Review by New York Times Review
THE PHYSICAL WORLD is "largely illusory," an editorial in The New York Times announced on Nov. 25,1944. Wishful thinking on a depressing day? No. Had The Times gone mad? Not quite. It was endorsing the ideas of Sir Arthur Eddington, an eminent British astronomer and popularizer of science, who had just died. Eddington began his best-known book, "The Nature of the Physical World," by explaining that he had written it at two tables, sitting on two chairs and with two pens. The first table was the familiar kind: It was colored, substantial and relatively long-lasting. The second was what he called a "scientific table," a colorless cloud of evanescent electric charges that is "mostly emptiness." Likewise the two chairs and two pens. Only the scientific objects were really there, according to Eddington. Hence the idea that our familiar world is a deception on a grand scale. Coming to terms with science is not getting any easier. Today's popularizers face two challenges, both of which are admirably met by Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, in his new book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." First, there is more to explain than ever before, as the sciences extend their embrace to a widening range of phenomena. Fortunately, Carroll is something of a polymath. His accounts of the latest thinking about microbiology or information theory are as adroit as his exploration of the links between entropy and time or his elucidation of Bayesian statistics. The second challenge for today's explainers is that the theories are getting weirder. Einstein used to worry that, according to quantum mechanics, God seems to be playing dice with the universe. Now it appears that he has put a stage magician in charge of the casino. Stuff can be conjured out of nowhere, the latest cosmologies seem to say, and the particle that you thought was in your pocket may, in effect, also be behind someone else's ear. Carroll does not claim to clear up all the mysteries of quantum mechanics. That would be impossible. There is no doubt that the theory is broadly correct, because of the accuracy of its predictions; but there is too much disagreement about what it really means. Still, his exposition of quantum theory is vivid, and all the more impressive for managing to eschew mathematics. In place of Eddington's two tables, only one of which is real, Carroll sees a myriad of them, each legitimate in its own way. This is because phenomena may usefully be investigated at many levels. You can consider the individual atoms in a box of gas, for example, or you can instead treat the gas as a liquid and study its fluid properties. Similarly, the actions of a person may be described psychologically, in terms of his or her desires and beliefs, or in terms of physiology. Underlying all these scientific stories, there is, he insists, a rock-bottom level of description: "a quantum wave function, or a collection of particles and forces - whatever the fundamental stuff turns out to be." But Carroll rejects the sort of reductionism that says all valid descriptions can be deduced from fundamental physics. That venerable idea seems to have been a mirage. Instead, Carroll defends what he calls "poetic naturalism." "Naturalism," because there is nothing above and beyond nature. In particular, there are no gods or spooks to transcend or interfere with natural laws. So Einstein's dice are rolling themselves. "Poetic," because "there is more than one way of talking about the world." True enough, but "poetic" is a bit of a stretch. Carroll might just as well have called his position "romantic reductionism" or "fragrant physicalism," since what he's trying to convey is a stance that is hard-nosed yet soft to the touch - a kinder, gentler, more capacious science. Carroll's gentler science includes a fair bit of philosophy. His knowledge of the subject not only deepens his book's account of contemporary theories but is a boon to its historical parts. He knows better than to try to slice thinkers from the distant past into two neat piles labeled "scientist" and "philosopher." For example, rather than making the downfall of Aristotelian physics all about Galileo as usual, Carroll is careful to give some credit to John Philoponus, a theologian and grammarian of sixth-century Alexandria, and to Jean Buridan, a 14th-century rector of the University of Paris. Another welcome walk-on part goes to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, a sometime abbess who corresponded with Descartes and gave him an impressively hard time over his ideas about the mind-body problem. The last quarter of "The Big Picture" deals mostly with questions about consciousness, free will and the nature of morality. If, as Carroll has explained in the rest of his book, "the vast majority of life is gravity and electromagnetism pushing around electrons and nuclei," then how do minds fit into the picture? And what is one supposed to say about ethics? One famous thought experiment discussed by Carroll, which was invented by Frank Jackson, an Australian philosopher, concerns Mary, a scientist who studies color. Bizarrely, we are to imagine that Mary leads a wholly monochrome life, even though she is not colorblind. Her body is painted white, and she has never left her windowless house, the contents of which are all either black, white or gray. She has never directly experienced the colors of the rainbow, and yet she is an authority on optics and the physiology of color perception. Now suppose she goes outside and sees flowers for the first time. Does she thereby learn something about the world that science could never have taught her? In one sense, yes: She acquires new kinds of abilities and memories that you cannot get from books. But, Carroll argues, it does not follow that "there is more to the universe than its physical aspects." IN HIS CLOSING chapters, Carroll tackles what he calls the hardest problem of all: how to find meaning in a cosmos that is "without transcendent purpose." His answers come packaged in a format suitable for airport bookstalls: "Ten Considerations," instead of Ten Commandments, to live by. They include "What matters is what matters to people," "It takes all kinds" and "The universe is in our hands." Such pieces of advice sound reasonable enough. But if these Ten Nostrums of Highly Secular Eggheads are the answers, can the meaning of life really have been the hardest question? Carroll's Ten Considerations are rather easier to grasp than quantum entanglement, the arrow of time or regulatory RNA molecules. He notes that the way in which people's lives matter "isn't a scientific question." Indeed. But maybe it isn't an intellectual question at all. Like the colors of the rainbow, perhaps meaning in life is not something to be learned from books, even ones as splendidly informative as this. One of the main challenges for todays popularizers: Scientific theories are getting weirder. ANTHONY GOTTLIEB'S new book, "The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy," will be published in August.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 12, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Theoretical physicist Carroll (The Particle at the End of the Universe, 2012) thinks we need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life's meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe. This book is his attempt to do so, and it's a successful one that's true to the grand scope of its title. Divided into five sections of increasingly narrow focus, the book starts way out to explore the philosophy of science and ways of talking about our understanding of reality, which Carroll calls poetic naturalism. From there, he investigates Bayes' theorem of statistics, entropy, vacuum energy, and much more before landing back on Earth to ponder morality, ethics, and the improbability of theism. Though often highly technical, Carroll aims his writing at a general audience, barraging readers with analogies and thought experiments galore and sprinkling in weightier topics via familiar references, such as how human consciousness is explained by the movie Inside Out. Readers unaccustomed to science jargon might struggle with dissections of quantum mechanics, up quarks, and gluons, but anyone who enjoys asking big questions will find a lot to consider.--Comello, Chad Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Carroll (The Particle at the End of the Universe), a theoretical physicist at Caltech, marshals an impressive array of scientific information to convince readers that the universe and everything in it can be explained by science. He posits "poetic naturalism" as a philosophy, which for him serves as a way to figure out "the best way to talk about the world." He distinguishes his poetic form from other variants of naturalism by affirming that there is an underlying physical reality that exists independently of the human mind, and that there are "many useful ways of talking about it." His determination to counter supernatural ontologies drives the book, and Carroll acknowledges that his philosophy may seem like "an appealing idea" to some and "an absurd bunch of hooey" to others. Carroll can be repetitive, and some of his the anecdotes, such as the connection between Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, are interesting but tangential. Much of the material here will be new to many readers, but regardless of familiarity, Carroll presents a means through which people can better understand themselves, their universe, and their conceptions of a meaningful life: "It's up to us to make wise choices and shape the world to be a better place." Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman Inc. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"From the perspective of a vast, seemingly indifferent cosmos," do our lives really matter? As might be expected, Carroll's (Theoretical Physics/Caltech; The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, 2012, etc.) answer is affirmative but not simple. "We are not the reason for the existence of the universe," he writes, "but our ability for self-awareness and reflection make us special within it." Furthermore, "understanding how the world works, and what constraints that puts on who we are, is an important part of understanding how we fit into the big picture." In this fascinating book, Carroll explores "how and why, in the context of mindless evolution from the Big Bang to the present, the laws of physics brought about complex, adaptive, intelligent, responsive, evolving, caring creatures like you and me." To effectively navigate these complicated matters, he turns to an area of his own research regarding how the emergence of increasing complexity in the evolving universe relates to increasing entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Although intuitively, we associate entropy with disorganization and increased randomness, it plays a crucial role in the development of complex structures. For example, it is randomness and apparent disorganizationthe role of chance variation and mutationsthat are central to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. At each successive level of complexityfrom stars and planets to life and conscious beingsdifferent levels of descriptive language are necessary. This introduces a poetic aspect into the language used by scientists in their attempts to understand our place in the universe. The author affirms his conviction that "nothing weknow about consciousness should lead us to doubt the ordinary, naturalistic conception of the world," including the provisional nature of scientific theory. Carroll is the perfect guide on this wondrous journey of discovery. A brilliantly lucid exposition of profound philosophical and scientific issues in a language accessible to lay readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
