One two three ... infinity G. Gamow

One Two Three... Infinity, subtitled Facts and Speculations of Science, was originally written by George Gamow in 1947 and then revised somewhat in 1961. It"s an amazing tour of some of the more interesting bits of physics, with a bit of mathematics and biology thrown in, covering in some depth more separate topics in under 350 pages of any non-fiction book I can recall. I"m not sure how old I was when I first read this book, but I doubt I was more than eight and I know for certain that I was younger than twelve. I read and re-read it many times up through college and even gave copies of it to friends. It"s been republished in various editions and appears to still be in print from Dover (the second copy that I own), but for the sake of this review, I re-read my original Bantam paperback. It"s ragged, the cover is a bit torn, and it"s full of underlining where I marked particularly interesting sections. Seeing what I decided to underline twenty years ago is part of the nostalgia.Even though it"s been more than a decade since I last read this book, I still know it almost by heart. It opens with a discussion of mathematics, specifically very large numbers, with two examples of the power of exponential growth that I still remember vividly. The first is about a vizier who (in legend) invented the game of chess. When told by a king that he could have any reward he wished, he asked for one grain of wheat for the first square of a chessboard, two for the second, four for the third, and so forth. The king happily agreed, only to discover that the total amount of wheat would be more than the entire world"s wheat production for two thousand years. The second is a legend of a temple containing a game of Towers of Hanoi with 64 disks which, when complete, will mean the end of the world. At a move per second, this would take significantly longer than the estimated age of the universe. Воспроизведено в оригинальной авторской орфографии издания 1962 года (издательство "The Viking Press"). Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге One two three ... infinity (G. Gamow)