THIS is a very fine book. The author, a science writer for the New York Times, embarked on a personal odyssey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in order to ponder on certain fundamental questions and to discuss them with the large and diverse scientific community there. Questions such as, How could the universe arise from nothing? How does the world materialise itself from the quantum haze? How does life arise from dead molecules? How does mind arise from brain?
The book is a tour de force of enormous scope. The topics covered range from the fine structure of the atom to the large scale structure of the universe. Quantum theory, big bang cosmology, thermodynamics, information theory, chaos and complexity, selforganisation, origin of life and evolution of life are all tackled. A lucid overview of each topic is presented, dealing not only with the current state of knowledge, but also the historical development of the concept.
The book is aimed at the general reader, and is accessible at that level. However, if one were coming absolutely fresh to these various topics, one would need to read the book quite slowly, simply because there are so many important concepts to be digested.
Those who are already somewhat familiar with science should find the book a delightful read. It is not merely a precis of generally accepted science, but also discusses matters in a critical and philosophical fashion.
Science proceeds on the genera assumption that it is generally uncovering a hidden scaffolding of order, law and symmetry that permeates the universe. The author points out that we view the world through the prison of our nervous system and science must always be wary of the possibility that the order we see in the world may be imposed by the lens through which we look.
In a brilliantly written chapter on the structure of the atom, Johnson describes how the physicists piled abstraction on abstraction when they probed beyond the proton to the neutron, the neutrino and the quark. Understanding matter at this level is a tremendous accomplishment, but the further you go the more scope there is for artful construction to parade as objective reality. He makes a similar argument about the scientific understanding of the large scale structure of the universe. The current scientific model works only by postulating that more than 90 per cent of the matter in the universe is invisible dark matter.
The concept of "information" runs through much of the book. Johnson introduces it with James Clerk Maxwell's famous thought experiment involving the demon. The demon is apparently able to subvert the second law of thermodynamics, which states that disorder (entropy) spontaneously increases with time in a closed system, by using information to create order in a disorderly system. However, the riddle is solved by treating the information used by the demon as a form of energy. When this is done, entropy increases and the second law stands.
Treating information as a coinage that is as tangible as matter, and energy is a useful concept that can be used to demystify quantum theory (which explains the behaviour of subatomic particles). In order to explain the very small, we have to sacrifice our familiar notions. In the quantum world, nothing exists until an observation is made. This idea can be extrapolated to conclude that conscious observers are needed in order to "actualise" the world. However, using the new approach to information and treating the quantum haze as information, it is possible to see how conscious observers can be dispensed with and the quantum haze crystallised by exchanging information with inanimate detectors in the environment.
The book has a very good section discussing how the first cell arose from the primordial shop. Studies on chemical self organisation in systems maintained far from equilibrium are making great progress here.
The idea that, once the first cell arose, Darwinian evolution through natural selection is sufficient to explain the subsequent history of life on earth, is coming under increasing attack. An alternative school of thought holds that new forms arise spontaneously, driven by laws embedded in the periodic table. Natural selection hones and polishes new forms once they arise. According to this view, if the type of evolution were played all over again we would end up with a similar range of life forms, albeit different in details, to the ones we have today.
I recommend this book to scientist and non scientist alike.
