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

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用户评价

我今年读过的最好的书

哈 也到我来当第一个阅读新鲜出炉的好书的时候了

有趣

“颜色科学”的那一章不错: the Hard Problem is just a matter of conceptional confusion

3 billion heartbeats, time is ticking.