John Barrow revisits one of the hottest topics in all of science, illuminating the modern quest to unlock the secrets of the universe.
Published in 1991, John Barrow's Theories of Everything was hailed as "a mind-boggling intellectual adventure" by Publishers Weekly and as "an exhilarating journey...important, engaging, and highly literate" by New Scientist . Now, in New Theories of Everything , Barrow completely updates his classic account of one of the hottest fields in all of science--the search for a cosmic key that will unlock the secrets of the Universe. Will we ever discover a single scientific theory of everything? How can one theory ever explain a world full of chaos and complexity?
In this stimulating volume, Barrow sheds light on these questions as he presents the reader with the very latest ideas and predictions, ranging from the speculations of Stephen Wolfram about the world as a computer program to recent developments in string theory and M theory, new varieties of complexity, new ideas about the nature of mathematics, and much more. He reveals that the field has changed dramatically. Fifteen years ago, scientists sought a single theory uniquely specifying the constants and forces of nature, but today they envision a vast landscape of different logically possible laws and constants in many dimensions, of which our own world is but a tiny facet of a higher dimensional reality. Equally important, Barrow reflects on the philosophical and cultural consequences of those remarkable new ideas, highlighting their implications for our own place in the universe.
The Theory of Everything has in recent years become the focus of some of the most exciting and imaginative thinking in science. Now fully revised, New Theories of Everything brings the story of this exhilarating quest completely up to date.
Kirkus Reviews
Can any one theory account for everything in the universe? Barrow (Mathematics/Cambridge; The Infinite Book, 2005, etc.) gets right down to fundamental issues in addressing this central question in modern science. He breaks his subject into eight key areas: laws of Nature, initial conditions, forces and particles, constants, broken symmetries, organizing principles, selection biases and categories of thought. Each of these is given a rigorous examination. For example, in discussing laws of nature, Barrow attempts to look at all possible ways the universe, scientific laws and God might interact, including the possibility that any or all of the three don't exist at all. One key question is whether our math is adequate to describe the deepest level of reality, especially in view of Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem, which holds that every mathematical system entails theorems that cannot be proved. The author suggests that Godel's insight, while true of abstract math, doesn't hold for applied math of the sort used in the sciences. The question of whether or not time and space themselves predate the universe gets a careful look, though not a definitive answer. That, of course, is the problem: There are no definitive answers as yet, only more or less promising approaches to the questions. Among the difficulties is the fact that the universe we can observe is only a fraction of what is believed to exist, and we can't be certain that the observable portion is typical. (Of course, to play the game at all, we need to assume so.) At the end, Barrow concedes that no theory can really account for everything; opinions, emotions and so forth are undeniably realm yet beyond all computation. Yet thisphilosophic recognition is not a denial of the scientific enterprise, but a recognition that the universe, at bottom, is subtler than our tools for analyzing it. A fascinating journey.
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Biography
John D. Barrow is Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University, Gresham Professor of Astronomy and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is the author of many highly acclaimed books about modern developments in physics, astronomy, and mathematics, including The Left Hand of Creation, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation, Pi in the Sky: Counting, Thinking, and Being, Impossibility: the limits of science and the science of limits, Between Inner Space and Outer Space, The Origin of the Universe, The Universe that Discovered Itself, The Book of Nothing, The Constants of Nature: from alpha to omega and, most recently, The Artful Universe Expanded and The Infinite Book: a short guide to the boundless, timeless and endless. He is also the author of the award-winning play Infinities.
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