San Francisco Public Library

The God problem, how a godless cosmos creates, Howard Bloom

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

The God problem

bibliography

Howard Bloom

how a godless cosmos creates

God's war crimes, Aristotle's sneaky tricks, Galileos creationism, Newton's intelligent design, entropys errors, Einstein's pajamas, John Conway's game of loneliness, Information Theory's blind spot, Stephen Wolfram's New Kind Of Science, and six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. What do these have to do with the birth of a universe and with your need for meaning? Everything, as you're about to see

Appetizers, canapés, and snacks. I dare you : the weirdest ride in the universe ; The café table at the beginning of the universe ; The problem with God : the tale of a twisted confession -- A taste of sin. Brace yourself : the Five Heresies ; Heresy number one : Why A does not equal A ; When is a frog a river? : Aristotle wrestles Heraclitus ; Heresy number two : Why one plus one does not equal two ; Heresy number three : Prepare to be burned at the stake (the Second Law of Thermodynamics : why entropy is an outrage) ; Heresy number four : Randomness is wrong : the six monkeys at six typewriters error ; A brief history of the God problem : were Kepler, Galileo, and Newton creationists? ; Galileo's nature fetish : poking the Pope ; Gamow versus Hoyle : the war between Big Bang and Steady State ; The tale of the termites -- The saga of a scratch mark. The mystery of the magic beans : what the hell is an axiom? ; Barley, bricks, and Babylonians : the birth of math ; Scratch mud and you get mind : the rise of a virtual reality ; The sorcery of corners ; Celebrities in the heavens : how to invent astronomy ; What's the angle? : blindness in Babylon ; Why knot? : the Egyptian rope trick ; How to hypnotize a Greek : math as a tourist attraction ; Seduce 'em with numbers : how to do a Pythagoras ; Squaring your way to fame : Pythagoras's not new theorem -- How Aristotle invented the axiom. A trip to Plato's cave ; Aristotle fights for attention-- or zeroing Zeno ; How Euclid makes Aristotle's "science" stick ; Galileo's dad and the drug of geometry ; Kepler : how to tickle the soul of the Earth ; Kepler's boxes and balls : yes, Kepler's freaky math -- Everybody do the flip. Guillotining an axiom : seveing the neck of parallel lines ; "One man deserves the credit, one man deserves the blame, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name" ; Bare-naked math : Peano strips it down ; Ted Coons, dancing wonder : a tale of two translation ; Presto, change-o : translation's little secret ; The day you uploaded your self : translations saves your life -- Is metaphor a crime? The hunger of the stuttering forms : isomorphic symbol sets ; Leonardo's stones : why metaphor works ; Plaid in the pool : the eye doctor who gave you waves ; How form goes manic : what's an Ur pattern? ; Real estate in the embryo : location, location, location : Karl Ernst von Baer and Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch ; Master of the universe : Herbert Spencer, grand unifier and flirt ; The scandal of the century : George Eliot and her ape ; Bulging forth from nothing : the emergence of "emergence" ; Charlie Darwin shows up late ; The zygote snabs Herbert Spencer ; The embryo goes cosmic -- Einstein turns an axiom inside out. The man who gave Star Trek its space : Bernhard Riemann ; Albert Einstein's pajamas ; Einstein gives seven ugly ducklings a home : the year of miracles ; Einstein's secret weapon : Aristotle's invention ; The adventures of Einstein's predictions -- The amazing repetition machine. Forget information : or, How Claude Shannon got it wrong ; The case of the conversational cosmos ; How gossips grows the universe ; The magic onion of meaning ; Doing the glycerin twist : David Bohm ; Benoît Mandelbrot zigs and zags -- It's from bits : the two-bit tarantella. How math lost its picture-- and how it got them back again ; Fuse and fizz, thou shalt bud : fractals and the bounce from boom to bust ; The sorcery of simple rules ; The Japanese sword maker and the alchemy of iteration ; Gaming your way to fame : John Conway enters the scene ; Axioms in silicon : Conway's game of life ; Good-bye to equations : Stephen Wolfram's new kind of science -- What are the rules of the universe? The case of the obsessive-compulsive cosmos ; Time, the great translator : an information theory of time ; Wrap yourself in string : iteration and emergent properties ; Baking the Big Bagel : how to start and end a universe ; Will silicon axioms fly? ; The Big Bang tango : quarking in the social cosmos