The Big Picture

出版者:Dutton

作者:Sean Carroll

页数:480

出版时间:2016-5-10

价格:USD 28.00

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780525954828

作者简介

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics, gravitation, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. He has wide-ranging interests, including in philosophy, complexity theory, and information.

Carroll is an active science communicator, and has been blogging regularly since 2004. His textbook "Spacetime and Geometry" has been adopted by a number of universities for their graduate courses in general relativity. He is a frequent public speaker, and has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report and Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has produced a set of lectures for The Teaching Company on dark matter and dark energy, and another on the nature of time. He has served as a science consultant for films such as Thor and TRON: Legacy, as well as for TV shows such as Fringe and Bones.

His 2010 popular book, "From Eternity to Here," explained the arrow of time and connected it with the origin of our universe. "The Particle at the End of the Universe," about the Large Hadron Collider and the quest to discover the Higgs boson, was released November 2012. "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself" will appear in May 2016.

More information at http://preposterousuniverse.com/

目录信息

0. Prologue
* Part One: Cosmos
1. The Fundamental Nature of Reality
2. Poetic Naturalism
3. The World Moves By Itself
4. What Determines What Will Happen Next?
5. Reasons Why
6. Our Universe
7. Time’s Arrow
8. Memories and Causes
* Part Two: Understanding
9. Learning About the World
10. Updating Our Knowledge
11. Is It Okay to Doubt Everything?
12. Reality Emerges
13. What Exists, and What Is Illusion?
14. Planets of Belief
15. Accepting Uncertainty
16. What Can We Know About the Universe Without Looking at It?
17. Who Am I?
18. Abducting God
* Part Three: Essence
19. How Much We Know
20. The Quantum Realm
21. Interpreting Quantum Mechanics
22. The Core Theory
23. The Stuff of Which We Are Made
24. The Effective Theory of the Everyday World
25. Why Does the Universe Exist?
26. Body and Soul
27. Death Is the End
* Part Four: Complexity
28. The Universe in a Cup of Coffee
29. Light and Life
30. Funneling Energy
31. Spontaneous Organization
32. The Origin and Purpose of Life
33. Evolution’s Bootstraps
34. Searching Through the Landscape
35. Emergent Purpose
36. Are We the Point?
* Part Five: Thinking
37. Crawling Into Consciousness
38. The Babbling Brain
39. What Thinks?
40. The Hard Problem
41. Zombies and Stories
42. Are Photons Conscious?
43. What Acts on What?
44. Freedom to Choose
* Part Six: Caring
45. Three Billion Heartbeats
46. What Is and What Ought to Be
47. Rules and Consequences
48. Constructing Goodness
49. Listening to the World
50. Existential Therapy
Appendix: The Equation Underlying You and Me
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
References
Index
· · · · · · (收起)

读后感

刘慈欣在他的小说《排险者》中，提出了一个判断文明是否开始对宇宙大统一理论探寻产生兴趣的标准：当这个文明的第一个个体开始仰望星空时。可以武断地说，每一个人心中都向往着大图景，渴望对于世界的本质性规律得到理解；然而，“正确”、严谨地谈论“大图景”而并非流于空谈...  

懒洋洋地下午，三个男人围在桌子上讨论着不着边际的话题——人类算个啥？ 穿着聖袍呆着金边眼镜的基督教徒说到：“几千年前世界漆黑一片，神说要有光于是就有了光，神创造了一切最后做了人，先做了男人再从男人的身上取出肋骨做了女人，所以人是神的仆人。” “住嘴！”穿着白...  

〖树评〗 《读家教练：生命意义的涌现与演化》 人性，美感，诗意， 智慧本在文字之外。 生命，智能，演化， 嵌入多维数网络中， 联结量变引起质变。 叠加，溶解，漩涡， 时间知觉情感重构， 意群融贯熵增复杂， 新陈代谢破茧化蝶。 变焦，回顾，展望， 自由意志记忆剧本， 弥散...

拿到手发现校对居然是Ent，期待一下子就高了起来。 现在的科普像科研一样，愈发趋向具体和专门，比如讲进化论或者心智科学，毕竟能把一个问题讲清楚就不容易了。 但肖恩·卡罗尔这本书开头就是本体论和认识论两个宏大议题，仿佛回到了亚里士多德的哲学物理时代，这些问题宏大到...  

用户评价

又接受了一次贝叶斯学派的洗礼。后半部分翻来覆去地靠实用主义来反击二元论，略讨人嫌

内容好杂，不像想象中的物理科普书，然而对世界的认识本来也就不是能由物理学完全说清楚的。

A really challenging reading, not only for the language issues, but mostly for the various scientific and philosophical phenomena that the author attempts to elaborate..., intrigued and still being humbled by the big world.

有趣

Poetic naturalism最佳宣传手册