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Index
Cover
MORE PRAISE FOR THE GOD PROBLEM
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface: Adventure That Takes Your Breath Away
1. Appetizers, Canapés, and Snacks
Introduction: I Dare You—The Weirdest Ride in the Universe
The Café Table at the Beginning of the Universe
The Problem with God: The Tale of a Twisted Confession
2. A Taste of Sin
Brace Yourself: The Five Heresies
Heresy Number One: Why A Does Not Equal A
When Is a Frog a River? Aristotle Wrestles Heraclitus
Heresy Number Two: Why One Plus One Does Not Equal Two
Heresy Number Three: Prepare to Be Burned at the Stake (The Second Law of Thermodynamics—Why Entropy Is an Outrage)
Heresy Number Four: Randomness Is Wrong—The Six Monkeys at Six Typewriters Error
A Brief History of the God Problem: Were Kepler, Galileo, and Newton Creationists?
Galileo's Nature Fetish: Poking the Pope
Gamow versus Hoyle: The War between Big Bang and Steady State
The Tale of the Termites
3. The Saga of a Scratch Mark
The Mystery of the Magic Beans: What the Hell Is an Axiom?
Barley, Bricks, and Babylonians: The Birth of Math
Scratch Mud and You Get Mind: The Rise of a Virtual Reality
The Sorcery of Corners
Celebrities in the Heavens: How to Invent Astronomy
What's the Angle? Blindness in Babylon
Why Knot? The Egyptian Rope Trick
How to Hypnotize a Greek: Math as a Tourist Attraction
Seduce ’Em with Numbers: How to Do a Pythagoras
Squaring Your Way to Fame: Pythagoras's Hot New Theorem
4. How Aristotle Invented the Axiom
A Trip to Plato's Cave
Aristotle Fights for Attention—Or Zeroing Zeno
How Euclid Makes Aristotle's “Science” Stick
Galileo's Dad and the Drug of Geometry
Kepler: How to Tickle the Soul of the Earth
Kepler's Boxes and Balls: Yes, Kepler's Freaky Math
5. Everybody Do the Flip
Guillotining an Axiom: Severing the Neck of Parallel Lines
“One Man Deserves the Credit, One Man Deserves the Blame, and Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Is His Name”
Bare-Naked Math: Peano Strips It Down
Ted Coons, Dancing Wonder: A Tale of Two Translations
Presto, Change-o: Translation's Little Secret
The Day You Uploaded Your Self: Translation Saves Your Life
6. Is Metaphor a Crime?
The Hunger of the Stuttering Forms: Isomorphic Symbol Sets
Leonardo's Stones: Why Metaphor Works
Plaid in the Pool: The Eye Doctor Who Gave You Waves
How Form Goes Manic—What's an Ur Pattern?
Real Estate in the Embryo: Location, Location, Location—Karl Ernst von Baer and Hans Adolf Eduard Driesch
Master of the Universe: Herbert Spencer, Grand Unifier and Flirt
The Scandal of the Century: George Eliot and Her Ape
Bulging Forth from Nothing: The Emergence of “Emergence”
Charlie Darwin Shows Up Late
The Zygote Snabs Herbert Spencer
The Embryo Goes Cosmic
7. Einstein Turns an Axiom Inside Out
The Man Who Gave Star Trek Its Space—Bernhard Riemann
Albert Einstein's Pajamas
Einstein Gives Seven Ugly Ducklings a Home: The Year of Miracles
Einstein's Secret Weapon: Aristotle's Invention
The Adventures of Einstein's Predictions
8. The Amazing Repetition Machine
Forget Information: Or How Claude Shannon Got It Wrong
The Case of the Conversational Cosmos
How Gossip Grows the Universe
The Magic Onion of Meaning
Doing the Glycerin Twist: David Bohm
Benoît Mandelbrot Zigs and Zags
9. It's from Bits: The Two-Bit Tarantella
How Math Lost Its Pictures…and How It Got Them Back Again
Fuse and Fizz, Thou Shalt Bud: Fractals and the Bounce from Boom to Bust
The Sorcery of Simple Rules
The Japanese Sword Maker and the Alchemy of Iteration
Gaming Your Way to Fame: John Conway Enters the Scene
Axioms in Silicon: Conway's Game of Life
Good-Bye to Equations: Stephen Wolfram's New Kind of Science
10. What Are the Rules of the Universe?
The Case of the Obsessive-Compulsive Cosmos
Time, the Great Translator: An Information Theory of Time
Wrap Yourself in String: Iteration and Emergent Properties
Baking the Big Bagel: How to Start and End a Universe
Will Silicon Axioms Fly?
Conclusion: The Big Bang Tango—Quarking in the Social Cosmos
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
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