El. knyga: Looking at the Universe through the Eyes of Physics, Cosmology and Philosophy

'Angelo Tartaglia, in this volume, writes an essay on general relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as their applications in cosmology, which combines intuition with rigor, which appeals to logic and math-ematics, and which presents the many achievements alongside the many open problems. It is work that was prepared with all possible readers in mind, i.e., not aimed at initiates, scientists or professionals. At each step, Tartaglia reasons primarily to convince himself, and in this journey he is accompanied by the reader, who can no longer limit himself to the feeling of having understood, but must make the same effort as the editor, accepting for example the fact that some concepts of physics cannot be fully captured without the support of at least a minimal mathematical language. The result is a portrait of great depth of the hitherto unsound dichoto-mies of fundamental physics, starting from the most fundamental one of all, the incommunicability between the discrete world of quantum and the continuous world of Einsteinian space-time. Some of the most intriguing aspects of modern cosmology are there-fore explored: from the cosmological constant to the era of inflation; from the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum to the hypothesis (di-rectly investigated by the author in recent years) of an elastic space-time; from the varied hypotheses on the existence of multiverses to string and membrane theories; and from the wave function of the Uni-verse to its Lagrangian and to quintessence. It is not a first-class trip taken in the company of Tartaglia, but a trek on the most rugged paths of modern physics.'Andrea PossentiFormer Director of the Cagliari Astronomical Observatory, Italy