Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality
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Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory.
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The Feynman Lectures on Physics,
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we’ve discovered that everything we previously knew about was part of something greater.
Jeff
And yet we refuse to act as such
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underestimation has thus been a persistent theme.
Jeff
100%
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There’s no better guarantee of failure than convincing yourself that success is impossible, and therefore never even trying.
Jeff
Thanks coach
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people noticed that when ships departed over the horizon, their hulls disappeared before their sails.
Jeff
Neat
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The Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno suggested that they were instead objects like our Sun, just much farther away, perhaps with their own planets and civilizations—this didn’t go down too well with the Catholic Church, which had him burned at the stake in 1600.
Jeff
Lol
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this fact that your two eyes measure different angles to objects depending on their distance is the very essence of how your brain’s depth-perception system works to provide you with three-dimensional vision.
Jeff
This is same concept as phase
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If you watch a car drive away at night, the brightness of its taillights drops as the inverse square of its distance (twice as far means four times dimmer).
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just wait 200 million years, and days will be twenty-five hours long!
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Galaxies sometimes collide with one another in huge cosmic traffic accidents. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, as their stars mostly miss each other;
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Although his paper was published in one of Germany’s most prestigious physics journals and was discussed by Einstein and others, it ended up largely ignored and had essentially no impact whatsoever on the prevailing worldview at the time.
Jeff
Depressing
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Remarkably, things will look the same whichever chocolate chip or galaxy you’re observing from, so if the distribution of galaxies has no end, then the expansion has no center—it looks the same from everywhere.
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Here the answer is that we’re not seeing these distant galaxies where they are now, but where they were when they emitted the light that reaches us now.
Jeff
Nice
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more volume can be created in a particular region between some galaxies without this new volume expanding into other regions
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The darkness behind the galaxies is the epoch before the first galaxies had time to form.
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No matter how emphatically we scientists claim to be rational seekers of truth, we’re as prone as anyone to human foibles such as prejudice, peer pressure and herd mentality. Overcoming these shortcomings clearly takes more than just talent for calculating.
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Friedmann’s work allows for the possibility that our Universe was once contracting, and that all the material moving toward us gently slowed down, stopped and started accelerating away from us.
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Although his book merely states that they “eliminated” the pigeons when they returned, I got him to reveal the grim truth after some wine: it involved a shotgun.…
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our entire Universe was once as hot as a star,