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The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

4.3 out of 5 stars 524 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0525954828
ISBN-10: 0525954821
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 480 pages
  • Publisher: Dutton (May 10, 2016)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0525954821
  • ISBN-13: 978-0525954828
  • Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.5 x 9.3 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (523 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

By Ash Jogalekar TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on May 10, 2016
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
Sean Carroll is a successful theoretical physicist, skilled ponderer of philosophical questions and gifted communicator of science. He brings all these qualities to bear in his big-hearted, ambitious latest book “The Big Picture.” The book is part sweeping survey of some of the most thought-provoking ideas in modern science, part sweeping rumination on two of the most fundamental questions that we can ask: How do we gain knowledge of the world? And how do we distill meaning from an impersonal, purely physical universe?

The book can roughly be divided into two parts. The first part can be titled “How do we know” and the second can be titled “What do we know”. The siren song weaving its way through Carroll’s narrative is called poetic naturalism. Poetic naturalism simply means that there are many ways to talk about reality, and all of them are valid as long as they are rooted in naturalism and consistent with one another. This is the central message of the book: we make up explanations about the world and we call these explanations “stories” or “models” or “ideas”, and all of them are valid in their own ways.

The first part of the book explores some of the central concepts in the philosophy of science that make up poetic naturalism. Carroll starts from Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and progresses through the Arabs. He explores the investigations of Galileo in the seventeenth century. It was Galileo and his intellectual successor Isaac Newton who showed that the world operates according to self-sufficient physical laws that don’t necessarily require external causes.
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Format: Hardcover
After having a countdown for this book, which spanned months, I woke up at 5 am on May 10th and thought, "It's finally here!" I opened my Audible library and it was better than Christmas. In the quiet of the morning, I began to listen to this deeply philosophical book and immediately fell in love with it. It felt like a Poetic Naturalist's version of Christmas- material gifts replaced by the gift of trying to understand the nature of our vast universe and the world in which we live.

Those who have wanted to read Sean Carroll but didn't want to wade through the science will be happy with this book. In the spirit of Alexander von Humboldt, Carroll tucks much of the complex science away in an appendix for those who would like more detail. But, that doesn't mean this book is light on the science. To the contrary, Carroll, as usual, takes some of the most complex issues science has to offer, and packages them in a form that even people with little or no scientific background can understand. In fact, this book in particular is aimed at those who might have little education in the sciences and and even less education about heuristics. It welcomes everyone to join in a thoughtful conversation about understanding what we know about our world and the wider universe. Does it have a purpose? Does its design imply any type of creator? Instead of insulting those who say that it does (I am guilty of this myself), Carroll provided a real way to put our beliefs to the test. He was very willing to consider the views of those who believe in God and provide a detailed method, which is both kind and built on logic, that can help us figure out whether a belief is true.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
After getting "The Big Picture" yesterday, I avidly read the first four chapters this morning. I rarely share a review before I've read the entirety of a book, but in this case I have to make an exception. Because -- I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH!

I'm an inveterate consumer of both science and philosophy books. Almost always, the scientists lack the ability to talk about philosophy cogently, and almost always the philosophers are clueless about basic scientific understandings. So each frustrate my desire to simultaneously (1) learn about how the world is, and (2) find meaning in the world, given how it is.

Sean Carroll is the sort of writer I adore. The chapters I just read show that he's marvelously capable of talking about findings of modern science in a philosophically productive (and provocative) way. Meaning, he takes dry facts and infuses them with the moist richness of meaning.

For example, I was blown away by his discussion on p. 32 about determinism: "The universe is resolutely focused on the current moment; it marches forward, instant to instant, under the grip of unbreakable physical laws, with no heed paid to its glorious accomplishments or to its hopeful prospects."

That is freakishly great writing. I've never thought of the universe, or reality, this way before. Sure, I've meditated daily for most of my 67 years. I've been exposed to countless mystics, masters, yogis, and such who talk about living in the reality of the present moment. But I've never come across a scientist who said what Carroll did in his easily understandable way: at the deepest level, every happening of any sort is proceeding because of the present moment.

So thank you, Dr.
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