In one of Bill Watterson’s wonderful cartoons, six-year-old Calvin and his tiger companion, Hobbes, stand outside and contemplate the starry night. “We hurl through an incomprehensible darkness. In cosmic terms, we are subatomic particles in a grain of sand on an infinite beach,” observes Calvin, before pausing for a moment and adding: “I wonder what’s on TV now.”
It’s a shrewd point. Musing on what we will perhaps never comprehend is a discombobulating experience that sends most of us scampering off to the familiar, intelligible corners of our daily lives. Not so Marcus du Sautoy . With What We Cannot Know, the prominent mathematician, writer and broadcaster boldly squares up to what he calls the seven “edges” of human knowledge, topics that range from the nature of time to the mysteries of human consciousness.
Continue reading...
No comments:
Post a Comment