Seventeenth-century England was racked by civil war, plague, and fire. A series of meetings of natural philosophers' in Oxford and London saw the beginning of a method of thinking based on proof and experiment. This is account of this unparalleled time of discovery explores the impact of the Royal Society.
We once had to abandon the idea of earth being at the centre of the universe. Now, we need to confront an even more profound possibility: the universe itself might just be one universe among many. In Search of the Multiverse takes us on an extraordinary journey, examining the most fundamental questions in science. What are the boundaries of our universe? Can there be different physical laws from the ones we know? Are there in fact other universes? Do we really live in a multiverse? This book is the ultimate search and Gribbin guides us through the different competing theories revealing what they have in common and what we can come to expect.
But the sensitive way in which systems respond to those basic laws, combined with feedback, can explain why, for example, just one vehicle braking on a motorway can cause a traffic jam; how a tiny genetic mutation or environmental change may make a species develop in a wholly different way.
