The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? [Hardcover]

Victor J. Stenger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2006

In a series of remarkable developments in the 20th century and continuing into the 21st, elementary particle physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists have removed much of the mystery that surrounds our understanding of the physical universe. We now have mathematical models that are consistent with all observational data, including measurements of incredible precision, and we have a good understanding of why those models take the form they do. Although current theories will probably be superseded by better, more detailed theories as science continues to advance, the great success of contemporary models makes it likely that scientists are on the right track. In short, the cosmos is undoubtedly comprehensible. For those fascinated by how physics explains the universe and affects philosophy, Stenger's in-depth presentation, complete with an appendix of mathematical formulas, makes accessible to lay readers findings normally available only to professional scientists.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Stenger (Has Science Found God?), emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii, goes to great lengths to explain that, although he is not completely convinced that the laws of physics as we know them have objective reality, he doesn't subscribe to the postmodernist notion that there is no such thing as objective reality. Stenger explains that the power of currently accepted models of physics arises from what he calls "point-of-view invariance," i.e., they have the ability to make the same predictions regardless of where or when an observer is taking measurements. While this point is well made and important, Stenger's descriptions of the models of physics and his discussion of cosmology will be largely incomprehensible to the average reader. A third of the book consists of eight mathematical supplements designed for "anyone who has taken the major courses in a four-year curriculum of undergraduate physics, chemistry, engineering, or mathematics." B&w illus. (July)
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Review

"[A] fascinating and thought-provoking book...it is a feast for both the specialist and the dedicated general reader." -- NewScientist magazine issue 2558, July 1, 2006, Marcus Chown

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 340 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books (November 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591024242
• ISBN-13: 978-1591024248
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #889,746 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Victor J. Stenger grew up in a Catholic working-class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant, his mother the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He attended public schools and received a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. While at NCE, he was editor of the student newspaper and received several journalism awards.

Moving to Los Angeles on a Hughes Aircraft Company fellowship, Dr. Stenger received a master's of science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a PhD in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. He currently is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Stenger is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England (twice), and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy.

His research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that in 1998 showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of this experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.

Victor Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of critically well-received popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. These include: Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988); Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World beyond the Senses (1990); The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995); Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (2000); Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (2003); The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (2006); God: The Failed Hypothesis--How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007); Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness (2009); The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (2009). God: The Failed Hypothesis made the New York Times Best Seller List in March 2007.

Vic and his wife, Phylliss, have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren. They now live in Lafayette, Colorado. Phylliss and Vic are avid doubles tennis players and generally enjoy the outdoor life in Colorado, and they travel the world as often as they can.

Dr. Stenger maintains a popular Web site (a thousand hits per month), where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Power of P.O.V.I., January 24, 2007

By 

Yonatan Fishman (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Hardcover)

Review of Victor Stenger's Comprehensible Cosmos

January 24, 2007

Where do the laws of physics come from? The Power of P.O.V.I.

In this admirable new book, physics professor Victor Stenger once again exhibits his notable ability to convey complex ideas of physics with simplicity and elegance, while not sacrificing mathematical rigor and detail. Moreover, the book offers a "big-picture" perspective that will appeal to both physicists and non-physicists. However, although not required, a basic familiarity with physics and a mathematical background will greatly enhance readers' appreciation and comprehension of the book, particularly concerning the helpful mathematical supplements provided at the end.

Here Stenger takes on "ultimate" questions, such as, Where do the laws of physics come from? and Why is there something rather than nothing?- answers to which are commonly believed to be found exclusively within the province of theological and philosophical discourse and to be inherently beyond the reach of empirical and theoretical science. Stenger argues that the extraordinary empirical success of our current models of physics, though still incomplete and provisional, gives us good grounds to assume that they are on the right track: the cosmos is indeed comprehensible, and our current physical models provide a description of nature that is likely to faithfully reflect aspects of a reality that exists independently of our thoughts and particular physical models.

Stenger argues that, contrary to some popular views, the so-called "laws of physics", such as the great conservations laws, are not restrictions on the behavior of matter imposed by an external agent or by a world of abstract Platonic mathematical forms. Rather they arise from the self-imposed requirement that physicists' descriptions of nature be independent of the particular point-of-view of observers- that they be point-of-view invariant. In order to ensure universal applicability and to describe reality as objectively as possible, physicists aim to construct mathematical models that describe nature in such a way that these descriptions do not depend on the particular point of view or reference frame of observers. For instance, the law of conservation of energy is a manifestation of time-translation invariance. A description of nature that does not depend upon the absolute time at which observations are made will automatically entail the conservation of a quantity called `energy'. Similarly, the law of conservation of momentum naturally arises from the requirement that physicists' descriptions of nature are space-translation invariant- that they do not depend upon any particular point in space.

Stenger's account builds upon the work of mathematician Emmy Noether, who proved that certain mathematical quantities called the generators of continuous space-time transformations are conserved when those transformations leave the system unchanged. Hence, the great conservation laws are consequences of point-of-view invariance and thus are reflections of the symmetries of space and time. As Stenger puts it: "If you wish to build a model using space and time as a framework, and you formulate that model so as to be space-time symmetric, then that model will automatically contain what are usually regarded as the three most important "laws" of physics, the three conservation principles". Stenger further demonstrates how Newtonian mechanics, quantum mechanics, and special and general relativity also arise naturally from the point-of-view invariance and symmetries of our physical models.

In addition to showing the intimate connection between the laws of physics and the symmetries of space and time, Stenger argues that features of our complex lower energy universe may be accounted for by the spontaneous breaking of symmetries that were present during the higher energy state of the big bang. Our universe is akin to a less symmetric snowflake that froze out of a more symmetric sphere of water vapor. Stenger discusses the possibility that our universe arose via a well-understood process of quantum tunneling from a highly symmetric void, empty of energy, particles, space, and time- a featureless state essentially equivalent to `nothing' . Since the void also exhibits space-time symmetries, the laws of physics are ultimately derived from the symmetries of the void. Indeed, Stenger argues that the laws of physics are not really laws at all, in the usual sense of the term. On the contrary, they are reflections of the absence of laws- they are what Stenger refers to as "lawless laws". Other aspects of nature, such as the apparent indeterminism of quantum mechanics can be accounted for by an element of randomness in the universe (which, Stenger notes, is itself a manifestation of invariance). Ultimately then, symmetry and randomness lie at the bedrock of reality. Hence, the universe is not only comprehensible, but may have arisen in the simplest way possible: randomly and spontaneously from a highly symmetric void, that is, from a state essentially indistinguishable from `nothing'. But then why is there something rather than nothing? Indeed, if the universe came from a void, then why did it not remain as a void? The answer Stenger offers, and which gains support from the work of other physicists, is that a symmetric void is unstable- hence there had to be something. Our universe is simply a different phase of `nothing', just as ice and steam are different phases of water.

There are plenty more topics discussed in this original and insightful book, including particle physics, cosmology, and thermodynamics, which are beyond the scope of this review. Perhaps some readers might complain that Stenger is too cautious in his lack of commitment to particular physical models of reality. At times he suggests that "scientific criteria cannot distinguish between viable metaphysical schemes" and that space and time are useful inventions that cannot be proven to exist. While this may be the case, this suggestion may be seen to weaken his thesis that the cosmos is comprehensible and that physics is not just another cultural narrative. On the other hand, Stenger emphasizes throughout that our physical models ultimately must be constrained by and consistent with empirical observations. Indeed, the relentless testing of the observational consequences of our physical models is what distinguishes physics from fiction. Thus, our physical models, while human inventions, are not just arbitrary cultural constructs. To the extent that they succeed in describing nature and surviving risky empirical tests, they likely represent aspects of an underlying reality independent of our specific models. Moreover, Stenger comments on how a particulate model of reality characterized by "atoms and void", which he explicitly favors, displays some virtues over a model characterized by waves, fields, and other "Platonic" mathematical constructs. If indeed physics does have implications for metaphysics, then physics might someday provide compelling empirical or theoretical reasons to prefer one hitherto observationally equivalent metaphysical model over another. In any case, readers will appreciate the elegance and simplicity of Stenger's expository style, which are paralleled by the elegant simplicity of the scenario he has described for the origin of the universe and of the laws of physics.

Yonatan Fishman, PhD
Department of Neurology
Albert Einstein College of Medicine

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Epitome of physics, December 11, 2006

By 

Keith Douglas (Ottawa, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Hardcover)

This small (320 pages of text) is, in essence, an epitome of the basic physics of our day. It covers space and time, classical and quantum mechanics in their fundamental form, relativity, thermodynamics, cosmology, particle physics and their interactions. Each topic is treated in rough terms in a main chapter and with precision in a mathematical appendix. What makes this work unique (and not just another textbook of physics) is an attempt to systematize the material under a few very basic principles. Most important of these is the generalized form of invariance called "point of view invariance" by the author, though other postulates are introduced as necessary. My only quibbles are: (a) these principles could be summarized somewhere, (b) the debates discussed in the book over instrumentalism, realism, etc. are too perfunctorally discussed. However as this is not a philosophy of science book on those topics, the oversights can be forgiven. Finally, (c) as a non physicist, I do find myself wondering which approximations are good ones and which not. Sometimes, to achieve equality of two terms, etc. Stenger makes mathematical approximations. This is indispensible; instead what could have been useful is some discussion of where the assumptions so made break down. This is done in some places (e.g. in the discussion of the connection between Newtonian and Einsteinian understandings of motion) but not others, so the flaw, such as it is, is not ubquitous.

Other merits of the book include a clear writing style, bibliographic suggestions for further reading, helpful diagrams and some historical perspective by including years of death for various key physicists.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Book that Stresses the Simplicity of Nature, December 17, 2006

By 

Mike "Mike" - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Hardcover)

This is the third book from Professor Stenger that I've read. In my mind, he's certainly the "Richard Dawkins" of general-audience physics books.

I won't repeat too much of the content of other reviewers of this book, but rather just touch on a couple areas that I found particularly interesting:

I enjoyed how the professor stresses the simplicity of nature. For example, he shows in this book how almost all of physics comes from generalized gauge invariance, which he calls "point-of-view invariance." By the end of the book, we're shown how the "laws" of physics are not really laws at all. In the professor's well-expressed view, our traditional physical laws, in fact, are not somehow built into the fabric of the universe or handed down from above, but rather emerge from natural symmetries of a void.

On a related note, I also enjoyed how he went into some detail regarding how this simple view of nature (what he calls "Atoms and the Void") is at odds against the (secular) Platonic worldview. I believe he does a fair job explaining both views and why a simpler view of nature is preferable.

Anyways, it's hard to say enough about this book. Pick up a copy and enjoy!