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(By A. K. Dewdney)



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Language: English

Publisher: Wiley



From Publishers Weekly Dewdney (A Mathematical Mystery Tour), best known for the Scientific American column "Computer Recreations," which he wrote for eight years, sets an impressive goal for himself: "to discover how physical reality depends on mathematical reality, and to examine how mathematical reality manifests itself." He attempts to do this by outlining four problems in the physical realm and four in the mathematical realm that he believes can never be solved. The topics he discusses are largely of great interest to science and math buffs: perpetual motion, the speed of light, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, chaos theory, squaring the circle, unprovable but true mathematical theorems, "simple" problems that no computer program can solve, and the fact that some mathematical problems would require an infinite amount of computer time to solve. In his chapter on chaos theory, for example, Dewdney does a very nice job of explaining why we will never be able to predict the weather accurately more than four days in advance. The problem throughout the book, however, is that he alternates between colorful prose or explanations of basic terms (such as "primary number") and relatively dense mathematics (transcendental and transfinite numbers), never settling on who the appropriate audience for this study might be. B&w illus. Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Inventors and engineers have invested centuries of effort trying to build a perpetual-motion machine. They have never succeeded, but without their valiant attempts, a particularly piquant chapter would be missing from this new book on scientific impossibilities. Science-writer Dewdney teases illuminating logic and formulas from the despair of physicists who wish to predict how electrons will dance, from the frustration of computer programmers who want to resolve certain types of yes-no questions, and from the embarrassment of meteorologists who would like to predict next week's weather. Rigorous enough to challenge intelligent readers but not so daunting as to overwhelm the nonspecialist, the investigation of each impossibility clarifies the barriers that forbid further progress along certain theoretical paths, limning the conceptual boundaries of science and even reflecting the limitations inherent in the structure of human rationality. Still, Dewdney concedes a catalogue of scientific impossibilities may just provoke some maverick to do what the greatest scientists have always done: enlarge the limits of the possible. Bryce ChristensenCopyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved



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Beyond reason: 8 great problems that reveal the limits of science ebook
Beyond reason: 8 great problems that reveal the limits of science ebook pdf
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