$my mathematical universe$

But those who take courage in hand and dive-in will be rewarded with an engaging, if wild, ride through the latest - yes highly counter-intuitive - conclusions being explored about the nature of our physical world.Īs hinted at in the book’s subtitle, My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Tegmark goes beyond reviewing the origins and implications of the theoretical physics he covers, to also describe his role as a physicist in the developments of the past half-century and the conclusions he has drawn from that work about the “nature of reality.” Thus, into his explanations of the science, he works in auto-biographical notes that provide insight into the often incremental nature of scientific development, as well as the complexity of the politics among physicists. Given, then, that one must abandon intuition at the door, and despite Tegmark’s best efforts to distill the essence of what, as he himself indicates, at most a handful of modern-day physicists in the world truly grasp, his book is not for the faint of heart. (363) This observation by physicist and author Max Tegmark comes toward the end of his book Our Mathematical Universe, but it could perhaps have served well as its epigraph, giving readers fair-warning of the strange and profoundly counter-intuitive predictions and hypotheses about our universe that he describes as arising out of the most important and consequential theories in physics from the past century. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2014)Įvolution endowed us with intuition only for those everyday aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, leading to the prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.

My mathematical universe