Lightmam A. Probable Impossibilities...2021 PDF

Textbook in PDF format

From the acclaimed author of Einstein’s Dreams, a collection of meditative essays on the possibilities—and impossibilities—of nothingness and infinity, and how our place in the cosmos falls somewhere in between
Can space be divided into smaller and smaller units, ad infinitum? Does space extend to larger and larger regions, on and on to infinity? Is consciousness reducible to the material brain and its neurons? What was the origin of life, and can biologists create life from scratch in the lab?
Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, whom The Washington Post has called “the poet laureate of science writers,” explores these questions and more—from the anatomy of a smile to the capriciousness of memory to the specialness of life in the universe to what came before the Big Bang.
Probable Impossibilities is a deeply engaged consideration of what we know of the universe, of life and the mind, and of things vastly larger and smaller than ourselves.
Also by Alan Lightman
In Praise of Wasting Time
Three Flames
Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine
Screening Room
The Accidental Universe
Mr g
Ghost
The Discoveries
A Sense of the Mysterious
Reunion
The Diagnosis
Dance for Two
Good Benito
Song of Two Worlds
Einstein’s Dreams