I’m back enjoying the Cambridge life for a fortnight, and already have some cricket lined up. Some comments from a previous post got me thinking …
Cosmic Variance recently polled its readers on what got them interested in science. The most common answer was popular science books, and this was certainly true for me. I discovered the nerdy pleasures of a good book on physics as I finished high school, and still enjoy such books today. Below is a list of some of my favourite cosmology and physics books for the interested layperson, organised alphabetically by author. I obviously don’t agree with everything written in these books, but they all presented the science accurately (to the best of my knowledge) and were thoroughly entertaining.
John Barrow: I’ve read and greatly enjoyed many of Barrow’s writings – New Theories of Everything, Between Inner and Outer Space, Impossibility, Pi in the Sky, The Book of Nothing, The Infinite Book, The Anthropic Principle. He combines mathematics and science seamlessly, loves a good historical anecdote or illustration, and isn’t afraid to wander into regions metaphysical. I think that my personal favourite was “Pi in the Sky”, which was my first introduction to the mind-blowing legacy of Kurt Godel. “New theories of everything” is a great introduction to modern physics and cosmology.
Paul Davies: As with Barrow, I haven’t met a Davies book I haven’t enjoyed – God and the New Physics, The Matter Myth, The Mind of God, The Last Three Minutes, The Goldilocks Enigma. A Davies book will always be wide ranging, from pure mathematics to cosmology to physics to biology. His forays into philosophy are thoughtful, even if I don’t always agree. I’d start with “The Goldilocks enigma” – it’s nominally about the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life but gives a very good introduction to modern cosmology and physics along the way.
Timothy Ferris: I read “The Whole Shebang” some time ago, and remember enjoying it immensely. It ranges over almost all of modern cosmology, though a lot has happened in the field since 1998!
Brian Greene: An excellent writer. I read “The Elegant Universe” and “The Fabric of the Cosmos” and greatly enjoyed both of them. It is no small achievement to write an enjoyable book on string theory for the masses, and I particularly enjoyed Greene’s discussion of entropy and time asymmetry in Fabric.
John Gribbin: slightly more writer than scientist than everyone else on my list, but still worth a read. I’ve read “In search of Schrodinger’s Cat”, “Schrödinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality” and I think one more but I can’t remember. Gribbin does a very good job of presenting quantum weirdness, and is very careful in outlining his reasons for believing Everett’s many world’s interpretation.
Edward Harrison: “Cosmology: the Science of the Universe” is fantastic. I read it in my first year of studying physics at university, and have been hooked on cosmology ever since. Covers everything, from the historical roots of cosmology to inflation, and is especially strong in his discussion of Olber’s paradox.
Stephen Hawking: “A Brief History of Time” is justifiably one of the best known popular science books. A must-read. (I haven’t read “The Grand Design”, though it seems that, as in his previous books, Hawking is at his best when he isn’t trying to do philosophy).
Roger Penrose: I finished “The Road to Reality” a few months ago, and read “The Emperor’s New Mind” a few years back. Emperor’s is wonderfully wide ranging, and carefully argued. I have no idea who Road to Reality was aimed at – I had met most of the maths before, and so the main attraction was Penrose’s geometric (rather than algebraic) way of thinking about topics such as differential geometry. His perspective on string theory, as a relativist, is also very interesting – I might do a post about this at some stage. It’s all very lucid and comprehensive, but I’m not sure how much complex analysis the average layperson is going to learn from a chapter of a popular science book.
Martin Rees: “Just Six Numbers” is an excellent read, discussing modern cosmology and physics and how our universe depends on the constants of nature. Rees is both authoritative and accessible. “Our Final Century” is also quite interesting.
Simon Singh: “Fermat’s Last Theorem” was one of the first popular science books I read, and I was pleasantly shocked at how fascinating the history of mathematics could is. I won’t spoil the ending by saying: they’re all nuts. I’ve heard very good things about “Big Bang” as well, so that’s probably worth a read.
Steven Weinberg: “Dreams of a Final Theory” is outstanding. I really should get around to reading his classic “The First Three Minutes.”
John Wheeler: I read my first Wheeler book (“At Home in the Universe”) very recently and loved it. He has a very easy, engaging style that lets his enthusiasm for the topic shine through. You can tell that he loved thinking about these things. I can’t resist a quote: “The bounds of time [black holes, big bang, big crunch] tell us that physics comes to an end. Yet physics has always meant that which goes on its eternal way despite all the surface changes in the appearance of things … How can one possibly believe that the laws of physics were chiseled on a rock for all eternity if the universe itself does not endure from everlasting to everlasting?” Impressively, he is just as engaging in his academic works, especially the phonebook.
Alex Vilenkin: “Many Worlds in One” is an excellent introduction to modern cosmology, and in particular theories of the early universe. One of its strengths is that it prefers direct explanations over analogies, which can be misleading or obscure when trying to capture such unusual scenarios as Vilenkin studies.
There are a few more authors who I should recommend, even though I haven’t read their books. I’ve read a lot of Sean Carroll’s writing at Cosmic Variance, so I’d expect “From Eternity to Here” to be an excellent read. I’ve also read a few articles by the philosopher of science Huw Price that were astonishingly lucid on the infamously confused topic of the arrow of time, so “Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point” should be similarly excellent. I’m sure there are others I’ve missed – comment away!
Two words of warning. Be wary of the difference between observational and theoretical cosmology. Theorists like Vilenkin, Greene and Hawking can get carried away in presenting their theories, giving the impression that they are as firmly a part of modern cosmology as, say, the expansion of the universe. But observational evidence only goes so far. As a general rule, any theory that predicts what the universe was like before nucleosynthesis (when the universe is about 1 second old) should be classed as speculative and treated as such. Martin Rees makes this point eloquently in his book “New perspectives in astrophysical cosmology”, as does George Ellis in response to Brian Greene’s latest book on the multiverse (the review is here … sorry about the paywall).
Secondly, be very wary of non-cosmologists that discuss cosmology. This principle applies more broadly: be wary of astronomers discussing biology. We’re all amateurs outside our (usually rather narrow) field of expertise. Cosmology, being such a colossal extrapolation beyond the world of common-sense experience, is particularly susceptible to the syllogism: modern cosmology is weird, my idea is weird, thus my idea is part of modern cosmology. Here is an example, from a scientist who is not a physicist, astronomer or cosmologist:
Now we go back in time beyond the moment of creation, to when there was no time, and to where there was no space … In the beginning there was nothing …. By chance there was a fluctuation, and a set of points, emerging from nothing, … defined a time … From absolute nothing, absolutely without intervention, there came into being rudimentary existence … Yet the line of time collapsed, and the incipient universe evaporated, for time alone is not rich enough for existence. Time and space emerged elsewhere, but they too crumbled back into their own dust, the coalescence of opposites, or simply nothing. Patterns emerged again, and again, and again. Sometimes chance patterned points into a space as well as a time … Then, by chance, there came about our fluctuation. Points came into existence by constituting time but, this time, in this pattern time was accompanied by three dimensions of space … with them comes stability, later elements, and still later elephants.
Words can scarcely express the utter vacuity of this passage. As Stephen Fry once described a well-known novel, it is “complete loose stool water, it is arse gravy of the worse kind”. It is wallowing in nonsense. If one of my cosmology students wrote that passage in an exam, I would probably respond with something along these lines.
I often recommend Simon Singh’s “Big Bang” because I like the way it focuses on the established parts of the story, like you’d learn in an introductory cosmology course, rather than venturing off into speculative areas. I’m a supporter of the notion that the more established areas of science need popularisation more urgently than some of the hypothetical areas of modern physics.
Regarding that quoted awful paragraph, I totally agree with you. Sometimes I’m embarrassed by some of the people “on my side” in science/religion debates. I’m still not quite sure what your side is, but I’m sure you understand that feeling.
Thank you for the book reccomendations. Recently I’ve been interested in the fine tuning of the universe and the anthropic principle so this really helps me find a good book on the topic. From what I’ve seen I think most physicists agree that the universe is fine tuned in several aspects but I’ve come across a few who don’t such as Victor Stenger. I was wondering if he was in the minority on this issue and if he was right or not. He wrote a book called the fallacy of fine tuning which is a big statement to make calling something a fallacy which many physicists believe in such as Martin Reese who is a very famous physicist. So I was just wondering if I’m wasting my time by researching this topic or does it actually hold water. Thanks.
Enjoy: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647
Thanks for the link. I’ll be sure to read it but apparently stenger responded back with this. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1202/1202.4359.pdf But im not really sure what hes getting at because he says that he doesn’t have any significant disagreement with you and that he agrees that if there were a slight change in the parameters our life wouldn’t exist.
I think hes lying though when he said that no one on your list of scientists, whom you said believe in the fine tuning, believes in fine tuning. I can confirm that atleast carter, barrow, and dawkins admit that the universe is fine tuned.
Stay tuned to this blog for my reply to Stenger’s reply.
With regard to other scientists, there is an equivocation here over the word “fine-tuned”. The scientists I listed affirm that in the set of possible physical laws, constants and initial conditions, the set that allow life is probably very small. So they believe that the universe is fine-tuned in that sense, which is the physicist’s definition. They don’t all believe that the universe was fine-tuned in the sense that some deity specially designed the universe so that life would evolve.
^ Yeah thats what I thought. I think he just misunderstood what you said.
What does the scientific community in general think about fine-tuning?
When can we hope to see your response to stenger?
A shortened version of my article is under consideration at a journal. Stenger has been invited to write a response to the peer reviewed version. I’ll see how that pans out before posting my reply to his reply.
Ok cool, I hope it goes well. Also I started reading one of the books you reccommended by Paul Davies, the goldilocks enigma, and as I was reading it I started thinking that the fine-tuning of the universe must either be proof of god or the multiverse but then as I read on he brought up some examples of unintelligent design. One example being that our esophagus is of poor design due to how both food and air travels through it. Now I accept evolution but I think that if a god did exist and if humans were supposed to be the best creation then the end result of human evolution should of been perfectly designed. I was just wondering if this really is a good example of how our human bodies are flawed and what you think of it as well as how it relates to god if he does exist. I’ve started having a more pessimistic view after having read this.
@Luke Barnes: Hi, I really enjoyed your youtube video Life in a fine-tuned universe. I hope to read your critique of Stenger soon. I hope your short version gets accepted. Best of luck.
@Ehsaun Huff Huff: I am a philosopher by trade (PhD), hence my interest in the fine-tuning stuff and its relationship to teleology and the question of purpose in the universe. I accept evolution, but also the existence of God (metaphysics is my specialty, and I am partial to the necessary being argument for God’s existence). To respond to your above post let me say the following. I don’t think it follows that if God is ultimately responsible for human beings that human beings must be perfect or perfectly designed.
First, being a physical being already carries many imperfections with it: we bleed and can bleed to death, we get sick, we age, we die, and so forth. To create physical human beings at all is to have already decided that they will be imperfect. Indeed, most religions stress that the physical world is only our temporary home. Our true home is beyond the physical. If that’s true then it makes sense that a temporary transitory human body need not nor should be perfect in every way possible. Second, although the human body might not be “optimal” from our perspective, you have to admit that the human body is pretty good: Consciousness, intelligence, humor, beautiful women, etc. Third, I think evolution is part of God’s plan. It’s better to make physical lifeforms adaptable and responsive to their changing environments over large spans of time–than to make them “static” and so-called “perfect.” Adaptability comes at a price however. Contingent forces might lead to organs that are only relatively good for a particular environment.
Peace.
Thank you for the very thoughtful reply
In Paul Davies’s book the Goldilocks Enigma he believed that the mind or consciousness played a fundamental role in the universe and used evidence from quantum mechanics(the double slit experiment and the delayed choice experiment) to substansiate his claims. I have heard from many scientists who say that consciousness does play an important role in quantum physics and others that say it doesn’t. I was wondering if you could expand on this topic and explain clearly what role consciousness, if it has one at all, has in quantum physics.
Big question. In short, it goes a bit like this. The standard equations of quantum theory describe things called superpositions. Basically,Schrodinger’s cat can be in a state that is a superposition of “alive cat” and “dead cat”. The cat is neither alive nor dead – it’s something else. The problem, as Schrodinger was trying to point out, is that reality isn’t at all that. we never see superpositions. We only see alive cats, or dead cats.
So at some point, the real world has to do something other than continuously evolve superpositions. The world must decide. When does it decide? It has been suggested that perhaps the decision is as late as it could be – in the consciousness of rational agents. The thing that makes the world decide is nature impinging on a conscious agent.
It’s a weird idea, and just one of the really weird ideas inspired by quantum mechanics. The problem is that the experiments that we need quantum mechanics to explain are really, really weird. To be honest, I’m not really sure what I think! Brian Greene’s “Fabric of the Cosmos” has a good discussion of these experiments, if you want to read more.
Thanks
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