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MediaDB / «Cosmological koans. A Journey to the Heart of Physical Reality" by Anthony Aguirre: download fb2, read online
About the book: 2021 / Anthony Aguirre is not only a famous physicist, cosmologist and mathematician, but also a popularizer of science, who has appeared as an expert in a number of documentaries . In his “Cosmological Koans”, he decided to talk about the structure of our world precisely as a physicist and for this he resorted to the practice of Zen Buddhist koans. Koans are a kind of parables that contain the doctrine of reality as understood by adherents of Zen Buddhism. There are several dozen such koans in the book, and each of them touches on one topic (classical and quantum mechanics, theory of computation, entropy, etc.). It is not easy to talk about such complex subjects clearly and captivatingly, but the author succeeded: the thoughtful reader is once again convinced that our Universe is a rather mysterious place and that there is a connection between its properties and the existence of people. Physicist, cosmologist, mathematician and popularizer of science Anthony Aguirre uses the practice of Zen Buddhist koans as a tool for understanding the physical structure of the universe. And he achieves incredible results. Aggire's book is structured in a very non-standard and, one might say, paradoxical way. However, this is fully consistent with its goals: to show that physics, as a science that tries to comprehend the structure of the Universe, develops primarily with the help of revolutionary insight, for which one must learn to break the rules, break established forms and overcome the usual train of thought. As a tool, Aguirre uses the practice of Buddhist koans, small instructive parables designed to make listeners think about the structure of the world and their place in this world. Having removed all Eastern philosophy from the koans, Aggire replaces it with physics. Thus, each small chapter is preceded by a small story that poses a series of questions to the reader, which Aggire answers from the point of view of physics. Gradually, these stories begin to intertwine, just as the physical laws and hypotheses that explain them become intertwined. Thus, from these disparate cosmological koans, a large-scale picture of the Universe is formed in the form in which it is accessible to modern science.