Book description
This book is about my own personal favourite puzzles and conundrums
in science, all of which have famously been referred to as
paradoxes, but which turn out not to be paradoxes at all when
considered carefully and viewed from the right angle.
A true paradox is a statement that leads to a circular and
self-contradictory argument, or one that describes a logically
impossible situation. Our subject is 'perceived paradoxes' - questions
or thought-experiments that on first encounter seem impossible to
answer, but which science has been able to solve.
Our tour of these mind-expanding puzzles will take us through some
of the greatest hits of science - from Einstein's theories about space
and time, to the latest ideas of how the quantum world works. Some of
our paradoxes may be familiar, such as Schrödinger's famous cat,
which is seemingly alive and dead at the same time; or the Grandfather
Paradox - if you travelled back in time and killed your grandfather
you would not have been born and would not therefore have killed your
grandfather. Other paradoxes will be new to you, but no less bizarre
and fascinating.
We will ask such questions as: how does the fact that it gets dark
at night prove the Universe must have started with a big bang? Where
are all the aliens? And why does the length of a piece of string vary
depending on how fast it is moving?
In resolving our paradoxes we will have to travel to the furthest
reaches of the Universe and explore the very essence of space and
time. Hold on tight.
Professor Jim Al-Khalili,
OBE
is an academic, author and broadcaster. He is a leading theoretical
physicist based at the University of Surrey, where he teaches and
carries out research in quantum mechanics. He has written a number of
popular science books, translated so far into 20 languages, with his
most recent being
Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science.
He has presented several television and radio documentaries, including
the BAFTA-nominated
Chemistry: A Volatile History
and
The Secret Life of Chaos
. He presents the weekly programme
The Life Scientific
on BBC Radio 4. He was awarded the 2007 Royal Society Michael Faraday
medal and the 2011 Institute of Physics Kelvin medal, both for his
science communication work.
