Cosmological Koans: A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality

by Anthony Aguirre

Overview

“Playful and enchanting.” —Priyamvada Natarajan, Wall Street Journal

Could there be a civilization on a mote of dust? How much of your fate have you made? Using pleasingly paradoxical vignettes, known as Koans, that follow the ancient Zen tradition and have a flair for explaining complex science, physicist Anthony Aguirre tackles cosmic questions from the meaning of quantum theory and the nature of time to the origin of multiple universes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393358315
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/19/2020
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	657,528
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Anthony Aguirre is professor of physics at the University of California–Santa Cruz and cofounder of the Foundational Questions Institute. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Table of Contents

A Map of the Journey ix

Introduction xi

Part 1 The Path Laid Out before Us

1 The Arrow (1630) 3

2 Setting Sail (1610) 10

3 Being Time (1630) 16

4 The Tower (1608) 23

5 A Perfect Map (1617) 31

6 The Cosmic Now (now) 38

7 Drifting Dreams of Venice (1609) 44

8 Choose Your Path (1612) 53

9 Taking the Leap (1612) 60

Part 2 An Uncertain Trail through Treacherous Terrain

10 Releasing the Djinn (1610) 71

11 Many Paths Make the Road (1617) 81

12 Sufficient Reason for a Roll of the Dice (1611) 87

13 Through the Gates (1612) 99

14 Splitting the World (1624) 108

15 What Cannot Be Known (1627) 118

16 What We Talk about When We Talk about Free Will (1610) 124

17 The Mind of Ming (1618) 134

18 A Halting Problem (1610) 142

Part 3 Torn Apart and Reassembled

19 Instructions from the Cook (1625) 149

20 Nothing Is Lost (now and then) 157

21 Being and Knowingness (1610) 166

22 Each Morning Is the Universe (1612) 172

23 Wandering in the Desert (1610) 179

24 A Hundred Thousand Million Kalpas (1612) 184

25 Mountains and Mist (1612) 190

26 Hazy Bifurcations in Decohered Histories (1610) 196

Part 4 Lofty Peaks with Endless Views

27 Beneath the Firmament (1608) 201

28 Celestial Spheres (1611) 209

29 Through the Looking Glass (1608) 217

30 Theodicy (1610) 222

31 The Floating Gardens (1611) 229

32 The Painting in the Cave (1613) 236

33 A Dialogue concerning Infinitely Many Things (1608) 243

34 Sickness unto Death (1615) 249

35 An Honored Guest (1611) 255

Part 5 Who Am I? Don't Know!

36 Who Sleeps, Perchance to Dream? (unknown) 263

37 A Simple Arrangement of Some Bits (1610) 268

38 What Survives (1627) 275

39 The Ice Garden (1621) 284

40 An Unfettered Mind (1612) 288

41 The Simulation Argument (unknown) 294

42 Time and Free Will (1624) 299

43 An Arc of Recohering Trajectories (1610-1641) 308

Part 6 Form Is Emptiness; Emptiness Is Form

44 What Is It You Sail In? (1620) 313

45 The Clear Blue Sky (1614) 318

46 At the Foundation (1620) 328

47 The Great Inheritance (1611) 334

48 A Long Hidden Game (1629) 341

49 The Mind-Only School (1619) 348

50 East and West (1630) 354

51 The Arrow (1630) 360

Acknowledgments 361

Notes 363

Editorial Reviews

"[A] gem of a book."

Carlo Rovelli

"[A] unique and beautifully written masterpiece."

Max Tegmark

02/25/2019

Everything from Newton’s laws to the Big Bang are probed in this hit-and-miss pop-physics primer. Aguirre, a physics professor and founder of the Foundational Questions Institute, prefaces bite-sized science lessons with paradoxical Zen koans—“the gateless gate lies open”—and episodes from a fictional picaresque about a 17th-century seeker who travels from Galileo’s Italy to China, with stops in a Buddhist temple and the cave of a djinn who subjects him to teleportation experiments and lectures on free will. The science explanations that flow from this lively framing device are uneven. Aguirre presents lucid, thought-provoking discussions of physicists’ evolving conceptions of space, time, motion, and forces, up through Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and his explorations of cosmic origins and the possibility of this universe being one among many are grandly engaging. But his complicated, murky exposition of quantum physics is not helped by Zen-like flourishes (“If you follow all paths equally, you end up just following a single path. The one true path”). Further disquisitions on mind and ontology—“what does it mean... to be something rather than, say, something else?”—are provocative but inconclusive. Readers will veer between “Whoa!” and “What?” on this sometimes stimulating, sometimes baffling tour of the cosmos. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"The universe is apparently paradoxical, but ultimately sensible. How better to illuminate that dichotomy than through Zen koans? This book is calisthenics for the mind—it will stretch your imagination almost to the breaking point, and your understanding of reality will come away more healthy and flexible than before."

Sean Carroll

"Written by one of the most important cosmologists of his generation, Cosmological Koans draws the reader into the deeply philosophical quest implicit in modern cosmology: the quest to understand who and what we are. I can think of no other book that so effectively elicits a sense of wonder."

Jenann T. Ismael

"A truly creative exploration of physics and its profound insights into the Universe. A masterful writer, Anthony Aguirre has composed an accessible and entertaining exploration of the Cosmos and our place in it. This book is a delightful addition to popular accounts of both the foundations and frontiers of physics."

Adam Frank

"Physicists have pieced together dazzling theories of the universe and our place within it; yet deep questions remain. Cosmologist Anthony Aguirre rewards curious readers with a tour of some of the thorniest open questions. Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging—I couldn’t put it down!"

David Kaiser

"Readers may experience epiphanies clarifying scientific theories of the cosmically large and the subatomically small…Science and mysticism meld in this physics rendered as fully human life."

Booklist (starred review)

"Playful and enchanting."

Wall Street Journal - Priyamvada Natarajan

05/01/2019

Aguirre's (physics, Univ. of California-Santa Cruz; cofounder, Foundational Questions Inst.) first book uses Zen-like storytelling as a framing device to explain all areas of physics. Each chapter begins with a journey, making this somewhat reminiscent of Jon Butterworth's Atom Land, which uses the journey metaphor, but in a map-oriented style, to explain physics. Aguirre focuses on the importance (and limitations) of human perception in understanding the physical world, and aims to show how we all can contribute to a shared knowledge. His conversational style makes the complex issues he discusses easier to grasp; however, this is still fairly rigorous for a popular science book. He adds interest by bringing in ideas about the physical world posited by philosophers from ancient Greece to the modern day. VERDICT This intriguing, though dense, account should be of interest to readers interested in a deeper comprehension of the physics of the world in which we live.—Sara R. Tompson, Lawrence, KS

Library Journal

2019-03-17
A physicist and philosopher delivers a provocative set of meditations on the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

If you think hard enough about the unlikeliness that you are you—to say nothing of the fact that the universe is not only infinite, but also expanding—your head is likely to hurt. All the more so when Aguirre (Physics/Univ. of California-Santa Cruz; co-editor: What Is Fundamental?, 2019, etc.) throws in a monkey wrench on the latter point: "It's got just one glaring flaw: the actual universe that astronomers observe is not like this." Throw in other imponderables worth pondering, as the author does—e.g., "if the electric repulsion between protons in the nuclei of atoms were just a bit stronger, then those atoms, and hence chemistry, and hence life itself, could not apparently exist"—and the throbbing temple threatens to explode. Some of Aguirre's forays into cosmological questions can be as squishy as any New Age guru's, as when he asks us to consider ourselves not just part of the universe, but central to it, but he tempers the fuzziness with some truly engaging questions (and questions, he hints, are vastly more interesting than answers when it comes to matters of the universe). Of what, for instance, are atoms made? The textbook answer is quarks and mesons and electrons and such, but also, Aguirre writes, information. And not just any old information, but information that projects dimensionally, proving Zeno's paradox and Galileo's notion that "there is nothing particularly natural or easy or special about being at rest." Though written with the generalist in mind, Aguirre's arguments can be a little difficult to grok sometimes, which is probably the point: It stands to reason that "quantum reality is somewhat ambiguous," but it gets a little shaky when we ask, since everything is quantum mechanical, why do we die?

A delight for readers raised on books like Gödel, Escher, and Bach and The Dancing Wu Li Masters.

Kirkus Reviews