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Best Books of the Month
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There is a new book on the intersection between science and the meaning of life: The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning by Marcelo Gleiser, the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College.
Gleiser's main thesis is that our observations yield only an "island of knowledge."Thus there are limits to science's ability to answer fundamental philosophical questions. These limits to our knowledge arise both from the tools we use to explore reality and the nature of physical reality itself. What we can know is limited by the speed of light, the uncertainty principle, the incompleteness theorem, and our own intellectual limitations. Recognizing these limits does not entail abandoning science and embracing religion. We should continue our scientific investigation of the nature of the cosmos, Gleiser argues, for by coming to know the universe we come to know ourselves.
Obviously Gleiser is right--there are limits to scientific knowledge as the incompleteness theorem and uncertainty principle strongly suggest. As the island of our knowledge grows, so too does the ocean of uncertainty which surrounds it. Still science gives us our best chance to understand the nature of the cosmos, and hence the the most firm foundation upon which to understand the meaning of the cosmos.
Gleiser also argues that science and religion focus on the same question.
The urge to know our origins and our place in the cosmos is a defining part of our humanity.Read more ›
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53 of 56 people found the following review helpful
I bought this book to support Gleiser and the 13.7 staff at NPR. I love the work they do and the human perspective they bring to the sciences. That being said, this piece of work fell short as a compelling cover-to-cover book. For one, I feel I was misled about the actual contents of the book. I understand authors are often at the whims of their publishers, but I can tell this book was trying to be about the limits of scientific understanding, how these limits affect science, and how they affect humanity. Unfortunately, the author's commentary on these topics could probably be condensed into 50 pages. The rest of the book is a meandering, if not pedantic, history of the human pursuit of knowledge. If I were interested in a history of philosophy or science, there are certainly many books which accomplish this better than Gleiser. If I felt that this history added a lot of value to the author's main argument, I could understand the attention it is paid. In reality, the author makes a clever analogy (about the "Island of Knowledge") towards the beginning of the book and then makes tenuous, disconnected references to this analogy as he reviews the past 2500 years of scientific history. I actually love the author's analogy and full agree with his philosophy on the limits of human understanding. I really wish the bulk of the book were more directly correlated with this topic. I hate to say it, but, given that Gleiser never delves really deeply into dissecting his analogy, the book comes across as a blog topic that got stretched very thinly into the length of a book. I don't regret my purchase because I'm happy to support Gleiser and co., but I the book is certainly not worth its price as it stands alone.
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful
This book is ostensibly about the inherent limits of scientific knowledge, but actually provides an excellent summary of what is known (at least in physics) and traces its development from the Greeks onward, in the process of identifying these limits. One limit arises from the cosmic horizon of 13.8 billion years, before which the universe was opaque to radiation, implying that we can never receive information about regions further away than 13.8 billion light-years. Uncertainity at the sub-microsopic scale is due to the quantum weirdness of knowing only the probability of a particles's location until it is measured, the inherent uncertainty of that measurement and the entanglement (action at a distance) between particles
Early Western philosophers looked for a unified theory of the nature of matter. Thales (600 BCE) thought "all stuffs of the world were but different manifestations of a primal stuff, the embodiment of a reality always in flux". Parmenides, somewhat later, wrote "that what is can not change, for it then becomes what it is not". According to Lucretius (50 BCE), Leucippus and Democritus thought that all things were made of unchanging atoms moving in a void under various forces, assuming different shapes and forms under different forces by the reordering of numerous atoms. Aristotle posited a bottom-up natural arrangement of his four basic substances--earth, water, air and fire--to explain why a body moved up or down when displaced from its natural place.
As the author notes, scientific inquiry is an ongoing process, implying an ever-changing perception of reality.Read more ›
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