Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

Do I expect to see this in my lifetime? I'd give it about 30%, putting it roughly on par with my getting cancer. The 2008 economic turmoil was of course nothing compared to the resulting global crop failures, infrastructure collapse and mass starvation, with survivors succumbing to hungry armed gangs systematically pillaging from house to house. The climate change we're currently worrying about pales in comparison with nuclear winter, where a global dust cloud blocks sunlight for years, much like when an asteroid or supervolcano caused a mass extinction in the past. “Accidental nuclear war between two superpowers may or may not happen in my lifetime, but if it does, it will obviously change everything. Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… the leading theory for what happened suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.”

On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above.

At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. “Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball).

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark