What if the world you experience is not reality itself, but a constructed interface?In GENERATED, Robert Srinivas explores the unsettling possibility that perception does not reveal the universe as it truly is. Instead, it renders a simplified, usable version of reality, one shaped by evolution, constrained by biology, and optimized for survival rather than truth.Drawing on neuroscience, physics, evolutionar...

Where are we? Who are we? Can the search for meaning ever fit into a scientific worldview?The instant New York Times bestseller and a Mail on Sunday Book of the Year'This is a book that should be read by everybody.' Carlo RovelliAward-winning author Sean Carroll brings his extraordinary intellect to bear on the realms of knowledge, the laws of nature and the most profound questions about life, de...

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The "Theory of Everything" that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most imm...

Why is the future so different from the past? Why does the past affect the future and not the other way around? What does quantum mechanics really tell us about the world? In this important and accessible book, Huw Price throws fascinating new light on some of the great mysteries of modern physics, and connects them in a wholly original way. Price begins with the mystery of the arrow of time. Why, for example, does disorder always increase, as required by the second law of thermodynamics? ...

In this unique book, the reader is invited to experience the joy of appreciating something which has eluded understanding for many years — entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The book has a two-pronged message: first, that the second law is not infinitely incomprehensible as commonly stated in most textbooks on thermodynamics, but can, in fact, be comprehended through sheer common sense; and second, that entropy is not a mysterious quantity that has resisted understanding but a s...

"The Whole Truth" consists of a series of discussions of a wide variety of scientific and philosophic concepts.Although it is based on scientific fact, it is not a text, and is not written for the academic audience; instead it is speculative in nature and discusses alternate views of a number of philosophic and scientific topics.Among these topics are reality, time, our universe and its constituents (including space, energy and the big bang), and life.It addresses a...

Why do we exist? For centuries, this question was the sole province of religion and philosophy. But now science is ready to take a seat at the table.According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning.But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by cutting-edge findings at the intersection of ...

As we navigate through life we instinctively model time as having a flowing present that divides a fixed past from open future. This model develops in childhood and is deeply saturated within our language, thought and behavior, affecting our conceptions of the universe, freedom and the self. Yet as central as it is to our lives, physics seems to have no room for this flowing present. What Makes Time Special? demonstrates this claim in detail and then turns to two novel positive ta...

What is consciousness? What is it made of? How does it work? Why do my conscious experiences feel like they are "happening to" an individual conscious "me"? Can my conscious being survive the death of its physical body-brain? The surprising answers from the emerging science of neurophysics is that the part of us that is conscious is made of electromagnetic wave energy that is generated by patterns of neuron firings in our brain. Our conscious waveform “experiences reality" by causally inte...

May of us harbour deep questions on subjects such as the origin of the universe, the concepts of time and causality, the nature of consciousness and free will, the mind-body problems of philosophy, the relationship between mathematics and physics, and more. Conventional answers will usually be from fundamental physics (often deeply mathematical) or philosophy (often very abstract). This work takes a different view of reality by substituting mathematical determinism for causal determinism, ...

This book explains, in simple but accurate terms, how orthodox quantum mechanics works. The author, a distinguished theoretical physicist, shows how this theory, realistically interpreted, assigns an important role to our conscious free choices. Stapp claims that mainstream biology and neuroscience, despite nearly a century of quantum physics, still stick essentially to failed classical precepts in which mental intentions have no effect upon our bodily actions. He shows how quantum mechani...

The problems of indeterminism, uncertainty and statistics in quantum theory are legend and have spawned a wide-variety of interpretations, none too satisfactory.The key issue of discontent is the conflict between the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds: How does a classically certain world emerge from a world of uncertainty and probability? To attempt to solve this riddle, we must first understand the nature of atoms.WHAT IF ATOMS ARE NOT THINGS BUT IDEAS?