Contents -- Chapter 1: The art of the impossible -- The power of negative thinking -- Of faces and games -- Those for whom all things are possible -- Paradox -- Visual paradox -- Linguistic paradox -- Limits to certainty -- A cosmic speed limit -- Summary -- Chapter 2: The hope of progress -- Over the rainbow -- The voyage to Polynesia via Telegraph Avenue -- Progress and prejudice -- The big idea of unlimited knowledge -- Negativism -- Some nineteenth-century ideas of the impossible -- Summary -- Chapter 3: Back to the future -- What do we mean by the limits of science? -- Possible futures -- Higgledy-piggledyology -- Selective and absolute limits -- Will we be builders or surgeons? -- The futures market -- How many discoveries are there still to be made? -- Summary -- Chapter 4: Being human -- What are minds for? -- Counting on words -- Modern art and the death of a culture -- Complexity matching: climbing Mount Improbable -- Intractability -- The frontier spirit -- The end of diversity -- Does science always bring about its own demise? -- Death and the death of science -- The psychology of limits -- Summary -- Chapter 5: Technological limits -- Is the Universe economically viable? -- Why we are where we are -- Some consequences of size -- The forces of Nature -- Manipulating the Universe -- Criticality: the riddle of the sands -- Demons: counting the cost -- Two types of future -- Is technological progress inevitable (or always desirable)?-a fable -- Summary -- Chapter 6: Cosmological limits -- The last horizon -- Inflation-still crazy after all these years -- Chaotic inflation -- Is the Universe open or closed? -- Eternal inflation -- The natural selection of universes -- Topology -- Did the Universe have a beginning? -- Naked singularities: the final frontier -- Dimensions -- Symmetry-breaking -- Summary -- Chapter 7: Deep limits.

Patterns in reality -- Paradoxes -- Consistency -- Time travel: is the Universe safe for historians? -- Completeness -- Impossible constructions -- Metaphorical impossibilities -- Summary -- Chapter 8: Impossibility and us -- Gödel's theorem and physics -- Does Gödel stymie physics? -- Gödel, logic, and the human mind -- The problem of free will -- The reaction game -- Mathematics that comes alive -- A stranger sort of impossibility -- The Arrow Impossibility Theorem -- Summary -- Chapter 9: Impossibility: taking stock -- Telling what is from what isn't -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.