Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas In Physics

Product Description

This book is about my own personal favourite puzzles & conundrums in science all of which have famously been referred to as paradoxes but which turn out not to be paradoxes at all when considered carefully & viewed from the right angle A true paradox is a statement that leads to a circular & self-contradictory argument or one that describes a logically impossible situation Our subject is 'perceived paradoxes'
- questions or thought-experiments that on first encounter seem impossible to answer but which science has been able to solve Our tour of these mind-expanding puzzles will take us through some of the greatest hits of science
- from Einstein's theories about space & time to the latest ideas of how the quantum world works Some of our paradoxes may be familiar such as Schroedinger's famous cat which is seemingly alive & dead at the same time; or the Grandfather Paradox
- if you travelled back in time & killed your grandfather you would not have been born & would not therefore have killed your grandfather Other paradoxes will be new to you but no less bizarre & fascinating We will ask such questions as how does the fact that it gets dark at night prove the Universe must have started with a big bang? Where are all the aliens? & why does the length of a piece of string vary depending on how fast it is moving? In resolving our paradoxes we will have to travel to the furthest reaches of the Universe & explore the very essence of space & time Hold on tight