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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An epiphany., March 13, 2002
This book started out slow and then became an epiphany. The book is set against the backdrop of the greater Santa Fe area of New Mexico. Johnson uses places and cultures in this area as a vehicle to lead into his description of current scientific thinking in cosmology and evolution. I didn't understand the connection at first, but one piece of rationale did emerge: the various high-powered scientific conferences held at the Santa Fe Institute beginning in 1989 that dealt with information and physics. This is where the epiphany came in, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The other reason he used this backdrop, I believe, is his obvious love for the area - its history, geography, and cultures. The first part of his book is a fairly straightforward tour of cosmology, albeit at a bit more intellectual level than most popular descriptions. One theme he starts with, and to which he returns several times throughout the book, is that our interpretation of the universe is determined by our inherited ability to understand, by our genetic evolution. That is to say, we see the universe through our own lens, tempered by our limitations. Nothing startlingly different here from my previous readings. In fact, it's rather intuitive. However, he delves into chaos theory, with which I am only slightly acquainted, and brings attractors into the discussion, about which I know nothing. The point about attractors is that they may account for the evolution of the universe (and, as I would see later, the evolution of complex organisms on Earth). Things were starting to warm up. He goes on into an understandable discussion of quantum mechanics and quantum physics. Wrapped in here is the epiphany: the fundamentals upon which the universe are built (as we understand it) are mass, energy, space and time. To these we have added information -- a fifth fundamental that is as much a part of existence and evolution, and cause and effect as any of the other four. His weaving of the significance of information into the tale of the evolution of complex organisms is all new to me, as is the concept that information is such a "real" player in the universe. It plays a role in entropy and a fundamental role in evolution, starting with organic molecules -- order leads to complexity, which leads to chaos. I struggle with how to summarize him. I have flagged several dozen pages. To try to review them will be like rereading most of the book. This is one that I may, in fact, reread.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Philosophy of Complexity, March 14, 2005
This review is from: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (Paperback)
In his book "Fire in the Mind" George Johnson explores the frontiers between religion and science, between chaos and order, and between complexity and simplicity. This exploration forces the reader to rethink what "reality" is. In the process we realize that we "know" very little about reality. Despite the huge databases we are developing we actually have not answered the big questions about existence. Nor are we likely to do so in the near future.
Fundamentalists who try to fit earth history (and indeed the history of the whole universe) into 6,000 years are almost certainly wrong. However, because of the nature of science we cannot congratulate ourselves just yet. While our data tell us that the earth itself is several billion years old, we also have made some unsupported assumptions (certainly not as many as the fundamentalists, but more than a few). Even mathematics and physics are not completely free of assumptions that cannot be tested, at least not yet.
Researchers such as Murray Gell-Mann and Stuart Kauffman at the Santa Fe Institute are busily probing the frontiers of complexity and in the process may be starting to get glimpses of just how weird our universe really is. Johnson, who is not a scientist, but a science writer, captures the excitement of this possibly ground-breaking research which may eventually show us a universe much different from that we had previously imagined. Questions arise about our immediate corner of that universe, the part with which we should be the most familiar. Is the evolution of life contingent as Steven Jay Gould might imagine it, or is it inevitably to result in creatures such as ourselves, as Simon Conway Morris believes? Are we just lumbering robots carrying our genes around (as Richard Dawkins has said), or something more significant? Can adaptationist' "just so stories" explain life? Or are we creating all of our own "reality" because of a deep need for order? My guess is that the answer is somewhere in between these extreme views, but the actual reality (if we ever glimpse it) is probably going to be very strange to us.
Johnson has brought up these questions and exposed them to our view, along with the researcher's views and doubts. It is perhaps the latter that is most instructive because it demonstrates that, despite our often arrogant opinions on the matter, we still don't really know for sure.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A literary spectacular, February 9, 2002
This review is from: Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (Paperback)
George Johnson has taken on some of the most difficult issues and questions woven into the fabric of science and religion and seperates them into their component threads to be examined by ordinary readers. He explores various world views as seen from the mountains and plateaus of northern New Mexico, truly a Land of Enchantment. The vast majority of modern human beings take most of the information we process each day on faith, no less our ideas of science than our religious verities. Johnson explores these faiths in the context of the pueblos, mountains, cities and research institutions of this ancient land, and presents each of them with no hint of condescension or disparagement. A truly remarkable feat given his subject matter which ranges from bar fights in remote villages to sunsets brilliantly firing the walls of the Sangre de Cristo mountians to the rituals and traditions of the Catholic Church and the Assemblios de Dios, to those of the Tewas and the myths and rites of the most primative peoples of the region. This is the best book exploring the escatologies of science and religion that I have ever read. It makes me anxious to retire so that I can attend lectures at the Santa Fe Institute and explore the mesmerizing landscape of nortern New Mexico. Read it. You will never again think of the struggle between science and religion in the same way.
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