Customer Reviews

The Artful Universe: The Cosmic Source of Human Creativity

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Barrow, of course, is with Frank Tipler the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which argues that the fundamental constants and initial conditions of the cosmos had to be more or less exactly as they are or life - thus our conscious, self-aware human life - could not have happened.

In The Artful Universe, Barrow explores in great and fascinating detail just exactly how the fine structure of the cosmos bears fruit in the structure of the human body, and in particular the structure of our ideas, preferences, values, aesthetic reactions, ways of thinking; our minds. The primary thrust of this wide-ranging survey is that animal minds and bodies subjected to natural selection are in big trouble if they embody propositions about the world, and therefore about the appropriate way to behave, that are in any important way essentially wrong. He argues that just as the structure of the eye constitutes evidence one way or the other for the correspondence to reality of our ideas about light, so the structure of, e.g., our mathematical faculties constitutes evidence for the mathematical structure of reality.

Barrow is terrifyingly erudite, and a clear, graceful writer. He manages to convey boatloads of highly technical concepts from numerous fields in crystalline arguments accessible to anyone with a basic scientific education. You will learn a ton from this book. You'll work for it - Barrow never condescends - but you will be well rewarded.

John Barrow illuminates in this book the relationship between the sciences and the arts with a new perspective on our emergence in the Universe by means of natural selection.
As the philosopher Victor Zuckerkandl says (quoted in this book): 'Art does not aim at beauty. It uses beauty (or ugliness) to arrive ultimately at knowledge, at truth.' (as science)

Many natural adaptations have given rise to curious by-products, some of which have played a role in determining our aesthetic sense.
Although sometimes very tentative, this rich book sheds an insightful light on more or less hidden links, like
- the connection between the heavenly bodies and the pattern of life on earth (28 days)

- the importance of symmetry: living beings are symmetrical, which is rare for inanimate objects. Also, our evaluation of physical beauty focuses on symmetry.

- size as a key to survival, with the adage 'small is best'. 'The Almighty had an inordinate fondness of beetles.'

- the origin of painting: a natural outgrowth of the fallibility of human memory and the need to communicate. Also, the reason why we like savannah landscapes and not computer paintings because they seem unnatural.

- the Chomsky (innate patterns) / Piaget (blank slate) controversy on the origin of language

- the origin of literature: the craving for social cohesion and well-being met by oral history and stories in which the hearers appear in a leading role. More, 'The pen is mightier than the sword.'

- the origin of dance: a need for frenzied activity or heightened sensibilities in preparation for war, in celebration of fertility or birth or in mourning death. The rhythmic gyrations of primitive dance bind people together.

- the origin of music (the purest form of art): animal mating calls.
John Barrow explains clearly the relationship between music and mathematics as well as theories on mathematics (Platonism, intuitionism, inventionism, formalism) and music (absolutism and referentialism).

This book is an excellent exploration of a vast and very interesting human domain. Not to be missed.

A book which explains how natural laws of the universe shape our size, our myths and legends, our attraction to certain patterns etc. Everything is explained in scientific terms, but illustrated very nicely by examples, so makes a great read.... even for those whose mother language isn' t English!

The first half of the book was interesting and kept my interest enough to read every word and scrutinze every example. However, by midway, the author's points became labored and needlessly exhaustive.

I guess it took me about half the book to find out what his general points were going to be. To me the book made connections between the nature of the universe and all things (particularly humans) in it.

I really wanted to closely scrutinize the chapters on sound (I am a musician and scientist). Unfortunately, by that last third of the book, I was too fatigued by the writing style. I ended up reading a few paragraphs in each section and skimming the rest, knowing (or making a logical guess) about the rest of the material. The author's basic points had already been made.

Furthermore, I felt unsatisfied by the author's overall treatment of art (particularly music). I was hoping for something more "insightful." It seems somehow self evident that particular sights and sounds are "appealing" to us given our physiology, evolution and their relationship to the nature of the universe itself. These arguments seem like tautologies; We like what we like because we are who we are. In the end, this isn't very interesting. On the other hand I could plead guilty to expecting too much.

There is more to art and music than meets the direct senses. When you try to explain what is "more" about music, you lose the meaning. Maybe the lesson is to just play the music and let it speak for itself. If the author was trying to make this point (indirectly) it is now very well taken. It's better to explain the beauty of music with selections of Joco Pastorius...

Finally, I thought the book was in places too human centric. Clearly books are intended to be read by humans. But I thought some of the author's points of view bordered on saying human animals were somehow more "important" than others. The universe doesn't make conscious choices to anoint one animal over another. Those evaluations are (too often, unfortunately,) made by us, not nature. Free will does exist.

Given these points, I do think the book was worth reading and might even be suitable for a seminar. I took about 4 days to read the book, but maybe should have taken more time. Anyway, at best, I think this book is worth 3 stars; Not bad, not great, but worth reading and discussing with others.

This book is an odd mixture of the extremely good and the very bad. Barrow is a good writer and a top-notch scientist; this combination comes through best when he sticks to what he knows best, the hard sciences. His discussion of time, astronomy, and geology are extremely informative, including such matters as why the sky is blue and the sun is yellow, why the most common color of berries is red, why the seashell makes the `ocean' sound when you put your ear up to it (you're hearing the sound of your own blood circulating). But now for the bad. When Barrow tries writing about the humanities, things go downhill fast. As with too many scientists opining about the humanities, they present only the most absurdly caricatured view of scholars in this area, as if they were all Lockians believing in the tabula rasa, and also Derrida disciples believing that all knowledge is socially constructed, and that all humanities professors are willfully ignorant and contemptuous of science. To be sure, there are some who are like this, but Barrow needs to get out more and meet humanities professors, and he will find that most are not like this at all. I imagine a reason for this belief is the unwillingness to acknowledge that many humanities professors are not hostile to science, but rather have listened to what scientists have to say about interpreting literature or art and found it simply not very useful. To the overly-defensive scientist perhaps this comes across as hostility, but it should not. And this book is an unfortunate example of how science, even in the hands of an intelligent and accomplished practitioner, has limited usefulness in its application to the arts. Consider for example his `evolutionary' explanation of the role of heroic stories: `they endow life with meaning, they move back the frontier of the unknown, and promote the sense of self-confidence that comes when sense is made of the world'. This statement is typical; it is so vague as to be vapid, it reminds one of something a very bad teacher would say in a high school English class, and anyway it is hard to see why we would need modern biology to teach us these clichés. Nor is it even clear how these are scientific claims: what sort of data could verify or falsify them? Or consider this gem: he `explains' our love of the New England fall colors as a result of our having evolved on the African grasslands, where there is a strong seasonal variation in rainfall. This makes us `sensitive' to seasonal changes, hence `people flock to New Hampshire for the fall.' OK, wait a minute here. We evolved where there are no deciduous trees, and no pronounced seasonal patterns except a wet versus dry season. And this is supposed to explain why we visit an environment about as different from the savannah as you could imagine? Moreover, on this theory, we should be equally attracted to ANY seasonal change in ANY environment - so why do people choose the New England fall as special? And while wildlife safaris in Africa are extremely popular, I'm pretty sure that most of these tours do not advertise themselves as taking place at the transition between the dry and wet season! In short, this is just the kind of speculative just-so story lacking either evidence or plausibility that has given evolutionary psychology such a bad name.
I don't want to overemphasize the negative however, as there is an awful lot of good stuff in here too, especially when Barrow sticks closer to his field of astronomy and doesn't try to be a biologist as well. But one feels the problem is that Barrow just doesn't respect the scholarship of humanities professors because they don't measure up to the standards of science. This is unfortunate, and it is ironic that Barrow is convinced that humanities professors have simply ignored the sciences, when the problem is clearly at least as great in the opposite direction: too many scientists have failed to appreciate the nature of knowledge in other fields besides their own.

This work relates the experiential beauty of the world to our sense of place within it. Barrow supports his ideas with insight and depth. Although some of the science is presented in confounding detail, it is nonetheless enlightening. As someone who teaches ecology, I would highly endorse it.

This is a good book for a beginner, e.g., an undergraduate student in philosophy, psychology, or art. It can provide some solid basic understanding of the issues involved in interpreting and reproducing the world(s) around us. The book's thesis is that we are hard-wired by the process of evolution to interpret the world a certain way and that same process limits the kinds of art and science we are able to create. Those already familiar with this thesis will find little that is new in this book. Also, I was a bit disappointed that the book contained only black and white illustrations, it would seem that the subject matter chosen cries out for some color. The topics covered in the book are diverse and hang together loosely, which can be a challenge to a reader accustomed to a more focused and sustained discussion.

"Kristor" review "The Cosmic Anthropological Principle" is thoroughly apt, and I've noticed that the book is being supplanted by an "expanded" version, although the description of the expanded version seems identical to this book.

The thesis of this book is quite simple: Science has found that we humans are wired so that certain things in the universe are necessarily that way and could not be otherwise. Because of this "hard wiring" as one commentator observes, the strict methodology of science has just recently began to branch out of its "models" of uniformity and embraced diversity. Meanwhile, the diversity of human creativity, especially as it applies to the arts, has avoided at all costs any semblance of having a "model" by which to judge the universal appeals of so much diversity. It's time that the creative arts started taking a look for "models" into serious view as it evaluates themselves. I think this is a reasonable and defensible thesis against solipsism.

The argument is not an either/or dysjunction, but an and/both conjunction. Science has discovered a number of theories which serve to explain the universe as we know it. It strives to find the common ground on which to evaluate the world as we have come to know it. Conversely, the creative arts and the humanities have avoided, to the extreme, any effort for artists to "conform" to similar models found in nature and described by science. Barrow thinks it is time to reverse this odd peculiarity.

After all, when we evaluate painting or music, for example, we see that certain patterns emerge which give each endeavor a backbone for acceptance or rejection. The archetonics of harmonic cords and pictoral perspectivism require that certain creative arts fulfill these a priori demands, otherwise we regard such works as "distorted" or even worse "contorted." This result is not arbitrary, but developed over years of knowing that representational art must be "three dimensional," not two, and that in music a chord is composed of certain harmonic notes that please the natural disposition of the ear both aesthetically and physiologically.

Barrow illustrates these patterns of proportionality, perspectivism, chordal harmonies, etc., in light that they shed on the acceptability or rejection of certain "given" patterns innate in life. His thesis that the creative arts ought at least entertain the association of these innate given patterns in their evaluation as "works of art," just as science has decreed that the universe itself operates on the principles of certain immutable laws. I found his argument persausive, as one who is endeared more towards the artistic endeavors more than to the scientific ones. Thus, not all that passes itself off a "art" ought to be evaluated on the basis of its diversity, but also on the basis of its conformity to certain aesthetic criteria that are found in nature itself. Thus, many of those artistic endeavors that are meant to shock the observer by their discordance and lack of proportionality are incongruent with certain immutable aesthetic judgments based on nature's inherent designs. Ergo, the creative arts may have a certain degree of freedom to create outside the boundaries of our natural dispositions, but for the most part they must play within certain rules enough of the time in order to constitute pleasing versus unpleasant art. How much of a jump there is between "good" versus "bad" art from these immutable rules is at least partially determined by objective criteria. The question becomes, How much?

As one who is a "conservative" aesthete, I find Barrow's argument more than persuasive. I'm not sure just how conformable a work of art must be to the innate rules of nature before it passes from acceptable to unacceptable. But now that I know there are indeed such naturally innate rules, I am much better able to evaluate, as well as articulate, the creative arts on a more expansive, yet nonetheless "natural" criteria. Barrow's book is an engaging and worthwhile polemic.