Customer Reviews

The Unfinished Universe

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I just ran across an obituary of Louis B. Young, the author of "The Unfinished Universe," who died in May 2010 at the age of 90. I was instantly reminded of how thought provoking this book has been for me. I purchased, read, and reread this book in 1987 and have referred back to it many times in the intervening years. In fact, I count it as being among the ten most intellectually stimulating books I have ever studied.

This book provides a description of how the universe has evolved since the Big Bang, from an intensely concentrated and highly undifferentiated plasma to the formation of stars and galaxies and on to the synthesis of life on Earth and the eventual evolution of humans. It is obvious from the book that Young was a methodological naturalist, that is, she viewed the universe as a closed causal system that is best understood by modern science alone.

But this book is more than just a science book on the role of evolution in the universe. It is also both poetic and philosophic. This book, for example, convinced me that the ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, was correct that becoming is more fundamental than being. From the time of the Big Bang to the present, the universe has been in a continual process of change, or more precisely, of becoming. And this change, this becoming, has resulted in an on-going increase in complexity throughout the universe.

Young also believed, as the title of the book indicates, that the universe is not finished evolving. Young led me to consider seriously the possibility that evil in a universe that is unfinished, that continues to evolve and to become more complex, may simply be the long term but ultimately temporary by-product of the incompleteness. Young also considers what else the unfinished nature of the world might mean for the future, but as she states at the very end of the book, "The universe is unfinished, not just in the limited sense of an incompletely realized plan but in the much deeper sense of a creation that is a living reality of the present. A masterpiece of artistic unity and integrated form, infused with meaning, is taking shape as time goes by. But its ultimate nature cannot be visualized, its total significance grasped, until the final lines are written."

There is one aspect of the book that left me uncomfortable scientifically. In Chapter 6 Young discusses the growth of complexity in the universe in relationship to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and she concludes that, "All of these observations lead to the conclusion that the Second Law of Thermodynamics, useful as it is in the whole range of phenomena for which it was originally conceived, cannot be used to evaluate the evolution of Form throughout time." Based on my understanding of thermodynamics I believe that the ongoing growth of complexity in the universe is not incompatible with the Second Law. In spite of this weakness, I admire this book.