Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them: A Journey to the Edge of Physics - Softcover

Padilla, Antonio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250872820 ISBN 13: 9781250872821

Publisher: Picador USA, 2023

Synopsis

A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality.

For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, and Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe?

In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. They include Graham's number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré recurrence, resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom.

Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper knowledge of reality, Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the keys to grasping such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant--that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict each other. Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is a combination of popular and cutting-edge science--and a lively, entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental units of the universe.

About this title

About the Author

Antonio Padilla is a leading theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Nottingham. He is the Associate Director of the new Nottingham Centre of Gravity and has served as the chair of U.K. Cosmology for over a decade. In 2016, he and his collaborator shared the Buchalter Cosmology Prize for their work on the cosmological constant. He is also a star of the Numberphile YouTube network, where his most popular videos include a discussion of Ramanujan's sum of all positive integers, which has been viewed more than seven million times.

Edition details

• Publisher: Picador USA
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1250872820
• ISBN 13: 9781250872821
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352