From Illusions to Reality by Vesselin Petkov

From Illusions to Reality by Vesselin Petkov

The greatest mystery in the world is its very existence. In our intellectual development, we all reach a turning point when we start asking the perennial existential questions: What is the world?; What am I?; What is the meaning of the existence of the world and myself?. As the German philosopher Schopenhauer put it: The lower a man stands in intellectual respects the less of a riddle does existence seem to him. but, the clearer his consciousness becomes the more the problem grasps him in its greatness. This book explores what fundamental physics tells us about the physical world and how the scientific picture of what exists often differs disturbingly from the common sense view based on the way our senses reflect the world. Centuries-old illusions are identified by showing that they contradict experimentally-confirmed results of modern physics, which clears the way toward deeper understanding of reality. The greatest illusion that the world exists only at the present moment of time has been realized by many great thinkers, but so far the human race has been unable to free itself from it, prompting Einstein to write this: the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. Getting rid of such stubbornly persistent illusions by open-mindedly examining the implications of modern physics for the physical world can help us rise above the fog of everyday life and see Nature the way she herself is.

Abhay Ashtekar is Eberly Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos at The Pennsylvania State University. He is one of the founders of Loop Quantum Gravity and its subfield Loop Quantum Cosmology. He is author or co-author of several books on relativity and cosmology, and an editor-in-chief of the Springer journal General Relativity and Gravitation.

Vesselin Petkov received a graduate degree in physics from Sofia University, a doctorate in philosophy from the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and a doctorate in physics from Concordia University in Montreal. Vesselin Petkov is one of the founding members of the Institute for Foundational Studies Hermann Minkowski.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781927763001
ISBN 10	1927763002
Title	From Illusions to Reality
Author	Vesselin Petkov
Series	Understanding Reality
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Minkowski Institute Press
Year published	2013-09-08
Number of pages	160
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.