The history of civilization is the process of human beings looking farther and farther. As the horizon extends, the universe that people know becomes larger and larger.
When I was a child, I lived in the Taihang Mountains. At that time, the ridgeline in the distance was a very wonderful thing in my eyes. Looking at the ridge with the empty sky as the background, I was always curious about the mountains. There will be something on the other side of the mountain, and gradually I began to imagine that there is a very magical world on the other side of the mountain. To me at that time, that ridgeline was the edge of the world. For the ancient ancestors of human beings, this feeling may often appear. In the eyes of people at that time, a valley may be the whole world.
In the myths and legends of different peoples, there have been narratives of great floods covering the whole world, so that people once believed that the earth really had a great flood era. In fact, this may be a misunderstanding, because the concept of "world" in myths is very different from ours today. For example, the most famous great flood in the Bible also claimed to have swept the whole world, but that world was only an extremely limited area in the Mediterranean area. To a certain extent, that flood was just a regional flood. Even if the speculation that the Black Sea poured into the Mediterranean Sea was established, it was still far from a worldwide flood in the current sense.
Later, human beings’ world vision expanded to the entire earth and into the starry sky. However, for a long time, the universe that humans knew was still only the size of the solar system, and Saturn and Neptune were the edges of the universe. . The discovery of stellar parallax at the end of the seventeenth century caused a huge leap in the scale of the universe in human eyes. However, until the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists still believed that the Milky Way was the entire universe. Now, the scale of the observable universe has expanded to more than tens of billions of light-years. This is a huge existence that is difficult to grasp by human imagination. The theory of parallel universe tells us that such a huge universe is not the whole existence, it may just be the vast ocean. A millet.
We are no strangers to multiverse theories, but most of them come from the multiworld hypothesis of quantum mechanics. However, in this book, the author *** describes for us as many as nine possible multiverses. , most of which were rarely heard of before, but the one about quantum mechanics was put at the end.
Among these nine parallel universes, the most intuitive one should be the so-called Hundred-Nab Multiverse. We are no stranger to the concept of infinite universe. In an infinite universe, regions far apart will inevitably form. There are countless multiverses, and the most astonishing corollary is that the combination of basic particles is limited. If the universe is infinite, then there will inevitably be other subuniverses with the same combination of particles as the subuniverse we are in, and there are also infinite such subuniverses. Multiple, which means there may be countless copies of our world. This is the multiverse model that is most mathematically understandable to us ordinary people. The most philosophical one is the so-called ultimate multiverse. It is assumed that all possible laws and parameters exist and can constitute their own universes, even including those laws that cannot be calculated and expressed mathematically. This is undoubtedly the infinity of infinity. Such a universe shakes the philosophical foundation of epistemology. Scientific exploration is based on the motivation of trying to explain why the laws of the universe and the parameters of the universe are the way they are. But in the ultimate multiverse, all possibilities exist, just like There are shoes of all sizes in a shoe store, and there is bound to be a pair that fits our feet, which defeats the purpose of exploring. In addition to the above two, the book also describes the multiverse model generated by the most cutting-edge modern physics and cosmological theories, including string theory, and even explores virtual universes that may be generated in computers.
I have always believed that the greatest and most beautiful stories in human history were not sung by bards, nor written by playwrights and writers; such stories are told by science. The stories told by science are far beyond those of literature in terms of their grandeur, twists and turns, horror, mystery, romance and sentimentality. This book further proves this idea. As a science fiction fan, I was filled with the pleasure of reading science fiction novels when I read this book. However, the imagination of this book far exceeds science fiction. Its grandeur, breadth and madness are unmatched by any science fiction novel, such as the string theory. There are as many as 10 to the 500th power of high-dimensional space forms, which may produce the same number of multiverses, and the sum of all basic particles in our universe is only 10 to the 90th power; there is also the ultimate multiverse that contains all possibilities Universe, science fiction has never dared to describe such a concept. From the beginning to the end of reading this book, shock followed shock, magic superimposed on magic. The vast and profound ideas in the book and the crazy imagination make people dizzy. But this book is not a science fiction. Every multiverse model in it is a rigorous scientific inference and has a theoretical and mathematical basis. Its gold content is far beyond that of science fiction. Therefore, science is not a shackles of imagination, but the source and wings of imagination. The title of this book was originally called "Cloud Atlas of the Universe". I feel that this title is more appropriate. In front of this magnificent cloud image, our thinking scale is stretched to the extreme, and there is a kind of God who stands outside infinite time and space. experience.
Modern science, especially physics, has evolved into extremely profound fields. The world described by its cutting-edge theories has far exceeded the scope of our daily experience, and the difficult mathematics used to describe these theories The language can also be daunting.
Green, the author of this book, has a great talent for describing the most profound and obscure theories in language that is consistent with our real-life experience. Not only can it be understood by us, but these descriptions are vivid and beautiful. This talent has been demonstrated in his previous book on string theory, "The Strings of the Universe", which is the clearest introduction I have ever read to modern theoretical physics including relativity, quantum mechanics and string theory. A clear book, Green's talents are fully displayed in this book. At the same time, the translation of this book is also very good. The translator has a professional and deep understanding of theoretical physics and cosmology, and perfectly expresses the meaning of the original book with a fluent translation. This book is an excellent translation of high-level scientific communication works. can be said to be a model.
When it comes to science communication, I can’t help but feel a lot of emotion. Compared with applied science and technology that have clear practical significance, what everyone should know more about is the most basic scientific theory and its most cutting-edge progress, because this is the latest picture of the universe and nature in human eyes. If a person never leaves home from birth to old age and death, this is undoubtedly a very miserable life. And if we rush through our short life without any understanding of the grand and tiny world beyond our vision, and our thoughts wander around the scope of life and work every day, it is equivalent to never leaving home spiritually. , this is undoubtedly a great regret in life.
In the past, the latest theories of basic science had a profound impact on society and people's thinking, such as Copernicus' heliocentric theory, Newton's classical mechanics and Darwin's theory of evolution. But later, this influence gradually disappeared, and basic science, especially theoretical physics, became a castle in the air on the ivory tower, getting further and further away from social life. If we want to find a limit, it is quantum mechanics. It was after the emergence of quantum mechanics that the public gradually became unfamiliar with theoretical physics and cosmology. Compared with classical theories based on determinism, including relativity, physics after quantum mechanics has shown a completely new philosophical look, which has posed a huge challenge to people's accustomed and familiar cognitive methods, especially those who have always accepted a single philosophy. For the Chinese public in education, this sense of strangeness and challenge is even more obvious.
As a result, a disturbing phenomenon has arisen: while science and technology are rapidly changing human life, the latest scientific worldview is not known to everyone. The gap between nature and the universe in the eyes of the public and scientists is getting wider and wider. As time goes by, the universe in the public eye is still a classical picture, and this cognitive gap may become the biggest potential obstacle to social progress.
For example, modern physics and cosmology have shown us an extremely vast universe, and the emergence of the parallel universe theory, no matter which of the nine multiverse hypotheses in the book becomes a reality, makes The vastness of the universe has added many more numerical poles, making countless copies of the vast space that has not been visited by humans. This contrast in size between the universe and human beings is shocking. This contrast is actually an unmistakable philosophical revelation, calling human beings to step out of the dusty cradle of the earth to fill the huge gap. This kind of pioneering and expansion is not only The mission of civilization is the essence of life. But now, people obviously have not felt this call. They are still immersed in the classical picture of the universe and muddle along in the illusion of human center.
Basic science is increasingly far away from the public, which may cause mankind to lie in the comfort zone of technology and enter the age of ignorance again. Society is in urgent need of a second scientific enlightenment, which makes "Hidden Reality: What is a Parallel Universe" Such excellent science communication works are of immeasurable significance.