John Gribbin

North Carolina · connectedBorn 1946

British science writer

Worked at Duke University

physicist, astrophysicist, astronomer, writer, journalist, science fiction writer

Quotations with a citation

The problem was that although ideas like statistical mechanics and the kinetic theory worked at the practical level to provide a mathematical description of what was going on, nobody had seen atoms—more to the point, given the technology of the time it was physically impossible to see atoms. This left the door open to for philosophers such as Ernst Mach to argue that the atomic hypothesis was no more than a hypothesis, what is known as a heuristic device, meaning just because things in the macroscopic world behave as if they were made of atoms that doesn't prove that they are... Mach regarded atoms as no more than a convenient fiction, which provided a basis for physicists to make calculations; anything that could not be detected by the human senses, he argued, was not the proper subject of scientific debate. Einstein disagreed, and argued the case for atoms with his friends. He became obsessed with the idea, and determined that if no one else could prove that atoms were real, he would do it himself.

The classic example of chaos at work is in the weather. If you could measure the positions and motions of all the atoms in the air at once, you could predict the weather perfectly. But computer simulations show that tiny differences in starting conditions build up over about a week to give wildly different forecasts. So weather predicting will never be any good for forecasts more than a few days ahead, no matter how big (in terms of memory) and fast computers get to be in the future. The only computer that can simulate the weather is the weather; and the only computer that can simulate the Universe is the Universe.

We live in a Universe which is exactly the most likely kind of universe to exist, if there are many living universes that have evolved in the same way that living things on Earth have evolved. And the fact that our Universe is 'just right' for organic life-forms like ourselves turns out to be no more than a side-effect of the fact that it is 'just right' for the production of black holes and baby universes.

In the libraries

Open Library Almost Everyone's Guide to Science · 1998 View library record ↗ Open Library Erwin Schrdinger And The Quantum Revolution · 2012 View library record ↗ Open Library In Search of Schrödinger's Cat · 1984 View library record ↗ Open Library In Search of the Multiverse · 2009 View library record ↗ Open Library Q is for quantum · 1998 View library record ↗ Open Library Time and Space · 1994 View library record ↗

Read John Gribbin

In Search of the Multiverse 2009 Find a copy In Search of Schrödinger's Cat 1984 Find a copy Time and Space 1994 Find a copy Erwin Schrdinger And The Quantum Revolution 2012 Find a copy Q is for quantum 1998 Find a copy Almost Everyone's Guide to Science 1998 Find a copy