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Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them
- A Cosmic Quest from Zero to Infinity
- Narrated by: Antonio Padilla
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's Summary
This program is read by the author.
A fun, dazzling exploration of the strange numbers that illuminate the ultimate nature of reality.
For particularly brilliant theoretical physicists like James Clerk Maxwell, Paul Dirac, or Albert Einstein, the search for mathematical truths led to strange new understandings of the ultimate nature of reality. But what are these truths? What are the mysterious numbers that explain the universe?
In Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them, the leading theoretical physicist and YouTube star Antonio Padilla takes us on an irreverent cosmic tour of nine of the most extraordinary numbers in physics, offering a startling picture of how the universe works. These strange numbers include Graham’s number, which is so large that if you thought about it in the wrong way, your head would collapse into a singularity; TREE(3), whose finite nature can never be definitively proved, because to do so would take so much time that the universe would experience a Poincaré Recurrence—resetting to precisely the state it currently holds, down to the arrangement of individual atoms; and 10^{-120}, measuring the desperately unlikely balance of energy needed to allow the universe to exist for more than just a moment, to extend beyond the size of a single atom—in other words, the mystery of our unexpected universe.
Leading us down the rabbit hole to a deeper understanding of reality, Padilla explains how these unusual numbers are the key to understanding such mind-boggling phenomena as black holes, relativity, and the problem of the cosmological constant—that the two best and most rigorously tested ways of understanding the universe contradict one another. Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them is a combination of popular and cutting-edge science—and a lively, entertaining, and even funny exploration of the most fundamental truths about the universe.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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What listeners say about Fantastic Numbers and Where to Find Them
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Performance
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Story
- Utilisateur anonyme
- 05-24-23
Soo goood
Challenging but worth every minute! Do yourself a favor and get this book! Thanks for the book
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Performance
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Story
- Michael
- 05-23-23
Exciting, Strange, Difficult = Meh
I really love numbers. I remember first learning about a googol from an Isaac Azimov book around 1970 (I got to tell all my geek friends). This book mostly annoyed me. The first number was a bit of nonsense about the amount sprinter Usain Bolt was time dilated. A number is given having little to do with reality. He talks about googol and googolplex in term of cosmological doppelgängers – another bit of unrealistic philosophy. Then Graham’s number, which is so big it will make your head explode. I doesn’t. He discusses infinity in terms of quantum and string theory. The author tried to excite the reader about numbers with strangeness and difficult to understand science, but (for me) totally misses the beauty of the simplicity of numbers. Azimov excited me about numbers this book did not.
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- Fred Schaumberg
- 02-16-23
Awesome
Awesome, great explanation of difficult concepts and a deep dive in to history and development of these.
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- JoeV
- 01-22-23
Great info, worthy listen, just too much hype
Loved the info, but it seems in trying to invite the listener to get as excited as the author is about the subject it was one-sided in favor of sensationalized "wow" topics without stopping to check the reality of ever proving things like string theory. Give it a shot, worth it, but you'll see what I mean particularly regarding conceptualization of what could happen to your head if you held a large number in your mind.
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- Karl F.
- 12-23-22
Amazing book
Real talk thank you for this! W w w w w w w we w w w w w w
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Performance
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- Greg
- 10-13-22
4 number geeks
Number geeks will love it. You don't even need to be a math whiz to understand the hard to understand world of numbers.
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- Scott L. Barnes
- 08-17-22
Wonderful Narration but Difficult to Grasp
I have a background in science, but most of these concepts are far beyond my capability to understand. Antonia's narration is absolutely great (as if Roy Kent is speaking, but not so gruff). I really liked his analogies as he attempts to explain such difficult topics. Maybe when I croak, I will be allowed to understand everything (only briefly though, just before I enter the void).
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Overall
- Eric
- 08-05-22
Tony Padilla gets a COisG
At Come On It's Still Good we rate movies, books, and showd as COisG (Come On It's Still Good) or COisB (Bad). Fantastic Numbers gets a COisG and should be on every numberphile fan's reading list. The audio book is also great, as it is read by Tony himself! Enlightening, entertaining, funny, and quotable. COisG!
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The Art of More
- How Mathematics Created Civilization
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: Nick Afka Thomas
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this captivating, sweeping history, Michael Brooks makes clear that mathematics was one of the foundational innovations that catapulted humanity from a nomadic existence to civilization, and that it has been instrumental in every subsequent great leap of humankind: from charting the movements of celestial bodies to navigating the globe to tracking the dissemination of viruses.
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Wow!
- By Cinski446 on 07-12-22
By: Michael Brooks
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Existential Physics
- A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions
- By: Sabine Hossenfelder
- Narrated by: Gina Daniels
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Not only can we not currently explain the origin of the universe, it is questionable we will ever be able to explain it. The notion that there are universes within particles, or that particles are conscious, is ascientific, as is the hypothesis that our universe is a computer simulation. On the other hand, the idea that the universe itself is conscious is difficult to rule out entirely.
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Separating the Science from the Nonsense
- By SelfishWizard on 08-16-22
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The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved
- How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry
- By: Mario Livio
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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For thousands of years mathematicians solved progressively more difficult algebraic equations, until they encountered the quintic equation, which resisted solution for three centuries. Working independently, two prodigies ultimately proved that the quintic cannot be solved by a simple formula. The first popular account of the mathematics of symmetry and order, The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved is told not through abstract formulas but in a beautifully written and dramatic account of the lives and work of some of the greatest and most intriguing mathematicians in history.
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Historical Perspective Appreciated
- By Michael Hanrahan on 01-22-20
By: Mario Livio
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This Way to the Universe
- A Theoretical Physicist's Journey to the Edge of Reality
- By: Michael Dine
- Narrated by: Michael Dine
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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This Way to the Universe is a celebration of the astounding, ongoing scientific investigations that have revealed the nature of reality at its smallest, at its largest, and at the scale of our daily lives. The enigmas that Professor Michael Dine discusses are like landmarks on a fantastic journey to the edge of the universe. Asked where to find out about the big bang, dark matter, the Higgs boson particle - the long cutting edge of physics right now - Dine had no single book he could recommend. This is his accessible, authoritative, and up-to-date answer.
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I Want More!
- By adam on 02-21-22
By: Michael Dine
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The Universe Speaks in Numbers
- How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets
- By: Graham Farmelo
- Narrated by: Hugh Kermode
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the great insights of science is that the universe has an underlying order. The supreme goal of physicists is to understand this order through laws that describe the behavior of the most basic particles and the forces between them. For centuries, we have searched for these laws by studying the results of experiments. Since the 1970s, however, experiments at the world's most powerful atom-smashers have offered few new clues. So some of the world's leading physicists have looked to a different source of insight: modern mathematics.
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Great story and narration, but lacks rigor...
- By James S. on 05-31-19
By: Graham Farmelo
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How Evolution Explains Everything About Life
- From Darwin's Brilliant Idea to Today's Epic Theory
- By: New Scientist
- Narrated by: Mark Elstob
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. In How Evolution Explains Everything About Life, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the questions of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke and how it got kick-started.
By: New Scientist
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A Brief History of Black Holes
- And Why Nearly Everything You Know About Them Is Wrong
- By: Dr Becky Smethurst
- Narrated by: Dr. Becky Smethurst
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Right now, you are orbiting a black hole. The Earth goes around the Sun, and the Sun goes around the centre of the Milky Way: a supermassive black hole—the strangest and most misunderstood phenomenon in the galaxy. In A Brief History of Black Holes, University of Oxford astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst charts the scientific breakthroughs that have uncovered the weird and wonderful world of black holes, from Hawking radiation to the iconic first photographs of a black hole in 2019.
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Becky is the British Neil Degrasse Tyson!
- By Mark on 09-02-22
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Elusive
- How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass
- By: Frank Close
- Narrated by: Richard Burnip
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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On July 4, 2012, the announcement came that one of the longest-running mysteries in physics had been solved: the Higgs boson, the missing piece in understanding why particles have mass, had finally been discovered. On the rostrum, surrounded by jostling physicists and media, was the particle’s retiring namesake—the only person in history to have an existing single particle named for them. Why Peter Higgs? Drawing on years of conversations with Higgs and others, Close illuminates how an unprolific man became one of the world’s most famous scientists.
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A gripping beautifully written biography
- By Henry Gradstein on 07-12-22
By: Frank Close
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The Primacy of Doubt
- From Quantum Physics to Climate Change, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World
- By: Tim Palmer
- Narrated by: Tim Palmer
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Why does your weather app say “there’s a 10 percent chance of rain” instead of “it will be sunny”? In large part, this is due to the insight of award-winning physicist Tim Palmer, who pioneered the introduction of uncertainty into weather and climate prediction. Now, he wants to apply it to how we study everything else.
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Regarding God
- By @DrCarlHoffman on 02-03-23
By: Tim Palmer
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Significant Figures
- The Lives and Work of Great Mathematicians
- By: Ian Stewart
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In Significant Figures, acclaimed mathematician Ian Stewart introduces the visionaries of mathematics throughout history. Delving into the lives of twenty-five great mathematicians, Stewart examines the roles they played in creating, inventing, and discovering the mathematics we use today. Through these short biographies, we get acquainted with the history of mathematics.
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Beware
- By Anton Kurtz on 12-08-18
By: Ian Stewart