Showing results by narrator "EC Hart" in All Categories

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes declared that without a powerful ruler to keep them in line, human beings would tear each other apart. Life without government, he wrote, would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For nearly four centuries, this bleak vision has served as the philosophical foundation for coercive authority everywhere. Hobbes gave the world a reason to accept the cage—and we have been living in it ever since. Boris Kriger argues that Hobbes was not merely wrong—he had it exactly backwards.

For a hundred years the cosmological constant has been served up as physics' most embarrassing riddle. Empty space, we are told, has no structure at all —no grain, no direction, no preferred place to stand —and yet it presses outward on the universe, stretching the heavens apart with a quiet, relentless force. How can the same nothing be both featureless and full of push? How can emptiness shove? This book answers by refusing the trick question. The word “structureless,” it turns out, smuggles two very different ideas into one.