Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them - Moé for Solarpunk Books

352 pages

English language

Published July 25, 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-0-374-60057-0

(1 review)

A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality.

For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe?

In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham's number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would …

A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality.

For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe?

In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham's number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré Recurrence—resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom—in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe.

Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper understanding of reality, Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the key to understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant—that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict one another. Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is a combination of popular and cutting-edge science—and a lively, entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental truths about the universe.

3 editions

Soh Kam Yung reviewed Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them by Tony Padilla

A book on numbers and how they matter to physics and other areas.

4 stars

A fascinating book about numbers big, small and infinite, and how they relate to physics, astronomy, cosmology, history, and culture.

The book start with big numbers. Some people may be familiar as the googol, but there are numbers even bigger, like Graham's Number, which is so big that attempting to put even the beginnings of the number into a volume the size of the brain would result in the 'Black Hole Head Death'. Why that happens leads to an introduction to entropy, its relationship with information, information storage in a black hole, and the holographic principle.

Then, it is on to small numbers, starting with zero and why it took so long for zero to be accepted as a number. Then it is on to smaller numbers, like 0.00000000000000001 which is interesting, because it is the difference between the actual and expected mass of the Higgs boson, leading to still …

A fascinating book about numbers big, small and infinite, and how they relate to physics, astronomy, cosmology, history, and culture.

The book start with big numbers. Some people may be familiar as the googol, but there are numbers even bigger, like Graham's Number, which is so big that attempting to put even the beginnings of the number into a volume the size of the brain would result in the 'Black Hole Head Death'. Why that happens leads to an introduction to entropy, its relationship with information, information storage in a black hole, and the holographic principle.

Then, it is on to small numbers, starting with zero and why it took so long for zero to be accepted as a number. Then it is on to smaller numbers, like 0.00000000000000001 which is interesting, because it is the difference between the actual and expected mass of the Higgs boson, leading to still unanswered question in quantum physics about the expected vacuum energy or why the constants of the universe are the values they are.

Finally, it is on the infinity and the difficulties it caused to people trying to imagine such numbers and how to act them. When infinities appear in physics, it is a sign of trouble. Quantum physics, once again, has its troubles with infinities, and it would need insights to handle them.