Summary: Why everything we think about fundamental physical laws
needs to change, and why the greatest mysteries of physics are
not at the ends of the universe but as close as the nearest ice
cube or grain of salt. Not since Richard Feynman has a Nobel
Prize-winning physicist written with as much panache as Robert
Laughlin does in this revelatory and essential book. Laughlin
proposes nothing less than a new way of understanding
fundamental laws of science. In this age ...show moreof
superstring theories and Big-Bang cosmology, we're used to
thinking of the unknown as being impossibly distant from our
everyday lives. The edges of science, we're told, lie in the
first nanofraction of a second of the Universe's existence, or
else in realms so small that they can't be glimpsed even by the
most sophisticated experimental techniques. But we haven't
reached the end of science, Laughlin argues-only the end of
reductionist thinking. If we consider the world of emergent
properties instead, suddenly the deepest mysterie