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What can we never do? The end of each century
leads to a stocktaking of human achievement and our expectations
about the future. This new book by John D. Barrow looks
at what limits there might be to human discovery, and what
we might find, ultimately, to be unknowable, undoable, or
unthinkable. Science is a big success story, but where will
it end? And indeed, will it end? Weaving together a tapestry
of surprises, Barrow explores the frontiers of knowledge.
We find that the notion of 'impossibility' has played a
striking role in our thinking. Surrealism, impossible figures,
time travel, paradoxes of logic and perspective, theological
speculations about Beings for whom nothing is impossible
-- all stimulate us to contemplate something more than what
is.
Why should we find anything impossible?
We explore the limits that may be imposed upon a full understanding
of the physical Universe by limits of technology, computers,
cost, and complexity. We ask why it is that the process
of biological evolution should have equipped us to understand
the deep structure of the Universe. We see how the Universe's
structure prevents us from answering the deepest questions
about its beginning, its structure, and its future. And
finally, we delve into the deep limits imposed by the nature
of knowledge itself. These deep limits have profound implications
for any quest for complete knowledge. They take us into
the debates over the problems of free will and consciousness.
Godel's famous theorem about our inability to capture the
truths of mathematics by rules and axioms is explored to
see if it has any implications for science.
This is no ordinary look at the limits of
science. Using simple explanations, it shows the reader
that impossibility is a deep and powerful notion; that any
Universe complex enough to contain conscious beings will
contain limits on what those beings can know about their
Universe; that what we cannot know defines reality as surely
as what we can know. Impossibility is a two-edged sword;
it threatens the completeness of the scientific enterprise
yet without it there would be no laws of Nature, no science,
and no scientists.
John D. Barrow is Professor of Astronomy
at the University of Sussex. He is the author of several
best-selling books, including Pi in the Sky, The
Artful Universe, and Theories of Everything.
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