Customer Reviews

The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge

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I've given many copies of this book to my students--the ones who have particular promise, the ones who ask questions about things. Like the question that Poundstone asks in the book: where did all this complex stuff come from. Of all the complexity literature--Arthur, Kaufman, et al--I've found this the most meaningful. And the use of the Game of Life to illustrate the emergence of the complex is beautifully done.

A wonderful journey through key concepts in information theory using Conway's "Life" program as a vehicle. This book is a celebration of what is possible when natural law is applied to a random system, and demonstrates the necessity of limits on systems. Highly recommended for anyone interested in entropy, extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, or cellular automata. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

I read most of this book (library copy) many years ago and one set of concepts had a great impact: The clear explanation of the deep epistemologiacal implications of Leo Szilard's 1929 groundbreaking paper analyzing Maxwell's Demon and the foundations of observational information. I can't recall all the details but the conclusions were clear and startling. It goes much deeper than Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in outlining the fundamental limits of observation and thus empirical/scientific knowledge. Szilard's results would even apply in a "classical" universe.
I have yet to see this fully explicated in philosophy departments or other "popular" texts, etc.
Recommended as a very good, basic introduction to information and communication theory. Also, try anything by Greg Chaitin for purely mathematical limits to information and [analytic?] knowledge.

Although this book was written in the 80's it is still up to date as it covers timeless aspects of physics. The book alternates chapters on Conway's Game of Life with chapters on physics. There is a lot of clearly explained chapters on information theory including Maxwell's Demon and the solution to that paradox. Also there is information on what happened at the beginning of the universe and what will happen at the end of the universe. There is also a mini biography of Von Neumann which I found very interesting. Finally, there is a good bibliography of books some of which are still current. I have read several books on this kind of stuff but this is probably the clearest book I have read, especially the part on information theory.

I read this book back in the mid-eighties, so I don't remember details now. When Poundstone extrapolates from Conway's "Life" that recursive application of a relatively simple rule can bring self-order to chaos, the inference is that order within our universe (The Universe) can be explained in teh same way; that only recursion of simple rules is necessary to explain complexity and order and self-replication from some initial chaos.

It seems so appealing, until one realizes that the Game of Life is not operating in vacuo, it exists within our universe (The Universe). The recursive rules in the game operate within whatever construction of rules, laws, etc, guide The Universe -- definitions of time, of space, or sequence, of continuity, of probability, and so on. Thus there is the structure of many assumed rules, not accounted for in analysis of the game. The recursive application of a particular rule happens within and according to an extensive set of ordering rules, which are part of the larger Universe.

So if one wants to analogize that The Universe operates on just a simple recursive rule or rules, one has to postulate a yet larger set of rules -- The Universe must exist within some larger superset of rules. By induction, there is no end of this embedding until recursion alone does not work.

And if one wants to postulate that The Universe is self-contained and operates only by recursion, that's fine, but that's not analogous to the Game of Life.

Not offering any solution here, just sayin'... I think it's a great read, very thoughtful, but not conclusive. (And probably that is just the way it will always be...!)

Where does the perceived complexity of the universe come from? Surely from something equally as complex. Or are there exceptions? Consider the irrational number pi; to all appearances, an infinite string of patternless, unpredictable numbers -- mathematically indistinguishable from a random and meaningless collection of bits. But unlike a an infinite random string of numbers, pi can be completely encoded succinctly in the form of a recursive relation with only two terms - all that complexity boiled down to a simple and portable equation. This embodies Poundstone's central thesis, that simple recursion begets complexity.

"The Recursive Universe" examines this powerful idea from several angles and draws from a colorful range of disciplines: from information theory to cosmology, thermodynamics to computability theory. Threaded throughout this development is a (perhaps too) detailed account of Conway's cellular automaton, The Game of Life. The game is used as a practical analogy demonstrating that complex forms and behavior -- even self-assembly -- can seemingly spontaneously arise in a world with only simple laws and random initial conditions. Poundstone explains that it takes a certain amount of information to define the recursive rules, but then the recursion "grinds out information endlessly." This profusion of information in the universe is embodied in an increasing number thermodynamic microstates, as entropy marches on in lock-step with growing complexity. But alas, this surplus of new information comes with a cost - we learn we must forget, and that we ultimately must die. Completing the connection between Shannon information and Boltzmann entropy, Poundstone reveals that there is an information cost for each bit of information gained, as the impossible task of Maxwell's demon is described in great detail. And then, as the universe equilibrates and heat death looms, the laws and initial conditions which shaped it become lost to us forever.

This book is about complexity and information theory. For this purpose it has a great deal with the now famous Conway's CA, Life, as an illustration. Though the survey of the main topic is pretty good--discussing such topics as Maxwell's demon, self-reproduction, self-organization, Von Neumann's automata &c--the book turns out to focus primarily on Life, ending with a detailed explanation of how to make a computing machine and then a universal constructor out of the game. It's the book's major point.

People seeking more Life documentation may want to inquire after Robert Wainwright, computer consultant for this book, who provided till recently (and certainly still does so) Lifenthusiasts with Lifeline, a letter recording many Life facts found out in its early history, and still of great importance nowadays.

I got this book for my husband because he is reconsidering his religious faith and I thought it would be about agnosticism. It is, instead, a HIGHLY technical treatise about I don't know what, inaccessible to me (and I assume to my husband, though I sent it back before he even saw it). It made no sense to me at all. I don't know what kind of audience it's for--mathematicians? scientists of some sort? But not the lay reader, that's for sure. I would have wanted this to be made clear before I bought it.