… As the author of this book rightly notes, as we learn more and more about the Universe, it turns out that there are fewer and fewer things to do for God. They say that Aristotle generally believed that God is "a motionless root cause, a king-slacker, who first created the universe, and then leaned back in his chair and looked back, through the centuries, observing the intricate interweaving of cause-and-effect relationships." Thus, "Brock's Brain" by Carl Sagan (M.: Alpina non-fiction) is about the study of the Universe and ourselves, exploring God in it. Although, as usual, the book is not up to him, and the selected topics may seem very diverse - from a crystal of salt to the structure of the cosmos, myths and legends, birth and death, robots and climate, the explosion of planets, the nature of the mind, the search for life beyond the Earth.
And also in this book - about the prospects of science. What place does it occupy in the life of mankind and how does it differ from pseudoscience? Where did the myths about Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, ancient astronauts and plant emotions come from, and why is it important to debunk them? What planets and satellites of the solar system can be suitable for colonization, how did life originate and where in distant space is it still possible? How can science explain the near-death experience, and how does this relate to the birth experience? How does religion relate to science? “But I hope that you will be convinced that these topics are related to each other,” the author says, “because the world is interconnected, and also because people perceive the world through the same senses and brains, as well as similar experiences. and our perception does not reflect external reality with absolute precision."
But, as it turns out, the "internal" reality, which is akin to Inner Mongolia in a postmodern writer, is reflected quite consciously. For example, we are reminded that in the world's religions, the Earth is usually described as our mother and the sky as our father. However, the significance of the perinatal experience is that we leave our mothers. First we do this at birth and then again when we independently go to the adult world. And no matter how painful these partings are, they are necessary for the continuation of the human race. “Could this fact have something to do with the almost mystical attraction that space flight has, at least for many of us? - the author carefully notes. “Doesn't that mean leaving Mother Earth, the world where our species was born, in search of its destiny among the stars?”
As for the title of the book, the brain of Brock (the great anthropologist) is just a symbol that gave rise to the author's research and left him at the end wondering whether the past is still stored in a jar with formalin, lunch with Victor Hugo, walks with his wife along the Voltaire embankment, personal immortality finally..
The beginning of the new century, about which, in particular, the speech in the next book of our review - "Dark matter and dark energy" by Jaan Einasto and Arthur Chernin (Moscow: Vek-2) - sinned with a lot of discoveries of the "cosmic" sense. Almost all figures of earthly arts dreamed of the mountain worlds, but not in the Old Believer, but in the newly converted, revolutionary, so to speak, sense. And everyone - from futurists to physicists - is overnight tired of "tossing out the stars", and indeed - to bow before any authorities. Even in front of himself, the former! So, for example, in Einstein's cosmology of 1917, in addition to the familiar hypothesis of antigravitation and the postulate of the static nature of the world, the author laid another time bomb, namely the idea of the finiteness and closedness of the universe.
Indeed, why did Einstein think that the space of the Universe should be finite? Indeed, from his theory of relativity does not follow any instructions on this matter. And all because there was not enough revolution in this area, and everyone relied on the geometry of Euclid and Lobachevsky, which make it possible to judge the local properties of space, and not about its structure as a whole, which should be studied with the help of not differential geometry, but topology. And therefore, if we consider the world as space and time, it turns out that the theory of relativity is talking about two-dimensional space, and nothing is really known about the topology of three-dimensional spaces in this model. That is, in the book of respected authors we are told that the "topological general theory of relativity", that is, such a theory of space-time,which would put the topology of the world in accordance with the physical processes developing in it, is not yet available. Perhaps this is a matter of the future.
Thus, the book consists of two sections, in which it is described in detail about two mysterious substances of the Universe, regarding which there is still no single point of view - dark energy and dark matter - and this matter, you understand, is dark. Although, of course, it is written easily. “As we can see,” we are told, “the energetic composition of the Universe is actually not too complicated - contrary to the impression that may appear at first glance. The recipe for a cosmic mixture, written in the language of constant energy parameters of the Universe, looks neither confusing nor strange, and its physical meaning is simple and obvious. In a word, read, and it will be revealed to you.
The next book, namely - "Folds in the fabric of space-time" by Govert Schilling (Moscow: Alpina non-fiction) - has a subtitle "Einstein, gravitational waves and the future of astronomy." That is, the theory of relativity is being tested once again, discovering new news of gravitational wave astronomy,
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By the way, about the waves. As you know, gravitational waves were predicted by Einstein, but they were discovered quite recently. The fact is that somewhere far away in the Universe, two black holes merged, and after a billion light years, in September 2015, they reached Earth. Two giant detectors registered the slightest tremor. This moment is recognized today as the scientific breakthrough of the century, which opened up to scientists a new understanding of the processes that underlie the formation of the Universe. Well, the book we are talking about tells how scientists tried to record this elusive ripple of space: decades of research, vicissitudes of fate, failures and victories. The author describes at first glance fantastic technologies that allow detecting gravitational waves, but in fact - as if he was writing a scientific research detective. While explaining such concepts in an accessible language,as "general theory of relativity", "neutron stars", "supernova explosions", "black holes", "dark energy", "Big Bang" and many others,
“Everything happens in about a tenth of a second and is observed not only in Livingstone,” he describes the everyday life of scientists. “It's the same at Hanford, a few milliseconds later. Not just interesting - very interesting! Drago walks into the office of his colleague Andrew Lundgren - through the next door obliquely along the corridor. Lundgren has worked here longer, he is more experienced. Together they look at the charts. The sinuous lines look exactly like the simulations they know very well. The increase in frequency and amplitude is a characteristic chirp of the gravitational wave signal. Really?.. Well, it can't be. The signal is unexpectedly strong. It is clearly visible; it is easy to isolate it from noise without special software. There is probably another explanation. It is simply impossible … Or is it possible?"
Igor Bondar-Tereshchenko
