In this book, world-renowned astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan reignites the excitement of these discoveries while considering their philosophical and theological implications. He describes the process through which constraining and sterile determinism was challenged, transformed and swept aside by contingency, which took a prominent place in fields as diverse as cosmology, astrophysics, geology, biology, and genetics. He traces the view of reality as dependent not only on natural laws, but also on a series of historical and ...
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In this book, world-renowned astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan reignites the excitement of these discoveries while considering their philosophical and theological implications. He describes the process through which constraining and sterile determinism was challenged, transformed and swept aside by contingency, which took a prominent place in fields as diverse as cosmology, astrophysics, geology, biology, and genetics. He traces the view of reality as dependent not only on natural laws, but also on a series of historical and contingent events. The topics include: truth and beauty in science; the story of the solar system, illustrating how reality is determined by the combined effects of determinism and serendipity, of chance and necessity; chaos theory, with examples drawn from astrophysics, meteorology, biology and medicine; symmetry principles and how they enable us to meld electricity with magnetism and time with space; the world of atoms, where quantum indeterminism predominates and reality depends on the observer; how nature exercises creativity, including "emergent" principles of self-organisation and complexity that operate holistically and globally; and man's "unreasonable effectiveness" in grasping the universe - "Could it be that man tries to understand the universe simply to give it meaning?"
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