Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite
    Unavailable
    Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite
    Unavailable
    Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite
    Ebook565 pages9 hours

    Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite

    By Rudy Rucker

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker leads an excursion to that stretch of the universe he calls the "Mindscape," where he explores infinity in all its forms: potential and actual, mathematical and physical, theological and mundane. Rucker acquaints us with Gödel's rotating universe, in which it is theoretically possible to travel into the past, and explains an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which billions of parallel worlds are produced every microsecond. It is in the realm of infinity, he maintains, that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations.


    Using cartoons, puzzles, and quotations to enliven his text, Rucker guides us through such topics as the paradoxes of set theory, the possibilities of physical infinities, and the results of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. His personal encounters with Gödel the mathematician and philosopher provide a rare glimpse at genius and reveal what very few mathematicians have dared to admit: the transcendent implications of Platonic realism.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 14, 2013
    ISBN9781400849048
    Unavailable
    Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite
    Author

    Rudy Rucker

    Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. His books include Postsingular and Spaceland.

    Read more from Rudy Rucker

    Related to Infinity and the Mind

    Related ebooks

    Mathematics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      A Universe Made of Tiny, Random Chunks: The space-time that makes up our universe is inherently uncertain.

      Jun 6, 2013

      One of science’s most crucial yet underappreciated achievements is the description of the physical universe using mathematics—in particular, using continuous, smooth mathematical functions, like how a sine wave describes both light and sound. This is

      6 min read

    • Article

      Heavyweight Particle

      Jun 12, 2022

      Heavyweight Particle
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Fourth Copernican Revolution

      Sep 27, 2018

      The sun formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got around 6 billion years more before its fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets. And the expanding universe will continue—perhaps forever—destined to become ever colder, ever

      9 min read

    • Article

      Cosmology Next-gen

      Sep 1, 2021

      Cosmology Next-gen
      8 min read

    • Article

      A Multitude Of Multiverses

      Jul 27, 2022

      A Multitude Of Multiverses
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Joy of Condensed Matter

      Feb 24, 2021

      Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math leap to mind, and they have started a wider conversation. But is all of phys

      7 min read

    • Article

      How Black Holes Nearly Ruined Time

      Jan 24, 2019

      An Introduction to the Black Hole Institute Fittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equations for general relativity—a solution that described a black hole decades before the first a

      6 min read

    • Article

      End Of The Multiverse Theory?

      Jul 18, 2019

      End Of The Multiverse Theory?
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Nonlinear History of Time Travel: Births, deaths, and other time travel paradoxes.

      Sep 29, 2016

      I doubt that any phenomenon, real or imagined, has inspired more perplexing, convoluted, and ultimately futile philosophical analysis than time travel has. (Some possible contenders, determinism and free will, are bound up anyway in the arguments ove

      20 min read

    • Article

      Watch This Space

      Feb 12, 2023

      Watch This Space
      1 min read

    • Article

      A Letter to Einstein From the Future: Two Princeton Physicists Catch Albert Up.

      Sep 14, 2017

      We don’t believe in time travel, and we’re not into mysticism. But what if we could write a letter to Albert Einstein to tell him about gravity and black holes in a few paragraphs? We’d write something like this letter. Steven Gubser and Frans Pretor

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Universe Has Made Almost All the Stars It Will Ever Make

      Aug 19, 2020

      Our human world is soaked in light. For starters there are the 100,000 trillion photons arriving every second at every square centimeter of Earth’s dayside surface, after racing here from the outer envelope of a natural giant thermonuclear reactor we

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Strangeness of Black Holes

      Apr 11, 2019

      This essay is one of the five winners in the 2019 writing competition held by the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University. “The Black Hole Initiative offers a unique environment for thinking about the topic of black holes more creatively and comp

      6 min read

    • Article

      Time Flows Toward Order

      Dec 2, 2020

      The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite this exalted status, it has long been associated with a great mystery and a bleak implication. The mystery is th

      9 min read

    • Article

      Hunt For The Multiverse

      Dec 5, 2019

      Hunt For The Multiverse
      7 min read

    • Article

      How Physics Is Like Three-Chord Rock: Like a set of common chords, the same math appears in diverse fields of physics.

      Jun 12, 2014

      A few years back, 12 million of us clicked over to watch the “Pachelbel Rant” on YouTube. You might remember it. Strumming repetitive chords on his guitar, comedian Rob Paravonian confessed that when he was a cellist, he couldn’t stand the Pachelbel

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Joy of Condensed Matter: Hard times in fundamental physics got you down? Let’s talk excitons.

      Dec 31, 2021

      Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Wonder” issue in February, 2021. Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Search For Wormholes

      Aug 11, 2022

      The Search For Wormholes
      11 min read

    • Article

      Do We Need A Theory Of Everything?

      Jul 21, 2021

      Do We Need A Theory Of Everything?
      2 min read

    Reviews for Infinity and the Mind

    3.5/5

    87 ratings4 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      reminds me of the works of a Ray Smullyan, except more explicit. Mathematical logicians generally have a culture of crazy philosophy, from Whitehead and Wittgenstein, to Godel, etc. which has influenced modern logicians.

      tl;Dr logicians be crazy and this book is no exception. doesn't mean that's a bad thing
    • 4/5
      In the 1981 preface Rucker writes, “This book discusses every kind of infinity: potential and actual, mathematical and physical, the ontological and the mundane.” The main line of argument is mathematical. Rucker uses physics, philosophy and theology as illustrations and examples of mathematical concepts. He also uses mathematical formulas, diagrams and cartoon to illustrate concepts in other disciplines. The five chapters all conclude with a collection of puzzles and paradoxes. This assumes that if the reader has followed and understood the concepts so far you have another chance to exhaust your reasoning powers on these, because with infinities there are things that cannot be logically, mathematically or scientifically described fully. Rucker argues that many of the ideas about infinity are not rationally and deductive, but mystical an intuitive. This makes a book that is an active and entertaining mental wrestling match. It also makes it a stimulating, thought provoking, and potentially mind expanding read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      The contents of this book is best used in 50 lb bags, available at most lawn & garden stores. You would get a better grasp of infinity by overdosing on dextromethorphan than by reading this tripe. The basic concept of a true infinity escapes Mr. Rucker throughout the whole book.
    • 4/5
      I read this book over a longish evening. At the end my mind was so expanded I had difficulty in going to bed! if you are at all curious about infinity, the concept, which, according to Borges "Contaminates and destroys all others", then a look at this book wil satisfy you. Some concepts still elude me, but if Rucker can't make them plain, then probably no-one else can. Perhaps I might suggest a book on flower arranging?To Rucker I owe the following proof of the falsity of the statement "in an infinite universe, anything is possible". Ti disprove this, we only have to show that something is impossible in our (imaginary) infinite universe. Let's say a planet where everyone has green hair. Now imagine a guide to the planets in the universe. This book has an infinite number of pages. Now imagine that we put green-haired planets every other page, with noral planets in between. We can remove the GHP from our guidebook, and it is still infinite. So now we can imagine an infinite universe with no GHPs. So many things are not possible in our infinite universe. This proof is oddly satisfying. Thank you Mr. Rucker.