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We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe (Hardcover)

by Marcus Chown (Author)

4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Faber and Faber (15 Oct 2009)
ISBN-10: 0571244017
ISBN-13: 978-0571244010
Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14 x 2.8 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 5,655 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in this category:
#10 in Books > Science & Nature > Astronomy & Cosmology > Astronomy

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Product Description

Review

A new popular science book that should be bought for its clever title alone! -- The Independent, September 16, 2009

Chown writes with ease about some of the most brain-bending of concepts. -- BBC Focus Magazine, October 2009

An elegant pop-physics pick'n'mix. -- The Guardian, October 17, 2009

Chown makes cutting-edge science clear and meaningful. His new book will literally change the way you see the world. -- Bookhugger, October 2009

For entertainment value, and driving pace, Kelvin never lets the reader down. -- www.popularscience.co.uk, October 2009

Product Description

Look around you. The reflection of your face in a window tells you that the universe is orchestrated by chance. The iron in a spot of blood on your finger tells you that somewhere out in space there is furnace at a temperature of 4.5 billion degrees. Your TV tells you that the universe had a beginning. In fact, your very existence tells you that this may not be the only universe but merely one among an infinity of others, stacked like the pages of a never-ending book. Marcus Chown, author of "Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You", takes familiar features of the world we know and shows how they can be used to explain profound truths about the ultimate nature of reality. His new book will change the way you see the world: with Chown as your guide, cutting-edge science is made clear and meaningful by a falling leaf, or a rose, or a starry night sky.

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	75% buy the item featured on this page: We Need to Talk About Kelvin: What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe 4.7 out of 5 stars (3) �7.11
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Mystery of Starlight, 4 Dec 2009

By	H. Callaghan "Alice in Wonderland" (London, UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The Sun could be made of bananas, and it wouldn't make a sod of difference to us. Though that said, it would make for tasty but rather scorched banana bread. It's not that the Sun is on fire because it's made of flammable stuff. The Sun is on fire because there is such a lot of it. The crushing force of gravity increases pressure and correspondingly heat within its contents, producing the mind-numbingly melty temperatures within.

This is one of the many surprising assertions made in We Need To Talk About Kelvin by Marcus Chown, which I mentioned receiving and enjoying last week, so I was consequently thrilled when I heard he'd be interested in guest blogging here on December 11th! YAY! So, I've read the book, and experienced no less than three Eureka moments.

Such as: Stuff is made up mostly of nothing but energy. According to Chown, if all the space were removed from atoms, the entire human race could be fit into the space of a single sugar cube. It's actually highly mysterious that I don't plummet straight through the seat on the Tube and to gory death on the tracks below, book in hand, as tiny electric forces are basically the only things holding me up. For the record, this is not a great thing to think whilst one is sitting on the Tube reading.

Which brings me neatly around to the book, of course. We Need To Talk About Kelvin, jacketed with what seems to be aggressive non-threateningness, is a book about relating everyday phenomena, such as starlight, your reflection in a window, the fact that aliens haven't enslaved everybody yet - into powerful illustrations of quantum mechanics at work in the world. It's peppered with fascinating anecdotes about the scientists involved in the work of proving these things, from Galileo to scientists whose work is only just being published now.

Possibly the most impressive thing, to me personally, was the discussion on quantum probability. I've read some extremely good books on the subject while doing my Mephistophela (and increasingly Sleepwalker) research - Quantum: A Guide For The Perplexed by Jim Al-Khalili and Brown's Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse: The Quest For The Quantum Computer, amongst others, but to me personally, Chown's recounting of the phenomenon was the clearest.

One hesitates to write things like, "We live in an age where..." It's just so portentous. You could imagine it being said by Mr. Voice in a movie trailer. In fact, it almost certainly has been. But the fact of the matter is that the incessant daily scramble to stay on top of mundane things blinds us to the fact that we are all participants in an ongoing elaborate miracle - that the universe is a juggling trick where all the balls are in the air at exactly the same time, and science is a series of constantly opening doors leading to ever more astonishing worlds where our idea of "true" and "normal" meets the quantum idea of "true" and "normal" and they immediately get into a huge fist fight. As it happens, on a clear day, you really can see forever. And that's pretty amazing.

Sometimes you just reminding.

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The slippery slope of reality, 3 Jan 2010

By	Simon Laub (Aarhus, Denmark, Europe) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Barack Obama started his "Dreams from my father" with a
quote from Chronicles (29:15):" For we are strangers before them,
and sojourners, as were all our fathers".
Reading Marcus Chowns "We need to talk about Kelvin"
easily brings you to the same frame of mind.

For starters: We are ghosts! 99.999999 per cent of
matter is empty space. Not only are the atoms
we are made of, very, very tiny indeed. The atoms themselves
are mostly nothingness circling more nothingness.

And what little substance there is to matter
soon evaporates when you realize that all
of the atoms that make up 'you' are quantum things,
endowed with quantum weirdness - or madness if you like!
Take quantum entanglement: Particles
born together bahaves as though they know about each other,
no matter how far apart. Communicating with each other,
somehow, at infinite speed. With
everything born 13.7 billion years ago
in the fireball of the Big Bang - One can speculate that
everything in the universe is now bound together,
i.e. everything knows about everything else in the universe,
through some inifinite speed communication process.

When we stand on the Earth, solid ground (ha ha),
our weight compresses atoms below, squeezing electrons
in atoms closer to the nuclei. According to Heisenberg,
electrons aren't too crazy about having their position
exposed. So they resist by gaining a higher momentum.
Fighting the compression so to speak. The 'solidity'
of the ground is Heisenbergs uncertainty principle kicking in:
The more sure we are of the location of a particle,
the less we can know about its momentum.
The 'solidity' of the ground is teaching us that there are limits
to what we can know about the world so to speak.

Most things we know from our everyday world are not
identical. They may look indistinguishable, but when we
look closer, at a detailed molecular level, they are not.
Not so with electrons - everyone out there in the
universe is absolutely identical. There is no way to tell
them apart. And likewise for quarks.
It follows that they have no inner structure, which would
allow us to tell them apart.
So they are just weird to begin with, not weird due to otherwise
rational inner parts.

The (weird) parts, we are made of, have been processed
in stars before they became parts of humans. Take iron.
A massive star develops an onion like interior,
with heavier and heavier elements closer to its core.
Finally it undergoes silicon buring which creates iron.
which is bad news for the star, as burning iron doesnt
give more energy, it takes energy. Without energy
being produced there is nothing to oppose gravity from
collapsing the star. Which eventually leads
to a cataclysmic explosion of the star, that for a short time,
outshine an entire galaxy of a 100 billion stars.
Sending out the iron that will eventually end up in the bodies
of humans.

Looking out in the night sky, we can of course see many stars.
Actually, in a infinite universe, the night sky should be
completely bright with starlight, coming from stars
in all directions in an endless universe. But it
is not (Olbers paradox).
Ok, the universe is to young for stars to have had time to
fill it up with light, and actually, the stars
dont have the energy to fill up the entire universe,
no matter how powerful they appear.

The universe is a pretty big place!
It wasnt always. Way back at the Big Bang
it was small. And small tends to be synonymous with Quantum.
Yet, our everyday world doesnt seem to be
quantum weird. So, how did the world loose its
quantumness?
For matter there might be an answer. Here the clustering
of matter into big things like galaxies and people
might have caused the decoherence.
The quantum waves representing the particles (and allows them to
be in many places at the same time), interact
and 'decides' to be real, instead of ghostly quantum,
when particles come together in large amounts.

But space time itself - why did that decide to
be relatively smooth, instead of totally chaotic quantum? No one knows.

Marcus Chown doesn't go into (in this book) what a
quantum world actually means for our consciousness.
Are our minds being flipped around according
to 'ghostly influence' by the rest of the universe? -
or better still, are our minds flipping the rest of universe
around according to our thinking?
At the very least, surely our minds live in a quantum
world, should mean something?

However small the quantum thing is everywhere!
The universe is infinite, so it doesnt mattter that much
if the quantums effects are small. It is still
enough to make everything mind boogling.
E.g. It is very unlikely, but eventually, everything can be produced
in spacetime out of 'thin air' and random quantum process.
Lego bricks, cars, spaceships and brains.
And with an infinite amount of space-time it
is a certainty that these things will eventually
be produced. Including 'Boltzmann brains'!
Actually, 'Boltzmann brains' will outnumber other 'real' brains, like
human brains, that have been build by evolution over
billions of years.

So, Boltzmann brains will sit out there in the utter emptyness
of space - and stare out in nothingness... They are
the typical observers in our universe?!

The Boltzmann brains might not be communicating
with us. And apparently noone else is!
It might be that the galaxy is a galaxy of dolphins,
that are happy swimming around in alien seas.
Or that communication is extremely dangerous,
with killer species out there in deep space.
Or that it is just very hard to reach
a technological civilisation
(The five steps that made us - a) advent of bacteria b)
complex cells with nuclei c) multicellular life
d) intelligence e) human civilisation - each took
some 800 million years)

Or perhaps is it much better to make
your own simulation of the whole thing
at your own home planet. Complete with humans
and dinosaurs in it (as Stephen Wolfram
has suggested). Perhaps everything, everything
can be generated by a computer program!

Reality it might not be. But who knows about
reality anyway?

-Simon

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1 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Kelvin Comment, 2 Dec 2009

By	Ian Bell (UK) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I got what I wanted at a good price and delivered quickly. I was very staisifed.

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