Bits Of Matter Research Articles

The Nominalist Limit of Kim’s Ontological Physicalism

Abstract Kim’s Ontological Physicalism (OP) presents itself as a naturalistic and monistic metaphysical framework, aligned with the causal closure of the universe and rejecting causally efficacious “exotic” properties. The foundational ontology is, in turn, monistic and materialistic, positing that the universe is composed solely of material particulars: bits of matter. In this work, we identify a notable tension between OP’s intended model and the one OP specifies. Initially, we show how the theory inevitably becomes entangled with higher-order entities, not just particulars. Kim introduces the Supervenience Argument (SA) to counteract the possibility of higher-order entities being causally efficacious. While SA proves to be a plausible strategy, it is ultimately inadequate: not only SA is a petitio principii against emergence, but it is also unsound and invalid. Therefore, we propose a formal strategy to restore its ontological effectiveness. Unfortunately, at a closer look, even this strategy falls short as it unwarrantedly assumes the logicality and invariance of those equivalence relations (such as identity, similarity, and congruence) which are crucial for specifying the theory’s model as composed of particulars.

Who Are You Really? A Philosopher’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons

Who Are You Really? A Philosopher’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Persons

Quantum tunneling and exceptional human capacities: Illustrating different skepticisms in physics and psychology

Quantum tunneling is a phenomenon where a particle appears on the other side of an energy barrier that it does not have enough energy to pass through, according to classical physics. This notion, first proposed by a German physicist in 1927, runs improbably counter to common sense and to rules thought for hundreds of years to govern physics. Acceptance of this and other quantum phenomena has required the reconceptualization of subatomic particles from solid bits of matter to probability clouds that extend infinitely in every direction. As such, quantum physics has required a skepticism driven by the need for sound evidence, rather than based on whether a given idea conformed to culturally common notions of reality. This form of well-tempered skepticism would serve the project of building a psychology of the whole person, and of all persons, in place of versions that reject phenomena based on cultural notions of what is or is not plausible, even in the face of substantive preliminary evidence. Such a skepticism is counterproductive in a way that dismissal of a patient's unexpected healing response could negatively impact the body's self-healing capacities.

Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Human Intellect by Adam Wood

Reviewed by: Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Human Intellect by Adam Wood Daniel D. De Haan Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Human Intellect. By Adam Wood. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2020. Pp. 335. $75.00 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3256-0. I was keen to review Adam Wood’s recent contribution to debates on Aquinas’s arguments for the immateriality of the intellect. I immediately discovered his book treats far more than my narrow interest had anticipated. In six engaging chapters Wood explores an impressive array of disputed questions on Aquinas’s views on the physical and metaphysical aspects of the human soul and intellectual powers. The arguments for the immateriality of the intellect are confined to the fifth chapter, but Wood does show—sometimes surprisingly— how many different debates are directly relevant to understanding Aquinas’s [End Page 307] contentions that the human soul is incorporeal, immaterial, incorruptible, immortal, and compatible with the resurrection. The questions driving each stage of Wood’s monograph are clearly sign-posted and typically are variations on two basic questions: What should we say is Aquinas’s view on X, given rival readings of Aquinas’s view on X? and what are the philosophical merits of holding such a view today? Most of the book is dedicated to an accurate interpretation of Aquinas’s positions, which Wood helpfully situates amongst the positions and objections of Avicenna, Roger Mareston, Francisco Suárez, David Armstrong, Saul Kripke, William Jaworski, and many other historical and contemporary thinkers. For these investigations alone I heartily recommend Wood’s study to anyone interested in a critical survey and contribution to the major disputes orbiting Aquinas on the intellect’s immateriality. Before considering some challenges to Wood’s argument for the intellect’s immateriality, I will give an overview of the book’s major theses. Chapter 1, “Forms as Limiting Principles,” commences with Aquinas’s hylomorphism. The central challenge is squaring hylomorphism with Aquinas’s contention that the intellectual soul is an immaterial form that can subsist apart from the body. Wood shows why explicating matter and form as “stuff and structure” or “referent and truthmaker” cannot meet this challenge, but the analogy of being can. He explains how Aquinas’s sixfold division of being illuminates an understanding of form as an immaterial mode of being and limiting principle of esse which can be directly participated in without matter. The human intellect “is an accidental form inhering directly in the human soul, rather than in the human being as a whole. Consequently, the human intellect has its act of being in an immaterial mode. This is what Aquinas primarily means by asserting its immateriality” (39). Wood marshals these resources to defend two theses of Aquinas. First, contrary to universal hylomorphism, the intellect can directly inhere in the rational soul alone; it need not inhere in a composite of form and spiritual matter. Second, that the rational soul both subsists in itself and informs matter is philosophically justifiable and coherent. Chapter 2, “Forms as Essences, Structures, Truthmakers, and Powers,” clarifies that “form” can mean either the essence as a whole—including matter and form—or the formal part of an essence, like souls and other substantial forms. Because Aquinas rejects the plurality of substantial forms, he maintains that the soul provides the single overarching structure for the essence of the whole composite. Essences locate composites within a kind or species. “Yet within the essence it is the form of the part that does the important identity-determining work, because matter on its own, or prime matter, is pure potentiality, and not actually anything at all. It takes some structuring or ‘perfecting’ by a form of the part for matter to exist in act as flesh, bones, or anything else” (72). The soul also plays a “unifying role” as the “overarching structure” that unites “material components into a single composite whole synchronically, and maintains its unity diachronically even as it cycles bits of matter in and out throughout its career” (73). Additionally, Wood identifies the [End Page 308] roles substantial forms play as grounding powers and other properties of the composite...

Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation? Discussing Origins with Reasons to Believe and BioLogos

Old-Earth or Evolutionary Creation? Discussing Origins with Reasons to Believe and BioLogos

Paul Alivisatos named 2021 Priestley Medalist

The old adage “If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it,” aptly describes A. Paul Alivisatos. The University of California, Berkeley, scientist is the Samsung Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and a professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering, as well as the university’s executive vice chancellor and provost. He is also director emeritus of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the founding editor in chief of Nano Letters, published by the American Chemical Society. Now he can add ACS’s highest honor to his resume. For “foundational contributions to the chemistry of nanoscience, development of nanocrystals as nanotechnology building blocks, and leadership in the chemistry and nanoscience communities,” Alivisatos will receive the 2021 Priestley Medal. Since the early 1990s, Alivisatos has explored the chemical and physical properties of nanosized bits of matter—often colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals—and developed widely used methods for controlling them. He and his

Charge-Mass Equivalence leading to Ilectron from the Electron

Hydrogen atom was considered as the smallest “bit of matter” until the electron was discovered. Nearly all attributes of the electron have been experimentally measured except for its radius. Electron’s radius has been derived in classical mechanics. The angular momentum of the electron has been understood as a purely quantum mechanical effect. In this paper, we have established an equivalence between the charge and mass of a fundamental particle. This leads to a definition of a complex charge or a complex mass, which combine both charge and mass. Every fundamental particle with charge and mass can be defined by a single complex charge. Interaction of two complex charges leads to the familiar Coulomb and Gravitational forces. It also points out the possibility of a 5th force of nature. By writing the charge and mass of the electron as mass and charge, we come up with a new particle which we have called the ilectron. Some attributes of the ilectron have been derived in this paper and its relation to Planck’s mass and charge are explored. This is a comprehensive paper that has been adapted from material we published in [1-3] for disseminating this information in the Physics community.

How Did I Get Here?: Your Story from the Big Bang to Your Birthday by Philip Bunting

Reviewed by: How Did I Get Here?: Your Story from the Big Bang to Your Birthday by Philip Bunting Elizabeth Bush Bunting, Philip How Did I Get Here?: Your Story from the Big Bang to Your Birthday; written and illus. by Philip Bunting. Little, 2019 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-316-42344-1 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-316-42343-4 $9.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5-8 yrs In this chatty, often lyrical introduction to, well, the entire history of the universe, Bunting starts at the beginning, "or at least what we think is the beginning," when an unimaginably dense universe was crammed into the size of an orange, here represented as a bright orange fruit afloat in a black abyss. Then "bang!" and scattered matter coalesces and organizes into suns and familiar planets and a cooling [End Page 111] Earth, and "Ta-da!" With that quote from the first putative earthly cell, life is off and running: "She had one very special trick. She could make copies of herself. … You, me, the trees, worms, whales, and wolves … we're all related to this little lady. All of life is one." Increasingly complex organisms, land animals, humans, dispersed populations, increasingly complex communities, and then: you, the viewer "made your grand entrance. And that is how you got here." Obviously there are a few steps left underreported here, but the continuity of wide-eyed, dot-pupiled life forms deftly delivers the message that every bit of matter is in this together. From here readers and listeners are free to turn this malleable title in any direction they need or wish and ponder the closing lineup of bizarre characters that demonstrate "if any little thing had changed in the time after that first really, really, really big bang … you might have turned out a little different." Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

‘Venus flytrap’ soft robot gets a grip

Pity the poor insect that wanders onto a Venus flytrap. Just a couple false steps into the carnivorous plant’s trigger hairs, and the leaves snap shut, dooming the bug. Inspired by the Venus flytrap’s ability to distinguish between insects and other stray bits of matter, Tampere University of Technology scientists Arri Priimagi, Hao Zeng, and Owies M. Wani have created a soft robot that acts with the same sort of autonomy. Their optical flytrap distinguishes between objects that reflect or scatter light and those that do not before grabbing the reflective ones. “It’s very difficult in soft robotics to develop systems that make decisions by themselves,” says Priimagi, who led the research team. Most soft robots, he says, don’t react to their environment but instead require some sort of external activation. His team’s solution was to incorporate an optical fiber into a liquid crystalline elastomer. When the light strikes a

‘The Stone Sky’: Dwelling and habitation in other worlds

Abstract Have humans always had the desire to inhabit other worlds? From the microscopic scale to the vastness of outer space, it seems our capacity for occupying uninhabitable spaces with our intellect, our bodies, our sensorium, our desire, is fundamental to our being. What are these spaces and how do we come to ‘know’ them? Whether mythological, religious or scientific, these minute or vast worlds are spaces that we unfold, narrate and dwell in. In his short story ‘The Stone Sky’ the novelist Italo Calvino writes of the inhabitants who live in a world that exists beneath the earth’s crust. These inhabitants who occupy the underworld exist in a mutable form that allows them to travel through the dense, dark inner landscape of the earth, through the crystal structures, the nickel sea to the earth’s core, an intricate viscous landscape quite other than the formation of matter on the earth’s surface. Calvino’s narration tells us of what is it to inhabit the interstices of the underworld, to be in a space with little intervening air, to live within the deep time scale of crystal formation. The neuroscientist Christof Koch states that ‘we live in a universe where organised bits of matter give rise to consciousness’ and that we need to extend our understanding of what consciousness really is. Could it be that these other worlds, whether planets only just glimpsed through early telescopes, or nano-landscapes at the scale of the atom are still integrated with our own fundamental make-up? Are they the product of a vastly developed pre-frontal cortex or are they a result of ideas, knowledge and experiences accumulated over billions of years? In this article I will look at the concepts of matter as a carrier of consciousness and of panpsychism as a tool with which to understand our habitation of other worlds.

Our computational nature: comment on Barrett et al.

Our computational nature: comment on Barrett et al.

“At Our Potatoes”: Recipes for Normality in Post-Union Ireland

“At Our Potatoes”:Recipes for Normality in Post-Union Ireland Helen O’Connell (bio) This essay explores how taste—in the very obvious sense of the actual flavor of food, but also as a mode of conceptual and aesthetic discrimination—was broadly associated in post-Union Ireland with republicanism and nationalism. The development of taste in regard to diet among the poor—specifically the preference for one kind of food over another—was understood to be a version, and a very worrying one indeed, of the gastronomy that was increasingly a feature of life not only in Paris, the capital of haute cuisine, but also throughout rural as well as urban Britain and Ireland. A gastronomic culture had expanded in the period of the French Revolution and its aftermath, developing conditions in which food acquired particular political and even existential meanings.1 The habits of the Irish rural poor were caught up in this culture in striking ways, democratization making itself felt not only in the sphere of ideas but also in gustatory preferences. Anxieties regarding the development of taste amongst the rural poor, however, are expressed in the improvement fiction of Mary Leadbeater and Abigail Roberts, whose early nineteenth-century tracts were, in almost all cases, published in Ireland and widely circulated as chapbooks and pamphlets, comprising one of the most significant literary genres of the immediate post-Union period. This fiction was even used to teach reading in various schools throughout Ireland until the foundation of the national schools in 1831. Leadbeater and Roberts’s tracts, as distinct from the critically explored [End Page 49] genre of the post-Union national tale, were more mainstream in their day than their current obscurity would indicate. The discourse about Irish food presented in them—particularly that surrounding potatoes and edible commodities—owes much to Arthur Young’s writing on diet and agriculture. Catherine Gallagher observes that for Young “the potato is the bit of matter that promises … a new material order, a secular transubstantiation in which the human body is no longer experienced as needy and hungry, and is hence no longer riotous and unpredictable.”2 Indeed in his A Tour in Ireland (1780), the phrase “belly-full” approvingly describes the effects of consumption on those who subsisted largely upon potatoes.3 Young’s faith in the potato is fully sustained within the improvement tracts this essay explores. Improvement writers committed themselves to the reform of Irish life in its most rural and material of manifestations, from agricultural techniques to the cooking and consumption of food. Both Leadbeater and Roberts feared that the rising popularity of tea and white bread, as well as an accompanying development of a taste for more provocative flavors, might even displace the central role of the potato in the meals of the rural poor. For them such a change would entail not only a disruption of a traditional diet, but also of the social harmony supposedly integral to it, revealing their anxiety about the encroachment of taste as a category into rural Ireland. For early nineteenth-century tract writers, in other words, taste constituted a direct threat to the material order of improvement, which sought to protect against contingency and disruption both in society at large and in ordinary daily domestic experience. Although Gallagher’s “The Potato in the Materialist Imagination,” explores Arthur Young, William Cobbett and Thomas Malthus’s ideas about the potato, her essay does not address the anxious dietary discourse [End Page 50] generated by didactic tracts that turned to the eating habits of the Irish poor. But Gallagher’s historicization of the potato debate establishes an invaluable critical context for explorations of food and hunger in the body of Irish writing discussed here. Often structured as fictional dialogues, such writing emphasized domestic order, thrift, and hard work. Distributed as pamphlets throughout rural Ireland, these tracts explicitly attempted to reform agricultural practices and home management.4 However, improvement writers faced difficulties as they encouraged new agricultural practices such as fencing and enclosures that suited an increasingly industrialized agriculture and that were also deemed necessary to meet increased demand for produce both before and throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Such practices frequently met with...

A puzzle about natural laws and the existence of God

The existence of natural laws, whether deterministic or indeterministic, and whether exceptionless or ceteris paribus, seems puzzling because it implies that mindless bits of matter behave in a consistent and co-ordinated way. I explain this puzzle by showing that a number of attempted solutions fail. The puzzle could be resolved if it were assumed that natural laws are a manifestation of God’s activity. This argument from natural law to God’s existence differs from its traditional counterparts in that, whereas the latter seek to explain the fact of natural laws, the former seeks to explain their possibility. The customary objections to the traditional arguments cannot be successfully adapted to counter this new argument, with one exception which has only limited effect. I rebut four claims that the theistic solution to the puzzle about natural laws is paradoxical, though I concede that one of these claims has merit. I consider four objections to the new argument but find three of them more or less unsatisfactory. The fourth, if successful, would undermine our claims to know the truth about the world.

For the love of physics: from the end of the rainbow to the edge of time-- a journey through the wonders of physics

Beloved MIT professor Walter Lewin, whose riveting physics lectures have made him a YouTube super-star, offers a mind-opening and delightful journey through the most intriguing discoveries in physics. A wonderful raconteur, Lewin takes readers on a marvellous journey with him in For the Love of Physics, opening our eyes as never before to the amazing beauty and power of all that physics can reveal to us. He describes the coolest, weirdest facets of the tiniest bits of matter, the wonders of our everyday lives-such as the mysteries of why lighting strikes and what makes musical harmony happen-and the most awesome features of the outer reaches of the universe. Whether explaining why the air smells so fresh after a lightning storm or showing us that a flea is strong enough to pull a heavy book across a table, Lewin always entertains as he edifies. For the Love of Physicsis a rare gem that will change the way readers see the world.

A Sign of New Particles or General Restlessness?

Last week, news spread that scientists in the United States may have spotted a bit of matter unlike any seen before. But even as they contemplate the implications, physicists are taking the result with a grain of salt.

Irreversible shear-induced vitrification of droplets into elastic nanoemulsions by extreme rupturing

Many materials weaken through fracturing when subjected to extreme stresses. By contrast, we show that breaking down repulsive bits of matter dispersed in a viscous liquid can cause a dramatic and irreversible increase in the dispersion's elasticity. Anionically stabilized microscale emulsions subjected to a history of high-pressure microfluidic flow can develop an unusually large elastic modulus as droplets are ruptured to the nanoscale, yielding "nanonaise." As the droplet size approaches the Debye screening length, the nanoemulsion vitrifies. Consequently, the onset of elasticity for disordered uniform nanoemulsions can occur at droplet volume fractions far below maximal random jamming of spheres.

Theoretical Integration, Cooperation, and Theories as Tracking Devices

The theoretical problem of integrating evolution, heredity, development, and cognition has a long pedigree with a complicated history. Many of these fields were considered the subjects of one science in the 19th century (Maienschein 1987). Leading theoretical biologists of the age wrote large, expansive treatises that biologists now can read only with equal measures of wonder and incredulity: wonder at their wide and deep learning and incredulity at their peculiar visions of biological integration. Think of Herbert Spencer (1900, pt 2: 367): “Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from a relatively indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a relatively definite, coherent heterogeneity and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” Or consider Ernst Haeckel (Gastraea theory), Hans Driesch (entelechies), August Weismann (biophors, ids, idants), and even Charles Darwin (use inheritance, pangenesis). None of these ideas were especially crazy in their time, but they drove integration projects that are quite different from ours. Historically, each of these special subjects has been a contender for the role of primary theory from which an understanding of all biological phenomena would flow. To take but a few examples, Dobzhansky (1973: 125) gave us “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” on behalf of Darwin’s theory. De Vries gave us his Mutationstheorie and Johannsen his pure line theory as alternative explanations of the root cause of hereditary change. Both were intended originally to replace natural selection as theoretically primary. Driesch gave us entelechies of individual development as a fundamental philosophical principle for the biological sciences. James Mark Baldwin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Francisco Varela, Rupert Riedl, and Donald Campbell, in very different ways, put cognition in the center of theoretical concern for general biological science, evolution in particular. Thinking about integration from the point of view of any of these specialties has traditionally depended on a notion of unification by explanatory theory reduction: explanations flow from a fundamental primary theory to phenomena that are organized at the surfaces, so to speak, of those phenomena considered central for the primary theory—for example, trait heredity and organism development in the light of evolution in Darwin’s day, or population change and the development of hybrids in the light of Mendelian heredity circa 1905, recapitulation and phylogeny in the light of ontogeny in Haeckel’s, de Beer’s, and Gould’s days (Haeckel 1866; de Beer 1930; Gould 1977), learning as coequal to inheritance and selection as a force in evolution. In the 20th century, phenomena have tended to be organized hierarchically, in terms of the composition of matter from the smallest to the largest units, so that there is a general expectation and drift of reductionism toward lower levels of compositional organization—to the behavior of smaller and smaller bits of matter—as the primary concern of fundamental theory. In biology, this reductionist drift led theorists from organisms to organs and tissues, to cells, and on to molecules as the foci of theoretical interest. Genes, the “molecules of life,” have been the focus of biological reductionism for nearly all of that century. A different model of integration centers on cooperation and communication among theoretical and phenomenal equals, rather than on imperialism and competition for primacy and fundamentality, which reduces or replaces one theory by another or trivializes one explanandum as epiphenomenal to another. An explanatory domain can become integrated when its bumps, twists, and turns are smoothly traversable, but we need not achieve integration by leveling the domain and making it conceptually homogeneous, just as nation-states can be unified by the smooth flow of goods, services, people, and ideas across their borders rather than by the obliteration of local and regional differences making flow irrelevant.

Itsy bitsy oversight?

Huge promises, enormous risks, minor safety precautions– that's the thumbnail version of the controversial recent history of nanotechnology, the science of using truly teeny bits of matter (1 nanometer = one-billionth of a meter) to make potentially miraculous new stuff. Someday, perhaps within this decade, carbon “nanotubes” sized one-thousandth the width of a human hair may clean polluted water and cancer could be cured using gold-plated “nanobul-lets” that would heat up and kill tumors. Yet along the way, workers and consumers who handle or inhale volatile nanoparticles may suffer health damage, which wouldn't become clear until the products are in wide use. Nanotech production, most of which is done through chemical synthesis (though some scientists zap particles with lasers), remains without specific regulations to ensure worker safety or shield the environment. Critics say that safety research funding, even including some major recent budget boosts, is as scanty as public understanding of the potential problems. “Nano-technology is, by everyone's definition, the biggest technological revolution the world has ever seen, but society is mostly still in the dark about it”, says Patrick Mooney, who spearheads the international opposition as director of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC), based in Ottawa, Canada. Hopes and concerns about nanotechnology all stem from the same simple rule: substances change the way they behave when broken down into really tiny bits, in some cases acquiring surprising new powers: some get stronger, some turn different colors, and some even explode. Given all the unknowns, the ETC has called for a moratorium on new production, pending new regulations, and is seeking United Nations involvement in future oversight. ETC's call for caution is one of many; Swiss Re, the world's second largest re-insurance company (insuring insurance firms), and the UK's Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering have all warned of the need for more safety research. Experiments on animals have shown that once in the body, nanoparticles can travel to the brain. Other research suggests that nanoparticles may damage inhabitant organisms if released in soils and groundwater. While the fantastical fear of “gray goo”, originated by author K Eric Drexler to envision how self-replicating nanorobots might wreak havoc on the Earth, has been widely dismissed, a new nano-threat is “green goo”, suggesting out-of-control engineered teeny life forms. “We take green goo very seriously”, says Drexler. The US government isn't going that far, but over the past few years, it has substantially increased spending to investigate specific safety issues, in what is quickly shaping up to be a historical departure from the usual ways of dealing with emerging technology. According to a representative of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, who asked to remain anonymous, so far the US federal agencies have dedicated approximately $40 million to specific safety research in FY2006, including spending by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the National Institutes of Health. While this money and attention is a major step forward, Mooney and other critics say it is insufficient considering that the US government plans to spend $1 billion on nanotech research projects in FY2006 and that the National Science Foundation predicts that nanotechnology could grow into a $1 trillion industry by 2015. The emerging landscape is reminiscent of the 1990s' biotech boom, when scientists raced to patent inventions and start their own companies. Critics say the huge potential profitability of nanotech innovations may dissuade researchers from focusing sufficient attention on the dark side of the new technology. “There has been no consensus about safety”, says Mooney, “so you'll see workers in private companies in Texas with bare hands and faces, while wearing surgical masks and gloves in France, and space suits in Africa”. Kristen Kulinowski, director of the federally funded Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University (Houston, TX), says she's encouraged by the trend towards more spending on safety research, though she emphasizes the danger of making “the same mistake we made with asbestos, PCBs, and DDT”, where products got into the mainstream before the discovery of risks that were so serious they had to be pulled off the market, by which time the damage had been done. Mooney goes further: “There has to be a broader social debate”, he says, noting that the British government has sponsored “juries”, in which lay citizens work with scientists and government officials to pose questions about where the new science is heading. “We need to get society not just to talk but to figure out what the priorities are”, he says. “If that isn't done, there'll be an explosion as changes start to come in.” Katherine Ellison

Saving Whitehead’s Universe of Value

Saving Whitehead’s Universe of Value

The runaway universe: the race to find the future of the cosmos

The incredible story of two rival groups of brilliant astronomers seeking the mysterious number that will determine the future of the universe. }For decades, astronomers have sought to discover the ultimate fate of the univers. Will the cosmos continue forever in its expansion, which began billions of years ago with the bang? Or will gravity someday reverse the process, producing a big crunch? Within the past few years, two rival groups of astronomers have announced a discovery that seems to resolve the issue: Instead of slowing down, the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating . This finding has shaken the science of cosmology to its very foundation. This is the story of the astronomers who have stood the world of cosmology on its ear--and of their competitive race to discover the future of the cosmos. It is also an investigation into whether their remarkable findings will stand the test of time. If the new results are verified in the coming years, we will eventually find ourselves in a runaway universe, in which every bit of matter is extremely far from its closest neighbor. Then the cosmological constant, which Einstein once rued as his greatest blunder, will turn out to be one of his finest insights into the nature of space itself.A vivid picture of an unexpected turn of events, The Runaway Universe presents the startling new discovery that is revolutionizing our view of the cosmos. }