The Big Picture

作者简介：

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics, gravitation, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. He has wide-ranging interests, including in philosophy, complexity theory, and information.

Carroll is an active science communicator, and has been blogging regularly since 2004. His textbook "Spacetime and Geometry" has been adopted by a number of universities for their graduate courses in general relativity. He is a frequent public speaker, and has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report and Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has produced a set of lectures for The Teaching Company on dark matter and dark energy, and another on the nature of time. He has served as a science consultant for films such as Thor and TRON: Legacy, as well as for TV shows such as Fringe and Bones.

His 2010 popular book, "From Eternity to Here," explained the arrow of time and connected it with the origin of our universe. "The Particle at the End of the Universe," about the Large Hadron Collider and the quest to discover the Higgs boson, was released November 2012. "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself" will appear in May 2016.

More information at http://preposterousuniverse.com/

目录：

0. Prologue

* Part One: Cosmos

1. The Fundamental Nature of Reality

2. Poetic Naturalism

3. The World Moves By Itself

4. What Determines What Will Happen Next?

5. Reasons Why

6. Our Universe

7. Time’s Arrow

8. Memories and Causes

* Part Two: Understanding

9. Learning About the World

10. Updating Our Knowledge

11. Is It Okay to Doubt Everything?

12. Reality Emerges

13. What Exists, and What Is Illusion?

14. Planets of Belief

15. Accepting Uncertainty

16. What Can We Know About the Universe Without Looking at It?

17. Who Am I?

18. Abducting God

* Part Three: Essence

19. How Much We Know

20. The Quantum Realm

21. Interpreting Quantum Mechanics

22. The Core Theory

23. The Stuff of Which We Are Made

24. The Effective Theory of the Everyday World

25. Why Does the Universe Exist?

26. Body and Soul

27. Death Is the End

* Part Four: Complexity

28. The Universe in a Cup of Coffee

29. Light and Life

30. Funneling Energy

31. Spontaneous Organization

32. The Origin and Purpose of Life

33. Evolution’s Bootstraps

34. Searching Through the Landscape

35. Emergent Purpose

36. Are We the Point?

* Part Five: Thinking

37. Crawling Into Consciousness

38. The Babbling Brain

39. What Thinks?

40. The Hard Problem

41. Zombies and Stories

42. Are Photons Conscious?

43. What Acts on What?

44. Freedom to Choose

* Part Six: Caring

45. Three Billion Heartbeats

46. What Is and What Ought to Be

47. Rules and Consequences

48. Constructing Goodness

49. Listening to the World

50. Existential Therapy

Appendix: The Equation Underlying You and Me

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

References

Index