brooks' 13 Things that Don't Make Sense.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Prologue: A Quick Proof That There Must Be Something Rather Than Nothing, for Modern People Who Lead Busy Lives
- 1. Confronting the Mystery
- 2. Philosophical Tour dāHorizon
- 3. A Brief History of Nothing
- 4. The Great Rejectionist
- 5. Finite or Infinite?
- 6. The Inductive Theist of North Oxford
- 7. The Magus of the Multiverse
- 8. The Ultimate Free Lunch?
- 9. Waiting for the Final Theory
- 10. Platonic Reflections
- 11. āThe Ethical Requiredness of There Being Somethingā
- 12. The Last Word from All Souls
- 13. The World as a Bit of Light Verse
- 14. The Self: Do I Really Exist?
- 15. Return to Nothingness
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index