Publisher's Synopsis
"Thuan's elegant prose vividly captures the interplay of chance and necessity that
shapes our universe. An astonishing array of phenomena are woven together in a coherent way. Thuan conveys an appreciation of the complexity and beauty of our cosmos, and the excitement of our ability to understand it."
-J. Richard Gott III, Professor of Astrophysics, Princeton University
Extraordinary advances in science in the twentieth century profoundly
changed the way we perceive the world. New discoveries restored mystery to
the universe, revealing a system of symmetry and chaos.
In this book, world-renowned astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan reignites
the excitement of these discoveries while considering their philosophical and
theological implications. He describes the process through which constraining
and sterile determinism was challenged, transformed, and swept aside by
contingency, which took a prominent place in fields as diverse as cosmology,
astrophysics, geology, biology, and genetics. He traces the view of reality as
dependent not only on natural laws, but also on a series of historical and
contingent events.
Topics include:
l Truth and beauty in science
l The story of the solar system, illustrating how reality is determined
by the combined effects of determinism and serendipity, of chance and
necessity
l Chaos theory, with examples drawn from astrophysics, meteorology,
biology, and medicine
l Symmetry principles and how they enable us to meld electricity with
magnetism, and time with space
l The world of atoms, where quantum indeterminism predominates,
and reality depends on the observer
l How nature exercises creativity, including "emergent" principles of
self-organization and complexity that operate holistically and globally
l Man's "unreasonable effectiveness" in grasping the universe-"Could it
be that man tries to understand the universe simply to give it meaning?"
Originally published in France where it became a bestseller, it was previously published in English in hardback edition. This is the first paperback English-language edition.
