Customer Reviews

What Remains to Be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life, and the Future of the Human Race

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is one of the best books I have read all year. It differs from the standard "cool things in science" tract in that it focusses on what we don't know - where the mysteries are. In the end, that's often what's most interesting anyway...

It is true that it is not always the easiest going, though I disagree with some of the other reviewers as to how hard it really is. If you truly paid attention in high school physics, biology, and chemistry, you should not have much trouble. The author does throw around terms like "reducing" or "organic" and expect you to understand them. Other terms, like "eukarote," are defined once - one must read attentively.

If you can get past that, the clarity and comprehensiveness with which this book is written is breathtaking. I think I want to read it again.

You really have to read What Remains to be Discovered by John Maddox to believe that one man could know so much about so many things. That Maddox is Editor Emeritus of Nature and was knighted for his service to science helps bridge that credibility gap....but this man is extraordinary. Although his book covers some of the most complex scientific issues of today, Maddox is able to distill the essentials and present them in a way that just about anybody can understand. Maddox introduces us to his world of quarks, strings, introns, and thinking machines with no incomprehensible formulas, absolutely no technical arrogance, and just enough jargon so you feel like you have a "conversational" understanding of the field. I think that if you want to better understand the issues and opportunities in some of the major fields of science then the easiest way is to read Maddox's book, put it down for a few months then read it again. Try it, you'll enjoy it both times.

John Maddox has written a readable account of possible future discoveries and the directions science will take in this future. This book, What Remains to Be Discovered, is not fully comprehensive or authoritative but the author, instead, selects certain important topics and digests them into small enough sizes to be understandable to a wide variety of readers and large enough to cover the selected topic with appropriate breadth. It is sometimes a struggle for the non-science minded but the the author always manages to get across the basic idea and, more importantly, just why this idea will be so important in the future. I enjoyed this challenging book more than I had any right to do.

I am among those who found this book quite difficult to read. I am not a scientist by training and a good share of the most technical description and discussion did not really make that much sense to me.
Nonetheless I learned much from the book. The main premise that there remains much to be discovered and known seems to me indisputable .And this even though there may be realms such as quantum physics where the main map is already largely drawn, and the questions which remain are of more minor significance.
The most challenging questions are as I understand it those which relate to the human mind and human situation. It is clear that we are not even close in having a real understanding of how the ' mind ' works. And in a world in which there are so many rapid developments scientifically and techologically it is clear that the major question, of the future of mankind( And our possible replacement or supplementation by other intelligences) has no clear and simple answer.
Maddox writing toward the end of the book on the possible disasters of Mankind is especially disconcerting. He does not go into the detail that Martin Rees does in presenting the various ways we may finish ourselves off, or be finished off, but he is disconcerting enough.
Above all though I think he achieves his main purpose in the book, and refutes those who want to argue that the main scientific problems (John Horgan) have already been taken care of.
Anyone who studies history or the creative life of mankind knows that so long as we are here and thinking and exploring we will be making and creating new problems and new questions.

This is a surprisingly good book. It's quite well written (by a longtime science editor, after all), and for the most part accessible to the layperson. In a world of accelerating knowledge and communication, it's tempting to believe that we're approaching the end of science. Some respectable sicentists have even posited that that is happening. Maddox makes a persuasive case that we've got an awfully long way to go. He covers astronomy, particle physics, quantum mechanics, genetics, cell biology, neuroscience and meteorology -- all topics that an interested layperson may have had at least some exposure to. In each case, he succinctly reviews the current state of our knowledge, in the process revealing the gaping holes. Far from leaving one disappointed or frustrated, the book offers a powerful sense of hope. Great discoveries undoubtedly will come, and with them likely improvements in our lives, as we eradicate diseases, harness cleaner sources of energy, etc. A sense of pessimism does intrude at the end however, when he addresses the apparent risks of global warming and the limits on our ability to reverse it. All in all an outstanding read, however.

I have to confess that I did not finish this book, as I was convinced of its merits about halfway through.

"What Remains to be Discovered" provides a good overview of astronomy, the origin of life, and the future of our world. It is nice to have all three in one volume. However, the writing is uninteresting and inconsistent.

The first section, on astrophysics, is very strong and authoritative, but written much more engagingly by Stephen Hawking in "A Brief History of Time."

The second section, on life, was much weaker and the reason I stopped reading. Written at a high school level (most readers are already familiar with cholorplasts and mitochondria, but he takes time to define them), this section presented general ideas on the origin of life, but provided few facts. Maddox seems much less familiar with the extant scientific literature on this subject than he does on astronomy. He presents few results of scientific studies and focusses mostly on a logical, theoretical approach. I much prefered Stuart Kauffman's "At Home in the Universe."

I give it three stars because it presents these ideas in one volume, an ambitious undertaking and would be a decent overview for someone who did not wish to take the time to read the several other, and more thorough, books on these subjects.

John Maddox was long-time editor "Nature". Magazine. All in professional scientific research know "Science" and "Nature" are the two preeminent journals where technical papers are first published. Some of the great discoveries such as the electron, DNA and quantum theory have been published in these journals.

It is a great fortune that John Maddox, the retired editor of "Nature" took the time write this book and at the turn of the century, turn of the Millennium. It is a gift of great learning that Mr. Maddox has given to the world at the turn of the millennium.

Some writers have commented this book is hard reading, hard to follow and dense technical writing. Friends, this is not "People" or "Time" magazine. This is not supposed to be light reading; this is a discussion of what science has discovered and what science may discover in the future. Many commentators and professional scientists have long awaited this book.

Mr. Maddox breaks the book into three parts. 1. Matter 2. Life 3. Our World. This alone is noteworthy breakdown of our present knowledge of the world. Of note, Mr. Maddox writes that all scientific explanation of anything must include a "physical or materialistic" explanation.

The physical explanation or rather Physics has triumphed over virtually all other sciences. Indeed, physics is the foundation of all the sciences. We all know the chief problem of physics is the unity of theory of relativity with the quantum theory. Indeed as writer Michio Kaku said, our sum total knowledge of the universe is in the theory of relativity and of the quantum.

Mr. Maddox was a Physics professor before and his knowledge of physics allows him to delve into great details about the unification of the two great theories of the 20th. Century.

The second and third part of the book on "Life" "Our World". This discussion is a bit murky. We all know biology is not an exact science and any discussion of "Our World" is bound to be of a subjective nature.

Mr. Maddox discusses the computer, mathematics, and a family tree of man, avoidance of asteroids. Needless, one 400 page book is not going cover this in detail nor with precision or clarity.

The book can be read in one or two days. It not a textbook per se but a general discussion now, past and the future of science. It provides a sense of "time" and "place" of science for the lay reader and the professional scientists. It is great for practicing scientists and for individuals who aspire to be scientists. It may even offer general roadmap of where we want to be headed in science. This book is a must buy.

Probably written originally for the `fin de siecle' market, I suspect this book will have a much longer shelf life. John Maddox has a finely honed sense of what constitutes good science, which is not surprising for the long time editor of the prestigious journal `Nature'. He writes with authority on a vast array of subjects, and seems comfortable with the complexities of all of them. As a result, he is well qualified to distinguish between what is good science and what is metaphysics.
Why is this important? Many science writers have written books on string theory, evolution, black holes, dark matter, quintessence etc. and have done so as though writing about real entities. It is as if media departments, under pressure from funding agencies for results, have pushed them into proclaiming the reality of their theories, and then sold them onto an unsuspecting public in impressive looking books (often heralded by the supposed cognoscenti who should know better) as the latest discovery. John Maddox makes it his business to pour very cold water on most of them and argues, for instance, that `putative' or `tentative' or `candidate' black holes are not quite the same thing as experimentally established, tried and tested ideas that we normally associate with good science and science practice. This is therefore an extremely timely book, for it is the writers of science that have foisted metaphysics on us as a fait accompli, half suggesting that theories of everything are within our grasp in a short while. In contrast, John Maddox points out that for all our knowledge, we know hardly anything at all about many traditional areas of enquiry such as cell division, and that most of our efforts seem to be spent on the `naming of parts'. The genome project is a good example, but while that is a huge achievement, knowing how all the parts are put together is an undertaking that will tax our understanding for very many years yet.
What is left to discover is therefore breathtaking, and it is his healthy scepticism that reveals this. The quantum gravity problem, for instance, will not be resolved by the accumulation of data, and points at serious conceptual difficulties of a qualititative rather than quantitative form. Yet if string theory is likely to solve this, it will not be in this century that it will be testable, and at the moment stands as a lone contender that is no better than an educated guess.
But there is a darker side to John Maddox. As editor of Nature, he played a crucial role in the Bienveniste fiasco, in which a magician was employed to discredit homoeopathic experiments which suggested that water could hold a memory of what had been in it, and which had been removed. At such times, healthy scepticism turns into prejudice, and yet still appears to retain its own character. I doubt whether a magician was used to discover the errors of calculation that caused CERN scientists to proclaim prematurely the discovery of the Higgs boson. The irony is that this particle is said to have a nature not dissimilar to that of a homoeopathic remedy, having an effect more by memory than presence. Yet despite such errors, such `exotic' ideas receive major funding, and are not discredited. When advances in ideas in such areas as homoeopathy are announced, they are the spur to renunciation at any cost, and its absence even of mention is to be noted in this book. Gene structure is based on memory, and we also experience an effect of memory when something or someone is removed from our presence; it is called grief, or sadness. Perhaps such cross-categorial references are distasteful to us, but that is no reason to pillory ideas that are striving for advancement. Such ideas may appear to threaten basic scientific assumptions, but it may well be these that are preventing progress in so many areas. Scepticism is necessary for this to happen, but it so easily disguises itself as something else entirely.
Notwithstanding, this book goes a long way in correcting the focus created by other books concerning science which claim far too much for themselves and for this one fact alone, this is a book well worth the effort of reading.

My colleagues and I are in an office book club and thought this was an important book. However, most of us found it harder to read than we had expected. It gets a bit easier about half way through.

Oddly enough, I agree with all of the previously submitted reviews. There is a lot to like in this book, as well as many flaws. Maddox set himself an impossible goal of explaining where all of science stands at the end of the century, and damn near did it. However, as a reader who is not a professional scientist but is thoroughly familiar with scientific literature and concepts, I found quite a lot of the book boring. Maddox' basic thesis that Horgan is wrong, however, is spot on, and needs to be repeated as often as possible.