Philip Franses

The laws of modern physics are seen as the bedrock of our understanding of the material world that surrounds us. Newton's and Maxwell's mathematics reliably describe behaviour and events in the world, and have given us the age of technology from telephones to space travel. Yet the founders of modern scientific thought, such as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli, struggled to pin down the paradoxical concepts they needed to present 'workable' theories, as the subatomic and quantum world began to reveal its mysteries. At the height of the debate about the nature of matter, Einstein famously objected that 'God does not play dice'. Starting from the significance of zero and one, with their contrasting Eastern and Western philosophies, Franses unravels the knots that surround elusive concepts such as matter, chance, time, light, darkness, emptiness, and form. Exploring current models in science, he asks: does light travel in time? Or is it time that travels in light? How can emptiness hold potential? Can chance create order? What does our own experience mean in all this? In this stimulating book, the author invites us to travel through a journey, and a life, full of surprise and ambiguity, from paradoxes in physics to the meaning of time and the mythology of creation.

Floris Books

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