The flag is like the Tower of Babel. With every additional stone we add to the tower, we aim to get closer to the eternal truths of the universe. But we will never reach the end. Ulrich Walter, a physicist and former astronaut, is pretty sure of this.
In his new book, “The Crazy World of Physics,” Walter presents some of the stones that actually support the tower to a wide audience. He warned at first: he would not be able to do without mathematics entirely. There will be some formulas for his interpretations, but they are all based on the knowledge of the school.
What do you want to know about physics?
Putting together the book’s themes seems a bit like thinking a very clever physicist: What do I think people need to know about what holds the world together? The author thus makes a seemingly erratic conversion from Newtonian gravity to more academic particle physics, and then back to astronomical phenomena observable from Earth. Walter jumps from explaining everyday phenomena like the question of whether a fat or skinny person falls from a dive tower faster, to the importance of the Higgs particle to cosmology and then to string theory in search of the formula for the world. Last but not least, he then takes a trip into epigenetics and deals with the question of how psychosocial stress affects our life trajectory.
It becomes more organized in the second part of the book. This is about “physics at large”. Walter takes the reader on trips to space. There is no doubt that he has a strong connection to this matter, as he himself was aboard the space shuttle “Columbia” in 1993. The author talks about the search for life in space and explains the meaning of the giant moon that can be observed from Earth. Then it deals with dark matter. He writes as if he is enchanted. For over 100 years, we’ve been searching for an exotic type of matter that we know makes up 84% of our universe because it primarily affects the rotation of galaxies.
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