标题: 《13 件不合逻辑的事 - 13 Things That Don't Make Sense》作者:麦克【PDF】 [打印本页] 作者: skyhew 时间: 2012-7-11 13:01 标题: 《13 件不合逻辑的事 - 13 Things That Don't Make Sense》作者:麦克【PDF [attach]60400[/attach]
作者：Brooks, Michael
出版社：Bantam Dell Pub Group
出版日期：2008年08月12日
語言：英文 ISBN：9780385520683
裝訂：精裝
When we look to the “anomalies” that science can’t explain, we oftendiscover where science is about to go. Here are a few of the anomaliesthat Michael Brooks investigates in
13 Things That Don’t Make Sense:
Homeopathic remedies seem to have biological effects that cannot be explained by chemistry
Gases have been detected on Mars that could only have come from carbon-based life forms
Cold fusion, theoretically impossible and discredited in the 1980s, seems to work in some modern laboratory experiments
It’s quite likely we have nothing close to free will
Life and non-life may exist along a continuum, which may pave the way for us to create life in the near future
Sexualreproduction doesn’t line up with evolutionary theory and, moreover,there’s no good scientific explanation for why we must die Science starts to get interesting when things don’t make sense.
Science’sbest-kept secret is this: even today, there are experimental resultsand reliable data that the most brilliant scientists can neither explainnor dismiss. In the past, similar “anomalies” have revolutionized ourworld, like in the sixteenth century, when a set of celestial anomaliesled Copernicus to realize that the Earth goes around the sun and not thereverse, and in the 1770s, when two chemists discovered oxygen becauseof experimental results that defied all the theories of the day. And so,if history is any precedent, we should look to today’s inexplicableresults to forecast the future of science. In 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to meet thirteen modern-day anomalies and discover tomorrow’s breakthroughs. 13 Thingsopens at the twenty-third Solvay physics conference, where thescientists present are ready to throw up their hands over an anomaly: isit possible that the universe, rather than slowly drifting apart as thephysics of the big bang had once predicted, is actually expanding at anever-faster speed? From Solvay and the mysteries of the universe,Brooks travels to a basement in Turin to subject himself to repeatedshocks in a test of the placebo response. No study has ever been able todefinitively show how the placebo effect works, so why has it become apillar of medical science? Moreover, is 96 percent of the universemissing? Is a 1977 signal from outer space a transmission from an aliencivilization? Might giant viruses explain how life began? Why are someNASA satellites speeding up as they get farther from the sun—and whatdoes that mean for the laws of physics?
Spanning disciplines frombiology to cosmology, chemistry to psychology to physics, Brooksthrillingly captures the excitement, messiness, and controversy of thebattle over where science is headed. “In science,” he writes, “beingstuck can be a sign that you are about to make a great leap forward. Thethings that don’t make sense are, in some ways, the only things thatmatter.”