This book review was written by Eugene Kernes
“The pressing, human questions we
have about our lives depend directly on our attitudes toward the universe at a
deeper level. For many people, those
attitudes are adopted rather informally from the surrounding culture, rather
than arising out of rigorous personal reflection. Each new generation of people doesn’t invent
the rules of living from scratch; we inherit ideas and values that have evolved
over vast stretches of time. At the
moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is
cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in
motion. We need to do better at
reconciling how we talk about life’s meaning with what we know about the
scientific image of our universe.”– Sean Carroll, Chapter 1: The
Fundamental Nature of Reality, Page 25
“Physics is, by far, the simplest science. It doesn’t seem that way, because we know so
much about it, and the required knowledge often seems esoteric and
technical. But it is blessed by this
amazing feature: we can very often make ludicrous simplifications –
frictionless surfaces, perfectly spherical bodies – ignoring all manner of
ancillary effects, and nevertheless get results that are unreasonably good. For most interesting problems in other
sciences, from biology to psychology to economics, if you modeled one tiny
aspect of a system while pretending all the others didn’t exist, you would just
end up getting nonsense. (Which doesn’t
stop people from trying.)” – Sean Carroll, Chapter 3: The World Moves by Itself,
Page 35
“Coarse-graining goes one way – from microscopic to macroscopic – but not the other way. You can’t discover the properties of the microscopic theory just from knowing the macroscopic theory. Indeed, emergent theories can be multiply realizable: there can, in principle, be many distinct microscopic theories that are incompatible with one another but compatible with the same emergent description. You can understand the air as a fluid without knowing anything about its molecular composition, or even if there is a description in terms of particles at all.” – Sean Carroll, Chapter 12: Reality Emerges, Page 108
Is This An Overview?
What people think about the universe
depends on their culture, that has been updated over generations. Updated with a scientific understanding. Much like how planets hold themselves
together through a self-reinforcing pattern, beliefs hold themselves together
in a mutual epistemological force.
People have their biases, which can cause them to seek to confirm their
views, rather than seek a better understanding.
People can see causes and reasons in events which occurred by random
chance. Science is based on empiricism,
deriving knowledge from experiences. But
there are limits to experiences which creates a need to constantly update
beliefs. Within the scientific fields,
physics is simple, for within physics, various simplifications of reality still
obtain quality results. In other
sciences, social sciences, simplifications tend to create havoc with the
results.
Caveats?
There are a variety of different
ideas presented in the book which explain features of reality, and ways to
think about reality. The topics are
given more than a survey understanding, but that might not be enough to
understand the complexity of the topics.
Background information into fields of physics, mathematics, and others is
not necessary but can aid in understanding the topics. Topic interest depends on the reader.
