EBOOK
13 Things That Don't Make Sense
The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Michael BrooksSeries: 13 Things That Don't Make Sense(0)
About
Ninety-six per cent of the universe is missing. The effects of homeopathy don't go away under rigorous scientific conditions. The laws of nature aren't what they used to be. Thirty years on, no one has an explanation for a seemingly intelligent signal received from outer space. The US Department of Energy is re-examining cold fusion because the experimental evidence seems too solid to ignore. The placebo effect is put to work in medicine while doctors can't agree whether it even exists.
In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they simply can't explain. But, if the past is anything to go by, these anomalies contain the seeds of future revolutions. While taking readers on an entertaining tour d'horizon of the strangest of scientific findings — involving everything from our lack of free will to Martian methane that offers new evidence of life on the planet — Michael Brooks argues that the things we don't understand are the key to what we are about to discover.
This mind-boggling but entirely accessible survey of the outer limits of human knowledge is based on a short article by Michael Brooks for New Scientist magazine. It became the sixth most circulated story on the internet in 2005, and provoked widespread comment and compliments (Google "13 things that do not make sense" to see).
Michael Brooks has now dug deeply into those mysteries, with extraordinary results. "This elegantly written, meticulously researched and thought-provoking book provides a window into how science actually works, and is sure to spur intense debate."
- New Scientist
"You will be amazed and astonished you when you learn that science has been unable to come up with a working definition of life, why death should happen at all, why sex is necessary, or whether cold fusion is a hoax or one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time."
- Richard Ellis, author of The Empty Ocean Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an editor at New Scientist. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Observer, Times Higher Educational Supplement, and even Playboy. He is a regular speaker and debate chair at the Science Festival in Brighton, UK. Chapter 1
THE MISSING UNIVERSE
We can only account for 4 percent of the cosmos
The Indian tribes around the sleepy Arizona city of Flagstaff have an interesting take on the human struggle for peace and harmony. According to their traditions, the difficulties and confusions of life have their roots in the arrangement of the stars in the heavens - or rather the lack of it. Those jewels in the sky were meant to help us find a tranquil, contented existence, but when First Woman was using the stars to write the moral laws into the blackness, Coyote ran out of patience and flung them out of her bowl, spattering them across the skies. From Coyote's primal impatience came the mess of constellations in the heavens and the chaos of human existence.
The astronomers who spend their nights gazing at the skies over Flagstaff may find some comfort in this tale. On top of the hill above the city sits a telescope whose observations of the heavens, of the mess of stars and the way they move, have led us into a deep confusion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, starlight passing through the Clark telescope at Flagstaff's Lowell Observatory began a chain of observations that led us to one of the strangest discoveries in science: that most of the universe is missing.
If the future of science depends on identifying the things that don't make sense, the cosmos has a lot to offer. We long to know what the universe is made of, how it really works: in other words, its constituent particles and the forces that guide their
In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they simply can't explain. But, if the past is anything to go by, these anomalies contain the seeds of future revolutions. While taking readers on an entertaining tour d'horizon of the strangest of scientific findings — involving everything from our lack of free will to Martian methane that offers new evidence of life on the planet — Michael Brooks argues that the things we don't understand are the key to what we are about to discover.
This mind-boggling but entirely accessible survey of the outer limits of human knowledge is based on a short article by Michael Brooks for New Scientist magazine. It became the sixth most circulated story on the internet in 2005, and provoked widespread comment and compliments (Google "13 things that do not make sense" to see).
Michael Brooks has now dug deeply into those mysteries, with extraordinary results. "This elegantly written, meticulously researched and thought-provoking book provides a window into how science actually works, and is sure to spur intense debate."
- New Scientist
"You will be amazed and astonished you when you learn that science has been unable to come up with a working definition of life, why death should happen at all, why sex is necessary, or whether cold fusion is a hoax or one of the greatest breakthroughs of all time."
- Richard Ellis, author of The Empty Ocean Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an editor at New Scientist. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Observer, Times Higher Educational Supplement, and even Playboy. He is a regular speaker and debate chair at the Science Festival in Brighton, UK. Chapter 1
THE MISSING UNIVERSE
We can only account for 4 percent of the cosmos
The Indian tribes around the sleepy Arizona city of Flagstaff have an interesting take on the human struggle for peace and harmony. According to their traditions, the difficulties and confusions of life have their roots in the arrangement of the stars in the heavens - or rather the lack of it. Those jewels in the sky were meant to help us find a tranquil, contented existence, but when First Woman was using the stars to write the moral laws into the blackness, Coyote ran out of patience and flung them out of her bowl, spattering them across the skies. From Coyote's primal impatience came the mess of constellations in the heavens and the chaos of human existence.
The astronomers who spend their nights gazing at the skies over Flagstaff may find some comfort in this tale. On top of the hill above the city sits a telescope whose observations of the heavens, of the mess of stars and the way they move, have led us into a deep confusion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, starlight passing through the Clark telescope at Flagstaff's Lowell Observatory began a chain of observations that led us to one of the strangest discoveries in science: that most of the universe is missing.
If the future of science depends on identifying the things that don't make sense, the cosmos has a lot to offer. We long to know what the universe is made of, how it really works: in other words, its constituent particles and the forces that guide their