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Zusammenfassung von The Magic of Reality

Name: The Magic of Reality
Rating: 4.4 (135 reviews)
Author: Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

How We Know What’s Really True

4.4 (135 Bewertungen)

26 Min.

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Das Weltall Naturwissenschaft

Inhaltsübersicht

The Magic of Reality
in 11 Kernaussagen verstehen

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Kernaussage 1 von 11

What’s in it for me? Discover the beauty in a scientific worldview.

In the ancient world, workings of the universe were explained in terms of gods, deities and other supernatural elements. We have come along way since then. However, it’s still easy to cook up magical explanations for things we struggle to comprehend. But what if there was another sort of magic – the magic of the concrete and well-reasoned?

We’re now familiar with many of the processes that govern the universe; its inception as well as the origin of species are common scientific knowledge. But much of this knowledge remains obscure to us laypeople. All those science lessons from school remain in some neglected corner of our brains, collecting dust and cobwebs.

In these blinks, we’ll go back to science class and rediscover what we once knew, as well as learn new things about the world we live in. Read on and discover the magic of reality.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how a 43-mile-high pile of photos can show us our ancestors;
why one extra oxygen atom makes the air poisonous; and
how the sun provides the energy for our water-powered plants.

To ascertain the reality of something, we have to experience it directly or indirectly with our five senses.

There are countless stories about the origin of life and the universe. According to a Bantu tribe in Congo, for example, the universe was created by Bumba.

First, there was only watery darkness and Bumba. One day Bumba got sick and vomited up the sun, whose light dispelled the darkness and dried the land. Bumba vomited again, creating the moon, stars, animals and people.

Science certainly tells a different story of our origins. But how can we be sure which is true? How can we know what is real?

We know something is real if we can experience it directly with our senses. When you taste ice cream, for instance, you know it’s real. When you touch a piece of wood, you know it’s real.

If our senses aren’t fine-tuned enough to experience a particular something, we can enhance them with scientific instruments, such as telescopes and microscopes, which help us see distant galaxies and miniscule bacteria.

When these instruments don’t suffice, we can turn to special machines that detect what our senses cannot. For example, while we could never see X-rays with the naked eye, we nonetheless can confirm their existence with the help of special machines.

By using these machines, we develop an understanding of how X-rays work, and can, in turn, use them to enhance our image of reality. For instance, X-rays allow us to look inside the human body and examine our bone structures.

But what if we want to learn about the past? We can’t sense the past, nor can we examine it directly with complex instruments. But we can use indirect evidence.

Take fossils, for example. Fossils form when mineral-rich water seeps into a corpse buried in mud and rock. There, the minerals crystallize, replacing the atoms of the corpse one by one and leaving behind an imprint of the animal in the stone.

We’ll never be able to see dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers, but we can see their fossils!

Scientific models help us understand things even when there is no way of observing them directly or indirectly.

You’ve surely heard of Einstein’s theory of relativity. But how on earth did he come up with something so complex prior to the invention of calculators?

In order to better understand things that are beyond our immediate understanding, scientists make up models that describe how they think these things might work. These models can be based on a hunch or a guess, or they may be the result of years of careful consideration.

Evolution shows us that a species can evolve into a new species slowly and gradually.

We all know the story of the princess who kissed the frog, magically turning it into a handsome prince. Though this is just a fairytale, there is a process in nature that is equally enchanting and transformative: evolution. But how precisely does evolution work?

Well, members of a species aren’t uniform. Each individual has variations, some of which are beneficial for survival.

DNA and radioactive clocks help us determine when species lived and how they’re related to each other.

At some point, you’ve probably seen a tree of life, which depicts the relationship of all living things on its leaves and branches. But how do we know which leaves connect to which branches, let alone where they all connect on the trunk?

One way is by looking into the fossil records buried beneath the earth in various layers of rock sediment.

Atoms, the building blocks of the universe, can be combined in different ways to form complicated substances.

When you stub your toe on a piece of furniture, there’s no doubt in your mind as to the solidity of that object. Strangely, however, even the things we think of as totally solid are mostly just empty space – at the atomic level, at least.

Atoms are among the smallest objects in the universe. A substance that consists of only one kind of atom is called an element.

Elements are created from the high temperature and pressure found inside stars.

So, we know that everything is made of atoms. But where did the rich diversity of atoms originate? The answer is in the stars.

All planetary bodies, including stars, exert a gravitational pull on each other. This is what causes Earth to orbit the sun and the moon to orbit Earth.

The sun provides the energy for all life on Earth.

Have you ever stayed up all night and watched the sunrise the next morning? Remember how, as the sun warmed you up, the world seemed to come alive around you? Indeed, the sun’s rays are critical for life on Earth.

Plants use the sunlight to produce energy in the form of sugar. This process, called photosynthesis, also requires water, minerals and carbon dioxide; but the sun's energy acts as the fuel that makes this transformation possible.

Light is energy transported from the stars and it consists of much more than we can see.

Few things in nature are more beautiful than the scattered light that forms rainbows. But what other things are hidden in the sun’s white light?

Let’s start by looking at the structure of light. Light, like sound, can be thought of as vibrations, but in this case electromagnetic vibrations of different wavelengths that traverse space.

Looking at the spectrum of light emitted by the galaxies, we can calculate when the universe began.

We’re all familiar with the sound that cars make when they zoom past, the sound starting at a higher pitch as they approach and then getting lower as they get further away. But did you know that this bizarre phenomenon – known as the Doppler effect – can help us understand when the universe began?

We can look at the light a star emits to determine what it is composed of and how far away it is. Scientists do this with a spectroscope, a machine through which the light of a star is seen as a spectrum of colors.

We enjoy hearing stories of unlikely events and we tend to retell and embellish them.

If you’ve ever heard someone tell a story a number of times, chances are you noticed that it became more and more fantastic with each telling. So, they exaggerated. But that’s okay; it’s only human.

Most of us love retelling stories of strange coincidences, and it’s only logical, considering the vast number of people on the planet, that sometimes crazy and unlikely events will befall some of us.

Phenomena have scientific explanations, and we limit our ability to understand them if we call them supernatural.

Some things, what we call “miracles” or “supernatural events,” seem inexplicable. But are they truly? Considering alternative explanations of miracles, and comparing the likelihood of these competing explanations, is a good way to go about discerning how and why seemingly mystifying things happen.

David Hume, the famous Scottish philosopher, put forward a clever heuristic for thinking about miracles: an unlikely event should only be considered a “miracle” if all other possible explanations of the event are even less likely, and therefore even greater miracles.

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Worum geht es in The Magic of Reality?

The Magic of Reality (2011) offers an introduction to scientific thinking by going through the ways scientists have explained natural phenomena once thought to be supernatural. Whether shedding light on the building blocks of the universe or explaining the origins of life, scientific reasoning has an answer.

Bestes Zitat aus The Magic of Reality

All humans, animals and plants are cousins.

—Richard Dawkins

Wer The Magic of Reality lesen sollte

Those curious about what the world is made of
People who like to look at stars
Skeptics wondering how we can be sure of what we know

Über den Autor

Richard Dawkins is an ethologist, evolutionary biologist and a fellow of the Royal Society. He is the author of several books, most famously The Selfish Gene, which popularized the gene-centric view of evolution.

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