Faust’s question by Goethe about “what binds the world together at its core” was certainly the inspiration for the choice of title. They are the laws of nature, this is the answer of the British writer Brian Clegg, and he described them in the main parts of his book. The English title “The Ten Patterns That Explain the Universe” focuses on the term “pattern”, in the German version it appears in the subtitle as “patterns in nature”. This term is an author’s guiding principle that runs through the entire book. He writes in the introduction: “We understand the world around us in terms of patterns. This does not necessarily mean patterns in a visual sense, but rather processes and phenomena that occur regularly. “You have to take this into account if using the term style sounds a bit strange in some places.
From spacetime to jet stream to knot theory
The first chapters are devoted to macro and micro world physics. The cosmic background radiation, which some theoretical physicists predicted already in the 1950s, can already be detected after about 20 years. Filmed by increasingly accurate space telescopes, it now represents a pattern that “continually tells us more about the beginnings of the universe.”
The author then explains the mathematical form of representing the Minkowski diagram as a “space-time pattern”. With the help of these two-dimensional diagrams (one dimension of space, the other of time), the phenomena of Einstein’s theory of special relativity, which are so surprising to ordinary people, can be presented clearly – without mathematical formulas. Clegg makes this clear.
As an example of patterns in the microcosm, choose a table that reflects the Standard Model of particle physics. This describes the importance of elementary particles and the relationships between them. Patterns can be seen when subatomic particles collide at nearly the speed of light in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, creating new particles. This is how the Higgs particle could have been discovered a few years ago. Following his main idea, the author introduces a theoretical model, called Feynman diagrams, with which interactions between particles can be shown without any formulas.
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