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| Preface | |
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| Before the Beginning | |
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| Sameliness | |
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| Journey Towards Ultimate Reality | |
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| Mission to Mars | |
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| Measure for measure - parochial standards | |
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| Maintaining universal standards | |
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| A brilliant idea! | |
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| Max Planck's natural units | |
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| Planck gets real | |
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| About time | |
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| Superhuman Standards | |
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| Einstein on constants | |
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| The deeper significance of Stoney-Planck units: the new Mappa Mundi | |
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| Otherworldliness | |
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| The super-Copernican Principle | |
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| Further, Deeper, Fewer: The Quest for a Theory of Everything | |
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| Numbers you can count on | |
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| Cosmic Cubism | |
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| New constants involve new labour | |
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| Numerology | |
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| Eddington's Unfinished Symphony | |
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| Counting to 15,747,724,136,275,002,577,605,653,961,181,555,468,044,717,914, 527,116,709,366,231,425,076,185,631,031,296 | |
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| Fundamentalism | |
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| Theatrical physics | |
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| The Mystery of the Very Large Numbers | |
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| Spooky numbers | |
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| A bold hypothesis | |
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| Of things to come at large | |
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| Big and old, dark and cold | |
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| The biggest number of all | |
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| Biology and the Stars | |
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| Is the universe old? | |
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| The chance of a lifetime | |
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| Other types of life | |
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| Prepare to meet thy doom | |
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| From coincidence to consequence | |
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| Life in an Edwardian universe | |
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| The Anthropic Principle | |
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| Anthropic arguments | |
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| A delicate balance | |
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| Brandon Carter's principles | |
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| A close-run thing? | |
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| Some other anthropic principles | |
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| Altering Constants and Rewriting History | |
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| Rigid worlds versus flexi worlds | |
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| Inflationary universes | |
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| Virtual history - a little digression | |
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| New Dimensions | |
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| Living in a hundred dimensions | |
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| Walking with planisaurs | |
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| Polygons and polygamy | |
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| Why is life so easy for physicists? | |
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| The sad case of Paul Ehrenfest | |
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| The special case of Gerald Whitrow | |
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| The strange case of Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein | |
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| Varying constants on the brane | |
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| Variations on a Constant Theme | |
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| A prehistoric nuclear reactor | |
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| Alexander Shlyakhter's insight | |
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| The Clock of Ages | |
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| Underground speculations | |
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| Reach for the Sky | |
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| Plenty of time | |
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| Inconstancy among the constants? | |
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| What do we make of that? | |
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| Our place in history | |
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| Other Worlds and Big Questions | |
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| Multiverses | |
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| The Great Universal Catalogue | |
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| Worlds without end | |
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| Journey's end | |
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| Notes | |
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| Index | |