The Universe In A Nutshell Epub Download Mac
Emmanuelle Riker
The universe is big. Mindbogglingly big. Our minds have trouble conceiving of the vastness of the universe, on either scales of time and space, or their unified presentation as spacetime. And the moment we think we might possibly be able to get used to this idea, it becomes apparent that the very foundations of our universe are small. So small, so tiny, that the energy required to probe these depths is nearly as impressively vast as the scale of the universe they conspire to create. This is The Quantum Universe that Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw want to explore with us.
Having fled into the desert, Paul is exposed to high concentrations of spice and has visions through which he realizes he has significant powers (as a result of the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme). He foresees potential futures in which he lives among the planet's native Fremen before leading them on a Holy Jihad across the known universe.
Two years pass and Paul's powerful prescience manifests, which confirms for the Fremen that he is their prophesied messiah, a legend planted by the Bene Gesserit's Missionaria Protectiva. Paul embraces his father's belief that the Fremen could be a powerful fighting force to take back Arrakis, but also sees that if he does not control them, their jihad could consume the entire universe. Word of the new Fremen leader reaches both Baron Harkonnen and the Emperor as spice production falls due to their increasingly destructive raids. The Baron encourages his brutish nephew Glossu Rabban to rule with an iron fist, hoping the contrast with his shrewder nephew Feyd-Rautha will make the latter popular among the people of Arrakis when he eventually replaces Rabban. The Emperor, suspecting the Baron of trying to create troops more powerful than the Sardaukar to seize power, sends spies to monitor activity on Arrakis. Hawat uses the opportunity to sow seeds of doubt in the Baron about the Emperor's true plans, putting further strain on their alliance.
The Dune series is a landmark of science fiction. Herbert deliberately suppressed technology in his Dune universe so he could address the politics of humanity, rather than the future of humanity's technology. For example, a key pre-history event to the novel's present is the "Butlerian Jihad", in which all robots and computers were destroyed, eliminating these common elements to science fiction from the novel as to allow focus on humanity.[13] Dune considers the way humans and their institutions might change over time.[1] Director John Harrison, who adapted Dune for Syfy's 2000 miniseries, called the novel a universal and timeless reflection of "the human condition and its moral dilemmas", and said:
A lot of people refer to Dune as science fiction. I never do. I consider it an epic adventure in the classic storytelling tradition, a story of myth and legend not unlike the Morte d'Arthur or any messiah story. It just happens to be set in the future ... The story is actually more relevant today than when Herbert wrote it. In the 1960s, there were just these two colossal superpowers duking it out. Today we're living in a more feudal, corporatized world more akin to Herbert's universe of separate families, power centers and business interests, all interrelated and kept together by the one commodity necessary to all.[16]
Each chapter of Dune begins with an epigraph excerpted from the fictional writings of the character Princess Irulan. In forms such as diary entries, historical commentary, biography, quotations and philosophy, these writings set tone and provide exposition, context and other details intended to enhance understanding of Herbert's complex fictional universe and themes.[22][23][24] They act as foreshadowing and invite the reader to keep reading to close the gap between what the epigraph says and what is happening in the main narrative.[25] The epigraphs also give the reader the feeling that the world they are reading about is epically distanced, since Irulan writes about an idealized image of Paul as if he had already passed into memory.[26] Brian Herbert wrote: "Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel's layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again."[27]
What especially pleases me is to see the interwoven themes, the fugue like relationships of images that exactly replay the way Dune took shape. As in an Escher lithograph, I involved myself with recurrent themes that turn into paradox. The central paradox concerns the human vision of time. What about Paul's gift of prescience - the Presbyterian fixation? For the Delphic Oracle to perform, it must tangle itself in a web of predestination. Yet predestination negates surprises and, in fact, sets up a mathematically enclosed universe whose limits are always inconsistent, always encountering the unprovable. It's like a koan, a Zen mind breaker. It's like the Cretan Epimenides saying, "All Cretans are liars."[59]
Brian Herbert called the Dune universe "a spiritual melting pot", noting that his father incorporated elements of a variety of religions, including Buddhism, Sufi mysticism and other Islamic belief systems, Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, and Hinduism.[71] He added that Frank Herbert's fictional future in which "religious beliefs have combined into interesting forms" represents the author's solution to eliminating arguments between religions, each of which claimed to have "the one and only revelation."[71][72]
With a masterful blend of engaging prose, vivid illustrations, and thought experiments, Hawking immerses readers in a world of black holes, quantum mechanics, and the fundamental building blocks of the universe. He discusses topics such as the nature of time, the birth and death of stars, the fabric of space-time, and the elusive quest for a unified theory of everything.
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