Book costing Rs. 40/- Changing life forever!!!
I went with my friends to city from the college hostel to hang around and enjoy. That was around march 2002. We also went to second hand books sale shop. Everybody bought books of their choice. Sarangan bought "Chicken soup for the surviving soul".
I was thinking about buying "The God of small things". Sarangan said it is a good book. I decided to buy it later. I chose the small book - "A Brief history of time" and it just costed Rs. 40/- as a second hand sale. When I bought it I just thought that it would be an interesting one. How could I ever have thought that it would change my life forever? Following are some of the things I understood from the book which if one understands would change their life forever.
1) The concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe.
2) An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job.
3) A theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make.
4) A theory must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.
5) Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.
6) You can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagress with the predictions of the theory.
7) Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from.
8) Our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.
9) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that "one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely".
10) Anthropic principle says that "We see the universe the way it is because we exist"
11) Matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. Gravitational field has negative energy. So we can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.
12) It is said that there's no such thing as free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
13) We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in Newton's theory of gravity.
14) We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and ask what is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
15) Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?
I was thinking about buying "The God of small things". Sarangan said it is a good book. I decided to buy it later. I chose the small book - "A Brief history of time" and it just costed Rs. 40/- as a second hand sale. When I bought it I just thought that it would be an interesting one. How could I ever have thought that it would change my life forever? Following are some of the things I understood from the book which if one understands would change their life forever.
1) The concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe.
2) An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job.
3) A theory is just a model of the universe, or a restricted part of it, and a set of rules that relate quantities in the model to observations that we make.
4) A theory must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations.
5) Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.
6) You can disprove a theory by finding even a single observation that disagress with the predictions of the theory.
7) Today we still yearn to know why we are here and where we came from.
8) Our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in.
9) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that "one certainly cannot predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely".
10) Anthropic principle says that "We see the universe the way it is because we exist"
11) Matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. Gravitational field has negative energy. So we can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.
12) It is said that there's no such thing as free lunch. But the universe is the ultimate free lunch.
13) We cannot even solve exactly for the motion of three bodies in Newton's theory of gravity.
14) We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us and ask what is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is?
15) Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence?
Comments
- Ulu..