25 thoughts on “The magic of reality”

  2. My fantasy of talking to long dead scientists usually involves a ‘way-back’ machine or a wormhole, or something or other. It can still make for a good fiction story, which can then be shared with future generations. Best of both worlds!

  3. Not 100% sure Richard Dawkins would appreciate the reference to his “penultimate book”.

    I think he probably sees it as the last but one in a catalogue he will be adding to for a while yet 🙂

  4. Even though I know it is a Richard Dawkins’ title, I am afraid that it always seems to me that it ought to be something out of Terry Pratchett’s stable!

  5. This is my feeling too: Educate my son to be able to think rationally and question everything. (Even me! :$)

      1. Emoticon non-fail.
        If you’re one of those Amazonian tribe members (or imitators) with a stick pushed through your cheeks.

      1. Did the same to me too. Having kids I mean. My wife makes fun of me when I tear up at even the cheesiest heartbreaking or heartwarming movie or TV show scenes.

      1. It starts out fine, but then he suddenly “remembers” that people like Newton and Galileo are dead? That sounds very forced.

        Then he mentions how no one lives much past 100 years, but then immediately declares his baby to be 200,000 years old.

        Don’t get me wrong, I understand the point that is being made — in fact, it might have been even more poetic to say that the baby is 14 billion years old, since we are made of the matter of the universe — but I think it strikes a very artificial note as it’s written.

        1. it might have been even more poetic to say that the baby is 14 billion years old

          Pedantry alert!
          Most of the essential elements to life (quite a long list, but even minimally (“CHONP”) going as far up the periodic table as phosphorous, and possibly molybdenum or vanadium as minor essential ; lots of interestingly-closely-spaced energy levels and oxidation states), need to be produced by supernovae of at least population I or II, and the metallicity (abundance of atoms which are not hydrogen, helium or lithium) of galaxies possibly didn’t reach high enough levels to generate significant planets to give life (“as we know it, Captain”) a significant chance of developing.
          Astrophysical opinion on how long that took varies, unsurprisingly, but doing it in less than a few billion years (stellar populations “0” and “I”) seems … optimistic, while we know that about nine billion was sufficient time to allow the formation of our solar system.

          1. Yes, what I said didn’t seem quite right, but you get the idea. That we are composed of cosmic matter rather than just being similar to our 200,000 year old ancestors seems much more awe-inspiring.

    2. Maybe it’s just because he draws babies like small adults with similar facial features & loads of teeth. 🙂

  10. Ummm, it’s a pleasant daydream to imagine explaining modern physics to Isaac Newton, say. I suspect it might not go quite as expected. Quite aside from having to find the right words to explain an utterly unfamiliar concept like electricity to Newton, say, how many of us would actually know enough about electricity to explain it anyway?

    1. I conceived a thought experiment a couple of days ago where Newton lives to ~200 (in seclusion, on a desert island with regular deliveries of Phil.Trans.Roy.Soc etc, but not feeding back into the development of science), then comes into contact with the astronomers whose longer runs of observations of Mercury started to show the anomalous precession of it’s orbit, which was one of the early pieces of evidence in favour of general relativity being an accurate description of reality.
      Could Newton have accepted that using his own methods could lead to a detectable disagreement with observation, and could he have worked out GR from that?
      It’s a thought experiment, so Schrodinger’s cat is probably messing with the controls.

      1. He’d have to invent all the successor mathematics, too, which might have been too much – it was to Einstein, who had to make use of some preexisting stuff.

        1. To re-invent GR, yes ; but to realise that there was a disagreement between Newtonian mechanics and Mercury, I don’t think anything new would be needed (Euler, or was it Gauss, improved techniques for reducing observations to orbits, but I’m not sure that would strictly be needed).
          Part of the appeal of replaying the tape is … what alternative solutiions might Newton come up with. Remember that we’re pretty sure that one of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics is wrong, and the odds are in favour of it being GR ….

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