The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"'Marcus Chown has the happy knack of making abstruse subjects seem intelligible.' Sir Patrick Moore"
Guardian, January 27, 2007
A limousine among popular-science vehicles ... Superb.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Big questions, even bigger answers,
By Toby Briggs "Toby Briggs" (Bath, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead (Hardcover)
Big questions. Brave people with even bigger answers which, even if they turn out to be wrong, illuminate vast areas of modern science. Chow takes you by the hand and leads you to the frontier of knowledge - literally, since one of his big questions is: What is the limit of what we can know? What IBM mathematician Gregory Chatin has to say about this will leave your brain reeling, but it has implications for everything from the limits of computers to the origin of human intuition, imagination and creativity. Elsewhere Chow asks: What happened before the Big Bang explosion? Where does the everyday world come from? Can life survive into the infinite future of the Universe? Why do we experience a common past, present and future when none of these concepts appear in our basic description of space and time (remarkably, it may be due to our biology rather than to physics)? And why are fridges hard to shove about?! (because empty space is "sticky"!) This is a very stimulating book which I have raved about to all my friends.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Frontier science and the ultimate questions,
By Steve M (Cardiff, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Front Line of Science (Paperback)
If you're a beginner hoping to learn about the big bang, relativity and quantum theory, then this is probably not the best book for you. A title like Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos would almost certainly offer you a better understanding of these concepts, building your understanding more gradually and methodically.
However if you already have a basic grasp of such topics and fancy a highly (and I mean highly!) speculative detour away from established theories into the realm of fringe topics such as whether we might be living in a computer simulation or where we might begin to look for a possible message from the creator of our universe, then you should find this a mildly entertaining read, even if you question some of the conclusions. At times it risks straying into theological territory, but not in a Bible-bashing way - for example, Chown relays the proposal of one physicist that the purpose of life might be to create an omnipotent and omniscient super-intelligence. That's the kind of book this is. It has its faults - several glaring grammatical errors towards the end, and it's also strangely repetitive in parts, making it feel somewhat disjointed. Despite that, it's hard not to find the concepts he relays fascinating. Just don't expect to learn too much from it.
47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The never ending days of trying not to get lost in this book,
By
This review is from: The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead (Hardcover)
As soon as I took it off the shelf I was hooked. You get tucked into the pages after the heading of the first chapter. The words begin to flow and you're taken on a smooth ride into the heart of all the really interesting bits of science, the ones that have the most extreme of theories and questions. All the information is explained in true layman's terms Which is a big help to non degree level people like myself, and is broken down in quick night time session chapters, yet don't expect to sleep easy, some of the information and facts about quantum theory are somewhat upsetting and take away most, or any individual belief that we are unique and more than just lucky animals. All and all a great read for the open minded.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
