Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Product Description

Riding his bike to school one morning in 1985, Max Tegmark was killed by a truck. But it wasn't the Max Tegmark in the universe we know. In our particular universe, he narrowly avoided the forty tonnes of honking steel, and lived to become one of the most important, original cosmologists at work today, and to write this book. But, he asks, if we can't see that parallel world, how do we know that it is real?

Physics has uncovered a reality much stranger than we'd imagined. Our Mathematical Universe is a journey into this strangeness, to seek answers to the mysteries uncovered by contemporary cosmology and to discover the ultimate nature of reality. The Big Bang, our distant future, parallel worlds, the sub-atomic and the intergalactic - none of them are what they seem. But when we look at everything together, we find that there is a way to understand this immense strangeness and complexity, and to see it with a dazzling clarity: as Galileo said, Nature is 'a book written in the language of mathematics'.

Exploring the fundamental puzzle of why our universe seems so mathematical, Tegmark proposes an elegant and radical idea. Our physical world, he says, is not only described by mathematics; it is mathematics: the world that we inhabit is one vast mathematical object. This idea offers tantalizing answers to our deepest questions: How large is reality? What is everything ultimately made of? Why is our universe the way it is?