Cosmological Koans

'A gem of a book' Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

'A unique and beautifully written masterpiece' Max Tegmark, author of Life 3.0


Could there be a civilization on a mote of dust? How much of your fate have you made? Who cleans the universe?

Throughmore than fifty Koans - pleasingly paradoxical vignettes following theancient Zen tradition - leading physicist Anthony Aguirre takes usacross the world from Japan to Italy, and through ideas spanning theage, breadth and depth of the Universe. Using these beguiling storiesand a flair for explaining complex science, he covers cosmic questionsthat giants from Aristotle to Galileo to Heisenberg have grappled with - from the nature of time to the origin of multiple universes to themeaning of quantum theory.

Playful and enlightening, Cosmological Koansinvites the reader into an intellectual adventure of the highest order,giving us what Einstein called 'the most beautiful and deepestexperience' anyone can have - a sense of the mysterious.

Reviews

The paradoxes of Zen Buddhism could help us grasp fundamental physics. . . What Aguirre does remarkably well is to find a way of threading many of the most interesting questions in theoretical physics onto a single narrative chain. . .At its heartthe book offers a compelling answer to the question of how to talk about the un-talk-about-able