By John D. Barrow
ISBN-10: 0316082597
ISBN-13: 9780316082594
John D. Barrow's Pi within the Sky is a profound -- and profoundly diversified -- exploration of the realm of arithmetic: the place it comes from, what it's, and the place it's going to take us if we stick with it to the restrict in our look for the final word which means of the universe. Barrow starts through investigating even if math is a merely human invention encouraged through our functional wishes. Or is it anything inherent in nature ready to be discovered?
In answering those questions, Barrow presents a bridge among the often irreconcilable worlds of arithmetic and theology. alongside the best way, he treats us to a heritage of counting around the world, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to logical friction, from quantity mysticism to Marxist arithmetic. And he introduces us to a number of unusual people who have inspiration a few of the private and strangest innovations that human minds have ever proposal, from Lao-Tse to Robert Pirsig, Charles Darwin, and Umberto Eco. Barrow therefore offers the old framework and the highbrow instruments essential to an realizing of a few of today's weightiest mathematical techniques.
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Additional info for PI in the Sky: Counting, Thinking, and Being
Example text
The world of 2000, then, will be poorer and hungrier than the world of today. This growth in population seems contradictory, if we recall that the Department's numbers reflect an optimistic assumption about population-control programs. There is no contradiction, though: the anticipated increase in numbers will be the result of a distorted age-structure of the populations in the poor nations. There, medical advances have come so recently that now most of the population is very young, well below childbearing age.
Climate, the locations of materials, and the special property of oceans for cheap transportation tend to cause wide separations, here on Earth, between agriculturalproducing areas and population centers. As a conse- quence, we become tied into interdependent networks thousands of miles in extent. Anyone who interrupts one of those networks by cutting off our sources of energy, of food, or of materials can hold a large population for ransom. We have examples of that sort of threat frequently, and the result is always the same: even at best, prices are driven up, production is slowed down, and almost everyone suffers.
An unlimited materials source, available without stealing, or killing, or polluting. Nothing in our solar system is truly unlimited, of course; no expansion can go on forever; but an exponential growth of wealth can be considered rationally if we can find the environment in which that growth can proceed for many hundreds of years; there is an enormous difference between sharp limits, forced on us within years or decades at 33 deep poverty, and limits reached only after several hundreds or thousands of years, under conditions of high prosperity and universal education in a generally affluent and literate human population.
PI in the Sky: Counting, Thinking, and Being by John D. Barrow
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