Impossibility - The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits (Paperback, Reissue)

What can we never do? The end of each century leads to a stocktaking of human achievement and our expectations about the future. This new book by John D. Barrow looks at what limits there might be to human discovery, and what we might find, ultimately, to be unknowable, undoable, or unthinkable. Science is a big success story, but where will it end? And indeed, will it end? Weaving together a tapestry of surprises, Barrow explores the frontiers of knowledge. We find that the notion of 'impossibilty' has played a striking role in our thinking. Surrealism, impossible figures, time travel, paradoxes of logic and perspective, theological speculations about Beings for whom nothing is impossible - all stimulate us to contemplate something morethan what is. This is no ordinary look at the limits of science. Usingsimple explanations, it shows the reader that impossibility is a deep and powerful notion; that any Universe complex enough to contain conscious beings will contain limits on what those beings can know about their Universe; that what we cannot know defines reality as surely as what we can know.