Amir D Aczel
Entanglement
Supposedly a layman's guide to the phenomenon of entanglement in quantum physics. This is when a quantum event produces two or more particles that seem to be able to "communicate" properties to one another instantaneously, defying Einstein's claim that information cannot be transmitted faster than light.
Most of the book comprises a history of the development of quantum theory, from Max Planck's discovery in 1900 that matter and energy exist in tiny packets or quanta, to John Bell's proof in 1964 that particles really can influence each other across theoretically infinite distances in ways that defy the classical rules of causality.
Unfortunately, Amir Aczel fails to strike an effective balance between the anecdotal and the technical, one minute speculating on scientists' private lives, the next proffering involved equations and (invariably unlabelled) diagrams with minimal explanation. He seems to have given little thought to his intended audience, instead just churning out information from his notes and his brain until he had enough material for a book. The history of quantum theory is elucidated much more thoroughly and clearly by Heinz Pagels in The Cosmic Code.
Aczel at least has the advantage of writing more recently than Pagels, and therefore of being able to describe the experimental proofs and theoretical elaborations of John Bell's theorem from the 1980s and 1990s. Here again, however, his writing is lazily elliptical, failing to introduce concepts properly before reproducing (in undigested form?) the technical detail given him by his physicist sources. (Aczel himself is a mathematician.)
Frankly, I got little out of this book, and would have got nothing out of it if I hadn't read better expositions of quantum theory beforehand.
Peter Atkins
The Periodic Kingdom
Peter Atkins describes the features of the chemical elements using the idea of a "kingdom" as an extended metaphor. He draws relief "maps" of the periodic table with elements shown as different heights according to their properties - for example, in one "map" the highest peaks are the elements with the largest atomic diameters; in another, they are the elements with the highest ionisation energies.
It all sounds a bit Mickey Mouse, but it works surprisingly well. As someone who gave up chemistry at 16, I welcomed a book which refreshed - and considerably augmented - my understanding of the subject with minimal requirement of imaginative effort on my part.
Obviously, this isn't a book for PhD students, but anyone else with a passing interest in this rudimentary field of science should find it very enlightening.
Hans Christian von Baeyer
Information: The New Language of Science
Information Theory is the current flavour of the month in physics, and this book is a pretty good introduction to the subject. Not the least of its merits lies in the author's admission that the very definition of "information" in physics is far from standardised, and that the ideas commonly grouped together as "Information Theory" are still a long way from constituting a neat and coherent paradigm.
Information Theory in its narrow sense - if I've understood correctly - resides in the rules defined by the mathematician Claude Shannon for determining the "information content" of binary messages. At the heart of these rules is that which states that the information content of a message is the logarithm of the number of possible messages allowed by the medium. For example, the information content of a single throw of a die is 2.585 - this being the logarithm of 6, the total possible number of "messages" a die can convey.
Also central to Information Theory is the concept of noise - random data that gets mixed up in the flow of intended data - and the solutions to the problem of how to send a message most efficiently.
If all this sounds pretty abstract, and technical rather than scientific, that's because it is. Shannon explicitly excluded the concept of meaning from his definition of information: his interest was in communications, not physics per se. This hasn't stopped some shallow-minded physicists from making the claim that information is the essential "stuff" from which the universe is made. It's easy to see how they arrived at this idea. At the current frontier of physics, quantum mechanics, all we have is information: it works mathematically, but ontologically it's a puzzle, with its implications of particle-wave duality and the idea that subjective perception somehow interferes with the workings of the objective universe. Niels Bohr, the father of quantum mechanics, was driven simply to assert that there's nothing we can call reality beyond the equations of quantum mechanics. It's where science stops: information without understanding.
Hans Christian von Baeyer isn't blind to the ambiguities and limitations of Information Theory; indeed, he acknowledges that much of it runs parallel to the idea of entropy in thermodynamics, first expounded in the first half of the 19th Century. As with entropy, there's always a frustrating element of subjectivity involved in its definitions: outside of Shannon's narrow definition, information, like entropy, can be shown to be dependent on what we know of a system. And in fact - for example, in its coverage of black holes - much of this book is really about good old entropy rather than anything more ground-breaking.
It's hard not to feel that Information Theory is a stop-off point for physics: something to keep scientists' brains ticking over, and to bring thermodynamics up to date with the computer age; but not really offering any deep new paradigms with which to renew the assault on the meaning of quantum mechanics. This book is a clear, readable and sane look at the current state of play, and definitely recommended.
David Deutsch
The Fabric of Reality
A book with such a portentous title was always going to be either revolutionary or a load of old cobblers, and unfortunately this is the latter.
I bought The Fabric of Reality partly on the strength of the review quotations on its back cover. Venerable names such as Paul Davies and John Gribbin lend their commendation to Deutsch's "theory of everything", which made me think it must be worth sampling, at least.
How wrong I was. The book starts off promisingly with interesting explanations of things like why frogs can see individual photons of light. But very quickly Deutsch deviates from the path of scientific exposition and begins to hack an idiosyncratic route through the jungle of scientific possibility. In fact he gives every impression of believing he has hit on the secret of existence, without ever explicitly saying what that secret is. Instead he bangs on about a "scientific evolution" that literally follows the same laws as biological evolution, gets into a lather about virtual reality, and insists that all the mysteries of existence can be explained away by the idea of parallel universes.
I'm not a scientist, and many of the ideas in this book are intriguing ones, whose veracity I would be more than willing to contemplate if they were well-argued. But I found nothing in Deutsch's longwinded, pompous and evasive prose to convince me. For a start, I don't see what virtual reality has to do with anything important: it's a way of simulating macroscopic reality that is satisfying to human senses but bears only the crudest structural relation, and no material relation, to the workings of the physical universe. Deutsch, on the other hand, seriously seems to believe that being able to simulate being Batman on a computer means that in some other universe you are Batman. And his "multiverse" theory is one I have a lot of problems with - most notably that he simply doesn't offer any evidence for its validity, other than some vague evocations of quantum uncertainty. He rather gives himself away, I think, when he throws notions of scientific rigour out of the window completely and asserts,
Above all what riles me about Deutsch's stance is that he seems to think the onus is on those who oppose his woolly theories not simply to expose their weaknesses but to provide better theories of their own! He talks of the need to "substantiate such objections" with "rival theories", which is like saying, "I believe the whole of the universe is contained within the intestine of an enormous rabbit, and unless you can prove to me that it isn't, you have to accept my theory as valid."
It's not just that Deutsch doesn't argue his case convincingly; his voice is hectoring and arrogant, and his unashamed geekiness can be laughable - as, for example, when he lauds the possibility of virtual music concerts that audiences could attend from their bedrooms. In fact, I think the world outside his bedroom is something that Deutsch ought to try to see more of.
Gerald Edelman
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire
Nobel Prize winner Gerald Edelman presents an overview of his ground-breaking theory of neuronal group selection (TNGS) for the brain's development. The theory, as I understood it, is that repeated activation of particular configurations of neurons causes those configurations to be 'selected', similarly to the way in which the immune system 'selects' (that is, stimulates the reproduction of) antibodies in response to foreign molecules. Thus the TNGS also mirrors the operation of natural selection to favour characteristics within species - hence Edelman's nickname for it of 'neural Darwinism'.
The basic idea sounds relatively simple, but Edelman does his best to confuse the reader entirely with elliptical, abstract prose and baffling schematic diagrams. One feels that he is too immersed in his area of expertise to be able to retrace his intellectual steps to the point at which non-specialists can begin to follow him. It's a shame, because from what one can gather of it, the theory sounds both fascinating and plausible.
Edelman's train of thought is easier to follow in the large portion of the book that he devotes to challenging three currently popular models for consciousness: as quantum phenomenon, as algorithmic 'computer', and as schematic representor of pre-existing objects and relationships in the objective world. He makes a strong case that consciousness cannot be understood except by reference to the physical make-up of the brain; and certainly the TNGS, if valid, refutes the idea that the capacity of a machine to simulate conscious behaviour in any way makes it conscious.
Edelman is explicit in his rejection of the notion that matter might embody a kind of 'proto-consciousness' that, when woven into the staggeringly intricate structures of the brain, gives rise to mind. Personally, I feel that he may do so too readily. It seems to me that there *must* be something in matter that is not completely inert if nature, by arranging it in (admittedly extraordinarily complex) ways, can imbue it with self-awareness. In fact, Edelman is disappointingly uninterested in what I feel is the most fascinating puzzle of all: where lies the boundary between the objective and the subjective worlds? Edelman sees this as a purely philosophical question, like that of why there is a universe at all, and shrugs, 'There is a mystery perhaps, but it is not a scientific one.' It's almost as though, realising he may have broken new ground in our understanding of the mind, he's in a hurry to consider the matter closed, rather than admit that there is still a great deal that remains unresolved.
In fact elsewhere in the book, Edelman makes what seem to me quite basic logical errors that suggest his limitations as a thinker. For example, he argues that Descartes' dictum 'I think, therefore I am' presupposes the existence of another consciousness with which the subject is in dialogue, not recognising the logical possibility that the interlocutor might be a figment of the subject's imagination. Like many great specialists, Edelman sometimes seems to miss the obvious in fields that occupy the periphery of his study. What's needed perhaps is a scientific synthesist who can integrate his theories more tightly with those of physics.
Elkhonon Goldberg
The Executive Brai n: Frontal Lobes and the Civilised Mind
Bit of a hotchpotch, this. It's pitched halfway between popular science and student textbook; and it's about a lot more than the frontal lobes, as well.
The lay reader will learn lots from this book about the structure of the brain. That's not to say, though, that they will necessarily understand a lot of what they've learned, because Elkhonon Goldberg has a tendency to bombard them with material from his vast storehouse of professional knowledge without consideration of the fact that they will be unfamiliar with the context of a lot of it.
That said, there is much fascinating information here about the (probable) different roles of the left and right cranial hemispheres; the evolution of the brain; and the crucial role of the frontal lobes in co-ordinating, structuring and "civilising" the activities of the more ancient parts of the brain, which do its "donkey work". There is also interesting discussion of the often devastating cognitive consequences of damage to the frontal lobes, or to the pathways that connect them to the rest of the brain.
Informative and absorbing though this book often is, its author comes across as much more of a "meat-and-two-veg" scientist than his ingenious neurological peers Oliver Sacks and VS Ramachandran. He lacks their warmth and humour, and I also think he lacks a lot of their insight. He's a sucker for trendy but shallow IT analogies - the brain as computer, the frontal lobes as Internet search engine - and his assertion that in the information age "sharp will be beautiful" struck me as both naff and dubious. There's just a hint of arrogance and smugness to his tone.
Still, all told this is a pretty interesting book: good brain fodder.
Amit Gupta
The Self-Aware Universe
As books go that attempt to reconcile science and spirituality, this is much better than most, though ultimately the scientific "justification" that it offers for enjoying an optimistic and spiritual approach to life fails fully to convince me (but then I'm a miserable b*****d).
Gupta is certainly in a good position to contemplate the interface between the two world views, being the physicist son of a Hindu yogi. He struggled for years attempting to make a name for himself in materialist physics, but several chance meetings with open-minded people from both within and outside his own field finally led him to conclude that he in particular, and physics in general, was barking up completely the wrong tree by trying to find an explanation for both quantum mechanics and consciousness in terms of a reductionist, materialist paradigm. In short, Gupta ended by turning the whole thing on its head, and positing that mind, and not matter, is the fundamental "stuff" of the universe. This is the notion of monistic idealism, and it's been around at least since the time of Plato, although of course since the Renaissance, it hasn't had much of a following in Western thought.
Many would sneer at this very idea, but if one analyses one's preconceptions honestly, one has to acknowledge that there's no logical reason to reject it. Given the apparently intractable mystery of the relation between matter and mind, we should be open to looking at it from the opposite point of view from the usual one. After all, a lucid dream can conjure up an apparently material world out of "nothing". The idea that the whole universe could be one giant, impersonal dream may not necessarily follow from this observation, but the acknowledgement that what we perceive is not necessarily what "exists", in an absoluate sense, must do so.
At the heart of Gupta's argument is the paradox of Schroedinger's cat: that quantum indeterminacy can, in principle, be amplified up to the macroscopic level so that in the right circumstances, it's theoretically possible for a cat to be both alive and dead at the same time, as long as no one is actually observing it. If I understood correctly (and it must be said the author's train of thought is not always easy to follow), Gupta thinks the act of observing effectively "collapses the past" - that after determining the current state of the cat (which may or may not have been poisoned depending on whether a particle was emitted or not by a radioactive source), we can say whether it was or wasn't dead or alive till we looked; but while we weren't looking, the very question didn't make sense. Effectively, I think Gupta is suggesting, causality can work backwards in time. This won't come as a surprise to anyone who's carefully considered the laws of physics as we currently know them: there is actually no scientific case against retrocausation beyond the rationalist, materialist "intuition" that it can't be.
Not being a physicist, I have to take for granted Gupta's argument that macro objects are indeterminate in the same way as quantum ones, and that their apparent consistency is due to their "very long regeneration time". He never explains what he means by a "regeneration time" but it seems to be something to do with "memories" that billions of quantum events, tightly linked with each other, create in the universe that result in the appearance of physical objects and predictable phenomena. Gupta seems to argue that the individual mind gives us direct access to the processes whereby the universe's memories are laid down - and that the individual mind, tied to a tiny, amplified subset of the universe's memories, is really just part of a larger consciousness.
If this sounds a tad wishy-washy, it must be emphasised that, at least in the earlier parts of the book, much of Gupta's thinking is rigorously thought out and indeed very subtle, requiring a good deal of imaginative effort to grasp. Even then, I struggled sometimes to apprehend the meaning of statements like this:
I honestly don't think Gupta is being pretentious or obscurantist here; rather, he doesn't always define his terms of reference adequately. His talk of "tangled hierarchies", using Maurice Escher's visual paradoxes as analogies, is similarly intriguing, but I didn't find it very clearly elucidated.
But then, these are difficult ideas, based partly on esoteric mystical insight and partly on the mathematical labyrinth of theoretical physics. I dare say the book would benefit from being read twice.
Or most of it, anyway. I admit that I skipped the last 50 or so pages, where Gupta leaves science to all intents and purposes behind, attempting to derive from the doctrine of monistic idealism justifications for universal love, the validity of romantic fulfilment, yadda yadda. My feeling (from reading other bits of his writing) is that Gupta found personal happiness at around the same time that he radically revised his ideas on physics, and felt compelled to infer a link between the two changes. Perhaps there was a link, but I can't say that it's persuasively established in this book. The result is that after a fascinating, if challenging, start and middle, it ends rather limply, sounding like so many of the "science and spirituality" efforts that offer reasonable pecuniary rewards for mystically inclined hack writers.
But it must be emphasised that Gupta isn't one of the latter: he's a respected academic physicist with a deep grounding in the subtleties of Eastern thought. If there's a gap in his thinking, it's in the area of neurology. It's very well to posit that the brain, like the rest of the material world, is a function of consciousness, but all the evidence is that the material structure of the brain has a direct, one-to-one correspondence with particular mental states - a correspondence that Gupta doesn't even acknowledge, let alone investigate.
So ultimately - and apologies if this counts as a "spoiler" for those who haven't read the book - Gupta doesn't locate the meaning of existence, but one has the feeling he's at least looking in the right places.
Jonathan Haidt
The Happiness Hypothesis
I'm not sure exactly what the "Happiness Hypothesis" is meant to be. The hypothesis that happiness is possible for everyone? Jonathan Haidt stops short of claiming that, but he maintains that most of us could help ourselves be happier, and he brings convincing scientific backup to bear on his argument.
The book explains how we have evolved to experience pleasure in response to some stimuli and anxiety in response to others. The bad news is that the anxiety response is much more powerful than the pleasure response, because, evolutionarily speaking, the stakes for failing to act on signs of danger are so much higher than those for failing to seize opportunities for pleasure. Haidt advocates meditation, cognitive behavioural therapy and antidepressants for those blessed with a strong implementation of this evolutionary survival mechanism.
That said, we are a social species, and research shows that social bonds (including romantic and family ties) give us our deepest sense of contentment. Social bonds, of course, mean compromises, and although most of us in the West take it as axiomatic that freedom means happiness, to an extent the opposite is true: when we're constrained by society, we are less plagued by doubt, indecision and loneliness. There's a term "anomie" which means "normlessness", and our society is a long way down this road to psychological anarchy.
Despite reaching that sober conclusion, Haidt fully advocates anti-depressants as a way out of gloom - even for people who aren't clinically depressed. He says he'd take Prozac all his life if it weren't for the side-effects. So he's no champion of the character-building effects of suffering, and even comes close to arguing that a lot of what looks like suffering to the onlooker - the effects of poverty, forced prostitution and quadraplegia - is perfectly "acceptable" to those experiencing it.
Haidt is too lucid to argue that happiness is there for everybody's taking, but he does play down the possibility that in some circumstances suffering is inevitable, severe and chronic, or that it's as likely to scar the subject for life as to strengthen them for future trials. Liberal though he is, Haidt has grown up too immersed in the American Dream to be able to drop completely the notion that fate is in the hands of the individual.
This book's value is not that it reveals the secret of happiness - the conclusion, that we should behave better to each other, get ourselves a nice partner, take part in rewarding activities, and stop being so materialistic, is hardly rocket science. Rather, it's in its elucidation of the psychological and biological research into why these things work for us. Human values are not universal values: a sober insight, but one leavened by the corollary that (except in extreme circumstances) we're "hard-coded" to benefit from adhering to them.
Nick Herbert
Quantum Reality
'Can we describe the world's unseen whales in words or must we remain silent?'
Any book with that sentence in it has to be read as far as I'm concerned. Nick Herbert examines the attempts that physicists have made to translate the bizarre findings of quantum mechanics into human-friendly 'philosophical' terms. His dismissal of the theories so far proposed (observer-created reality, multiple universes, etc.) as 'without exception preposterous' shouldn't be taken as implying contempt for his colleagues' propositions. Rather, he sees these theories' denial of common sense as evidence that there is probably something 'major' going on behind the scenes of quantum mechanics that still waits to be discovered. He sees John Stewart Bell's Interconnected Theorem, with its suggestion of superluminal 'communication' between quantum particles, as the likely key to a future revolution in our view of reality.
Punchy and irreverent, Herbert's prose quickly engages the reader and continues to hold the attention even through some pretty arcane material. The author's offbeat humour and intellectual tenacity make it easy to forgive him when he occasionally crosses the line from pithiness to glibness (as when he states 'about all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot'). Be prepared for some wacky neologisms, too - in Herbert's world, a quantum particle is a 'quon' and the classical model of the universe is 'apple reality'. Not the work of a straight-laced egghead, this.
As for the book's content, Herbert seeks to get the reader thinking primarily along philosophical lines, and does not aim at a detailed exposition of quantum theory. If you're new to this subject, you might consider reading Heinz R Pagels' The Cosmic Code before Herbert's book, to get a feel for the basics. Afterwards, strum away to 'Bell's Theorem Blues' - a Herbert-penned ditty whose score is provided as an appendix - as you contemplate the night sky and go a bit weird in the head.
George Johnson
Fire in the Mind
Science journalist George Johnson presents an overview of the current frontiers of scientific thinking. He also takes a step back from recent developments in physics, biology, mathematics and computer science to consider where science is taking humankind on a more general level. Are we on the brink of understanding the universe completely, or are we doomed to continue finding 'doors behind doors', perpetually blocking the way to ultimate truth? Is Western civilisation's belief that science can reveal the ultimate secrets of the universe any less naive than the superstitious rituals of the native Americans of northern New Mexico, who dwell in the valley below Los Alamos, former development site for the US's nuclear weapons and now the unofficial science capital of the world?
Johnson assumes the reader to be familiar with the basics of quantum theory, chaos theory and genetics; at least I assume he does, because the lack of examples and illustrations doesn't make things easy for the uninitiated. He starts every chapter with a scene, historical or contemporary, from northern New Mexico, getting the reader in a suitably awestruck state of mind for the scientific discussion that follows. It works quite well, making this a surprisingly atmospheric - nay, even, at times, poetic - scientific read. Johnson isn't particularly critical of the more controversial recent directions of scientific thinking - for example, information theory and computer science models of 'mind as algorithm' - preferring to emphasise the provisional nature of all scientific ideas, past and present. Even the western concept of time, he shows, is somewhat arbitrary when compared with the Tewa indians' division of phenomena simply into categories of 'the manifest' and 'the manifesting'.
A stimulating, speculative and quite original book, that perhaps a 'hard scientist' would have found difficult to pull off.
Steve Jones
The Language of the Genes
An interesting, if somewhat lightweight, set of essays describing recent progress made in the fields of biology, medicine, natural history and anthropology thanks to advances in our understanding of genetics.
The book is based on Jones's Reith lectures from 1991. There are numerous humorous asides that probably worked better in the lecture theatre than on the page, and a liberal helping of stylistic flaws and semantic and typographical errors. On the whole I suspect Jones may be a better lecturer than he is a writer. His prose is not always easy to follow, and the complete lack of illustrations and diagrams doesn't exactly help, either.
Finally on the negative side, while Jones's calls for racial and sexual tolerance are admirable, I felt he erred a little too much on the side of political correctness, refusing, for example, even to entertain the possibility of inherited temperamental differences between the sexes. Still, overall I was convinced by Jones's statement that the most variation in the human race is at the level of the individual.
I guess this is an encyclopedic book, that teaches the reader a little bit about a lot of things: illness, human prehistory, genetic modification of plants and animals. Jones devotes a lot of space to the ethical questions raised by genetics, and on the whole seems fairly balanced in presenting both sides of arguments. Personally I'd hoped for a little more hard science - I came away not knowing much more than before about how genes actually work - but still, it was worth reading.
Nick Lane
Oxygen: The Molecule that made the World
From the title, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is going to be a book of factoids about an element chosen at random from the period table. It's actually a lot more interesting than that, though its real theme is something completely different: why all oxygen-consuming life forms age.
To summarise very briefly indeed, Nick Lane believes that the ageing process is fundamentally due to the activities of short-lived toxic chemicals called oxygen free radicals during the metabolic derivation in our cells of energy from oxygen. The actual process is described in a lot of detail, but I'm damned if I can remember it now. That's not a criticism of Lane's prose, but of the great complexity of the subject. Nothing in molecular biology is simple, and it's to Lane's credit that he doesn't patronise the reader by trying to make it seem so, but in fact manages to sustain interest through some extremely arcane exposition.
The basic message is that our bodies are merely vessels for our sex cells, the cells that create the next generation. Once we've passed on our genes and brought up our offspring, it matters not a jot what becomes of us. So our bodies have evolved to protect us from the poisonous effects of free radicals during our youth, but there's never been any evolutionary selective pressure to continue the protection once we've procreated. Over time, our mitochondria - the small, energy-producing snippets of DNA in our cells - degrade, become less efficient both at "breathing" and at mending themselvs when they break, and so leak more and more free radicals. Our DNA ends up becoming a mess and we spend a couple decades falling apart physically before we finally snuff it.
It's not cheering, and it's certainly not easy reading, but it is fascinating. Ultimately, the book is about nothing less than why we're here at all, and at many points is almost - in the best possible sense - philosophical in tone. It helps that Lane is a deep thinker who is fascinated by his subject and always checks himself to keep his eye on the bigger picture. He acknowledges that many of his ideas are speculative (all the best scientists, I think, are essentially speculators), and he presents his case very carefully, always summarising at the ends of his chapters and keeping tabs on the progress of his argument.
So to criticisms. As so often with popular science books, there just aren't enough diagrams. I suspect publishers discourage them for fear of pumping up the page count to offputting levels, but that doesn't help the genuinely interested reader. Consequently, you really do need to know the basics of how DNA, genes and proteins work beforehand if you're going to follow a lot of this book.
Apart from that, at least as far as a non-expert reader can tell, there's not a lot wrong with it. Lane doesn't seek to convey merely the gist of evolutionary theory and biochemistry, but rather to present a specific cogent argument to a reader who he assumes has the intelligence and patience to bear with him. It is well-written and extremely thought-provoking, and introduces the reader to many many interesting subsidiary facts and insights in the course of its central argument.
Michael Morgan
The Space Between Our Ears: How the Mind Represents Visual Space
Common sense may suggest that our eyes present us with the world as it is, but as this book shows, common sense is largely wrong. Our perception of space has evolved from our need to move around in it, and Michael Morgan here describes in some detail why we find it helpful to see the way we do.
The message, though not unexpected, is rather disturbing. Perception - of visual phenomena in particular, but by extension of all sensory stimuli - is ulimately solipsistic and contingent, the "world out there" ultimately unknowable. Making frequent use of optical illusions, Morgan demonstrates how vision is essentially interpretative, often representing motion, contrast, sharpness and depth where it expects to find them - rather than where they necessarily are.
The book concentrates on the detail of visual perception, but Morgan has a couple of broad theses to plug. Firstly, while the brain is clearly, on one level, a type of computer, he argues that its computation is essentially analogue rather than numeric: that is, it mostly represents the world using internal "working models" rather than abstract mathematics.
Secondly, he tentatively rejects the notion that there may be a part of the brain that is the "seat of consciousness" to which more specialised neural circuits report. Rather, he thinks, the picture we create in our heads of the world is a cumulative model in which individual maps - for colour, motion, depth, and so on - are overlaid simultaneously. He bases this view chiefly on neurological and experimental evidence rather than any theory of his own about consciousness. Indeed he is rather derisive of scientists who philosophise on the general nature of mind, which is a little unfair since his own fascination for it emerges surreptitiously throughout.
The book has other small faults: the prose can be slapdash and opaque, and the author's attempts at wit are often feeble. But it's still a fascinating read, which strikes a good balance between conveying detail and broad principles for the lay reader.
Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos
The Non-Local Universe
I hoped this book - cowritten by a historian of science and a physicist - might be the thorough and thoughtful layman's guide to non-locality in quantum physics that Aczel Amir's Entanglement wasn't. Unfortunately, though worth reading, it failed to deliver the goods.
The first few chapters briskly describe the development of quantum theory, but not clearly enough for the book to be a recommendation for picking up the basics on the subject. The authors then take the idea of the "complementarity" between parts and whole and apply it to various realms of investigation with varying degrees of convincingness. The observation that living organisms operate in far more complex ways than could be inferred from their constituent parts is certainly valid (if not exactly novel); but the ensuing speculations on "male-female complementarity", and the completely irrelevant disquisitions on postmodern theory, had me struggling to stay the course.
In some ways I'm not sure my perseverence paid off. The book's "climax" is an appeal to a new global consciousness that might help humanity to tackle the issues of global warming, overuse of resources, and overpopulation. All very laudable no doubt, but bog-all to do with quantum physics. Ultimately the book's problem lies in its attempt to be a work simultaneously of science and of philosophical-sociological theory; there is much strident advocacy within its pages of an end to the "two-culture war", but its attempt to set itself up as a model of conciliation between the two sides unfortunately comes across as half-baked and, dare one say it, a little bit pompous.
Jeremy Narby
The Cosmic Serpent
It's debatable whether this highly speculative book should be reviewed under the head of 'science'. Nevertheless, the questions it raises are certainly scientific ones, even if the hypotheses it advances are too weakly qualified to be called scientific in the strict sense.
Jeremy Narby is an anthropologist who during a stay with Indians in the Peruvian jungle became fascinated by the Indians' encyclopaedic knowledge of the healing properties and requirements for preparation of the plants around them - knowledge that they claimed was revealed to them directly by spirits after imbibing of a powerful hallucinogenic brew.
Narby agreed to sample the concoction and had terrifying visions of two enormous fluorescent snakes. He subsequently developed the zany theory that these snakes were mental representations of the DNA double helix and that hallucinations allowed the Indians to receive normally imperceptible messages 'communicated' by all life forms via extremely weak light waves that are known to be emitted by DNA.
Sounds crazy? It is a bit. Narby admits that he formed his theories in ignorance of the areas of neurology, chemistry and physics that impinged on them; remarkable, then, that when he investigated these fields he found so much to corroborate his ideas. So remarkable that the reader can't help suspecting that he was unconsciously selective in his 'evidence' and rather free in the interpretations he drew from it. The same applies to his anthropological sources; for example, from Aztec myths of snakes with legs and wings he moves to the concept of a thing that is 'both serpent and non-serpent', that is therefore 'double', thus 'a double serpent', thus the DNA double helix. Poetic, certainly. Remotely convincing? Hardly, I would suggest.
Narby is sound in his denunciation of the arrogance of a scientific community that refuses to investigate, or even to acknowledge, phenomena that don't fit into its established paradigms. Equally admirable is his taking seriously the idea that technologically primitive peoples might have something to teach Western culture, which has risen to the ascendancy by pursuing materially fertile but one-sidedly rationalist trains of thought.
Yet for all his broad-mindedness, in the end Narby seems altogether too ready to jump to 'exciting' conclusions and to infer real correspondences from mere metaphors. He certainly asks fascinating and important questions: is there a stratum of external reality to which hallucinogens open up the mind? How does consciousness arise from the interactions of insentient chemicals? Why do certain symbols crop up time and again in mythologies around the world? But his conclusions, ingenious and poetic as they may be, often sound too glib to be persuasive.
Heinz R Pagels
The Cosmic Code
A thorough, no-nonsense introduction to quantum physics for the general reader. Pagels helpfully devotes two whole chapters to an explanation of Einstein's theories about the photoelectric effect and relativity, the revolutionary ideas out of which quantum theory was to emerge. He then describes the historical development of quantum theory in a clear and interesting way, before going on to present the quantum world in detail, particle by particle. Finally, he explains the mathematical nitty-gritty of how the chief discoveries of quantum mechanics were arrived at.
The book is well structured, with the author gradually working his way down from general concepts to detail, at a pace suited to the intelligent non-specialist reader. Inevitably, perhaps, there were points where I got left behind completely. In particular, the Gauge Field Theory Revolution (Part 2, Chapter 10) sure sounds important, but it was completely Greek to me :( Pagels also lost me in his explanation of Bell's Theorem, a crucial component of modern quantum theory. (My confusion was largely cleared by subsequently reading Gary Felder's excellent paper 'Spooky Action at a Distance': quantum newbies might want to check this out before attempting Chapter 12 of Part 1.)
Ultimately, quantum mechanics is a set of mathematical tools that allow scientists to understand and predict subatomic processes on paper. However, there is no agreement as to what kind of reality they describe in philosophical terms. However you look at it, quantum physics implies a world far weirder than common sense allows, with its suggestions of instant 'communication' between particles light years apart and a universe that is 'created' only when it is measured. The great Richard Feynman once said, 'I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum physics.' Let's face it, if he didn't understand his own subject, what hope does that leave for the rest of us?! Only, clearly, that of beginning to understand why the subject can't be understood - and The Cosmic Code is a pretty good place to start that quest for enlightened bafflement.
(Note: this book was written in 1982 and is, I believe, somewhat out of date. Unfortunately revisions are unlikely to be forthcoming, as Pagels died in a mountaineering accident in 1988 - a death he envisaged in a dream that he recounts in the last paragraph of the book. Spooky!)
Roger Penrose
The Emperor's New Mind
This is a very intriguing, but decidedly confusing book - purportedly a layperson's critique of 'Strong AI' (the notion that consciousness has an algorithmic basis) that for long stretches reads more like a textbook on modern physical theory for postgraduate mathematicians.
Roger Penrose is himself a mathematician, and his first assault on Strong AI involves an appeal to the nature of mathematical insight. Certain mathematical statements, he shows, can be instantly perceived by a human to be true or false, even though there is no algorithmic means of either proving or disproving them. This is all interesting and germane to the book's central concern, the mind-body problem.
However, things start to get a little hairy after the first hundred pages, as the author slowly gets sucked into his home turf of complex equations and arcane geometry. For the next three hundred pages, the non-specialist reader is largely left standing as Penrose dashes through the mathematical nitty-gritty of relativity, complexity theory, quantum theory and quantum gravity, all 'illustrated' with geometrical representations of abstract mathematical concepts that presumably are supposed to help us 'visualise' what he's talking about. Unfortunately Penrose is not good at restraining his own fascination for mathematical detail in the interest of allowing the reader a reasonable chance of grasping broad concepts; the result is a frequent urge to skip pages for fear of losing momentum completely.
The odd thing is that a basic comprehension of Penrose's ideas about consciousness, which are delineated in the final two chapters, calls upon remarkably little of the detailed mathematical exposition to which the bulk of the book is devoted. Introspection, common sense and imaginative projection are Penrose's main tools here, as he lays out his hypothesis that the superposition of quantum possibilities and the (as yet verified) phenomenon of quantum gravity may be what lie behind the mystery of consciousness. Here, finally swapping mathematical certainties for philosophical speculations, his train of thought becomes much easier to follow, and with relief the reader finishes the book, in spite of the trials that have gone before, feeling stimulated, enlightened and even inspired.
One thing I did have trouble reconciling myself with was Penrose's thinking on the nature of time. The essence of this seems to be the notion that nothing fundamentally differentiates time from the spatial dimensions except our perception of it as 'flowing'; that everything that is, was and ever will be somehow exists unchanging in a type of timeless stasis. Penrose denies that this vision negates free will, but I couldn't follow his argument as to why. I can see how a mathematician, awestruck by the intricate beauty of his subject, might come to the view that mathematics literally occupies a perfect realm of its own; but this seems to make appeal to the very mind/body dualism that science has struggled, for the past four centuries, to eradicate - as yet without success.
Susan Pockett
The Nature of Consciousness: A Hypothesis NEW! (Added 29/06/2008)
Physicist Susan Pockett proposes that consciousness is not a direct attribute of the physical material of the brain, but of patterns in the electromagnetic field that this material generates through its electrical activity.
The idea is controversial because it rejects the generally accepted view that there is something physically or chemically special about neurons that enables them to produce consciousness. If Pockett's idea is correct, it should be possible to generate consciousness artificially, outside of the brain.
I think she may well be onto something: the idea is just so simple and elegant, and at a stroke tames some of the apparent paradoxes that have dogged consciousness studies since the advent of modern biology. The problematic dualism implied - if not always acknowledged - by most existing models of the mind is at least partially eradicated, for electromagnetism crosses the boundary between immaterial forces, and matter (electromagnetism being a feature of individual atoms as well as objects as wholes).
Pockett's argument is that when many neurons fire synchronously, they effect large-scale changes, in space and time, in the brain's electromagnetic field that have direct correlates in particular subjective experiences.
The hypothesis gets rid of the idea that there is some kind of "seat of consciousness" in the brain that all sensory input gets fed into, which is largely refuted by experiment; and also allows for the fact that individual memories appear to be distributed throughout large parts of the brain and are not "stored" in a single locus.
Pockett's theory also allows for instances of telepathy that current science says (for reasons that aren't necessarily clear, given how little we know about consciousness) shouldn't be possible. The apparent rarity of telepathy she ascribes to the low frequencies of brain waves, which only extremely sensitive external sources would be able to detect.
Finally, Pockett argues that since all electromagnetic effects are, essentially, fluctuations in the cosmic electromagnetic field, the mystics of the ages could have been right in claiming that the individual consciousness is but a part of a greater, all-pervading consciousness.
This is an academic book, and much of the experimental support she cites for her hypothesis, centring on smell, sound and vision, is technically out of bounds for the lay reader. But the thrust of her argument is easy to grasp, and she presents it clearly, concisely and with flashes of lively humour.
Dean Radin
The Conscious Universe
Dean Radin is one of the small number of professional psychologists who devote their lives to the thankless task of trying to prove to the world that there's something in paranormal phenomena - or psi, to use the shorthand term.
Most scientists take the view that it's not even worth reading reports by alleged cranks such as Radin, when the claims they make have - they say - long since been proved groundless by systematic scientific enquiry. Exceptions to this attitude, though, include some respected and even great names of recent science - Nobel prizewinning physicist Brian Josephson, biologist Rupert Sheldrake, physicist Nick Herbert, cosmologist Carl Sagan, and Albert Einstein himself.
One thing all these figures have in common is that they actually have studied the evidence for psi, and concluded that it is not merely ambiguous or suggestive, but pretty much irrefutable. It's this evidence that Radin discloses in this book, after first presenting an exhaustive explanation of statistical metaanalysis.
Most of the evidence Radin discusses - all from laboratory experiments - seems highly credible, with even sceptics such as Ray Hyman acknowledging its statistical significance while remaining reluctant to grant it epistemological importance. The most extensive set of data comes from tests known as "Ganzfeld" ("whole field") experiments, in which subjects were tested for telepathic and clairvoyant abilities while subjected to white noise and visual blocking. Evidence for telekinesis has been obtained by getting subjects to try to influence electronic random number generators. Metaanalysis of these experiments has yielded odds against chance of one in millions and billions. Radin also addresses the issue of the "file drawer" problem - the hypothetical assumption that there always exist unsuccessful studies that are never published - by demonstrating how many unpublished unsuccessful studies would be needed to offset the positive studies and bring the results down to chance level. Typically, hundreds of file drawer studies would be required to counteract every positive study.
The studies I found somewhat less convincing were those conducted by Radin himself, in which he purports to show that when millions of people concentrate on a single event, the "randomness" of random number generators diminishes. It's not that the data is totally unconvincing, but to be honest there isn't all that much of it, and the criteria for what constitutes an "event" could be seen as somewhat arbitrary. And how do we know there wouldn't be hundreds of additional "peaks" of nonrandomness for which no corresponding "events" can be found?
This isn't to say that Radin's own research should be discounted, merely that it needs honing and building on if it's to withstand serious flak from sceptics (such flak being, of course, a necessary and desirable part of the scientific process). As for the other evidence here, I don't think anyone calling themselves a rationalist could argue with the methodical, level-headed and thoroughly sane approach that Radin takes. It's true that the careful, systematic description of experiment after experiment makes this book somewhat less entertaining than the more anecdotally-based The Sense of Being Stared At by Rupert Sheldrake, but it is well-written and is enlivened by Radin's wry humour.
Arch-sceptics can dismiss the evidence here without reading it if they wish; but that does raise the question of why one should take them any more seriously than the wishy-washy pseudo-mystics and pseudo-psychics who have done so much to give serious "paranormal" (for want of a less loaded term) research a bad name.
V S Ramachandran
Phantoms in the Brain
Anyone who's seen the neurologist VS Ramachandran's contributions to TV science programmes will have been struck by his enthusiasm, originality and perspicacity, and they will be pleased to find these qualities equally in evidence in his writing.
This book covers similar territory to Oliver Sacks' fascinating books, but it offers more hard science and goes into far more detail about the roles of the different regions of the brain. Obviously Ramachandran can only cover a relatively small amount of ground, but he gives a good flavour of what neurology is all about. He convincingly suggests that the apparent unity of the self is to some extent an illusion, made up from fragmentary inputs from different sources.
Particularly disturbing is Ramachandran's discussion of the roles of the two hemispheres of the brain, with the left being essentially "conservative" and the right being "revolutionary". In most of us a balance is struck between the two sides, but patients with damage to the right side of their brain can find themselves simultaneously paralysed in the left side of their body, and with their capacity to "revise" their body image seriously impaired - resulting in complete denial that they are paralysed. How fragile, one can't help but think, is our precious sanity.
Every syndrome discussed here is fascinating: phantom limbs, "fake" pregnancies, temporal lobe seizures that result in intense religious experiences, and damage to connections between the temporal lobes and the limbic system that results in patients believing their loved ones to be imposters, because recognition of their faces fails to produce an emotional response.
Later on, Ramachandran can't resist delving into the muddy waters of theories of consciousness, and I felt that here he starts to lose his way a little. He argues that we should reduce a definition of consciousness and qualia (subjective perceptions) to a series of scientifically measurable criteria - which is fine at one level, but ultimately boils down to a slightly more subtle variation of behaviourism, which I don't think he wants to embrace. Though he good-humouredly mocks his colleague Francis Crick's hardline materialism, ultimately Ramachandran seems to endorse Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" - that neurological description does offer a full explanation of consciousness - or the fullest we can ever hope for - even if our instinctive feeling is that it doesn't. Ramchandran makes a convincing case as to why conscious perceptions need to be sustained in memory - so that we can use them to modify our behaviour and our world-view - but he doesn't, in my view, explain why these sustained patterns, these qualia, need to be conscious.
Still, it's not as though anyone has yet proffered any more complete theories of consciousness, and one can hardly blame Ramachandran for having a go, given all the detailed neurological knowledge he has at his disposal.
In summary this is a very good book that offers an excellent complement to Oliver Sacks' writing, its emphasis on neurological detail rather than imaginative character description.
Oliver Sacks
An Anthropologist on Mars
The title is the self-description of Temple Grandin, an autistic American academic, successful businesswoman, and world expert in design of agricultural equipment. She is one of seven individuals profiled in this typically engaging book by one of the most skilled popular expositors of neurological disorder.
The format of the book follows that of 'The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat', consisting of seven independent essays rather than being a single narrative. As such, the book has no essential thesis, except perhaps to encourage the reader to perceive neurologically abnormal people as different rather than deficient. This idea is not politically correct self-delusion - for what Sacks conveys very vividly are the ways in which these individuals have learned to live with their conditions, and, in some cases, found other mental faculties developing to extraordinary degrees of potency that only their deficiencies in other areas have made possible. For example, a painter who turned colour blind after an accident developed exceptional long distance vision, and came despite his initial despair to view his monochrome world as, in a sense, as valid and even in some ways as beautiful as the chromatic world he had lost. And Temple Grandin, like many (though not all) with autism, has achieved success her field partly through her staggeringly accurate visual spatial skills and powers of recall.
The chapters of 'An Anthropologist' are longer than those of 'The Man Who Mistook...', and the portrayals of the subjects are still more involving than in the earlier book. Sacks has a gift for evoking the essence of people as successfully as a good novelist, and this, coupled with his determination to engage emotionally with his subjects (on however limited terms), really draws the reader into their worlds. In a sense this is particularly remarkable given the limitedness of some of those worlds: an artist with temporal lobe damage, obsessed by the Italian village of his birth so that he can talk of - and paint - nothing else; and an ex-hippie with devastating damage to his short-term memory, trapped in time in the late 1960s and destined to spend his days in a neurological institute.
Only occasionally, I wondered if Sacks's sympathy for his subjects, and his artistic desire for neat resolutions to his 'stories', sometimes got the better of his judgement. One of the chapters, for example, tells the poignant story of a Virgil, a near-blind man who, under the strong encouragement of his wife, agreed to have an operation to restore his sight. The results were catastrophic: because his brain, over four decades, had adapted to interpreting the spatial world entirely by touch, it proved unequal to the task, so late on in life, of learning to make sense of its new visual data. It is almost certain that the stress of this readjustment hastened the progress of a long-standing lung disease that left him breathing through an oxygen mask. Curiously enough, at the same time his vision regressed completely, with no apparent organic cause. And Sacks focusses on this regression almost as a 'happy ending', a release from an intolerable situation. The fact is that Virgil lost his house, his job, his independence and much of his hope through this crisis. One can understand Sacks's wish, as a doctor, always to seek cure or resolution, but this was not the only time where I felt he rounded off a story a little too tidily, and also - sad to say - perhaps a little too optimistically.
All the same, once again Sacks writes a fascinating and thought-provoking book that brings home the basic contingency of "normal" human modes of perception. The prime difficulty faced by most of his subjects is not that their understanding of the world is distorted (for all perception is, in a sense, distortion); but that they are forced to live in a social machine designed by a majority who model that world very differently. To this majority, their situation is mostly incomprehensible, and it is to Sacks's credit that he is determined to go down the road of comprehension as far as he can get.
The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
Neurologist Oliver Sacks provides portraits of some of his most interesting patients, showing some of the myriad ways in which neurological malfunction can skew the mind's perception and understanding of the world. One man is horrified by his own leg, and tries to throw it out of his bed every night - not realising he is attached to it. A woman loses all sense of her body, and has to learn to walk using sight alone. A musician loses the ability to distinguish common objects such as gloves and faces. A pair of retarded twins cannot perform the simplest arithmetic, yet are able to reel off six-figure prime numbers in seconds (and twelve-figure ones in minutes).
Sacks's focus is not on the neurological details of his patients' conditions, but on the ways in which their conditions affect their perception of reality. He introduces the book by stating his desire to present medical case studies in a more human and personal context than usual, and the result - notwithstanding the occasional self-conscious artistic flourish - is an exceptionally clear-sighted, humane, and compellingly written meditation on how narrow the bounds of what we call normality actually are.
Musicophilia
Sacks draws on his neurological cases studies, and his passion for music, to present a wide-ranging discussion of how the human brain interprets music. He describes many cases of music being used therapeutically, for example to generate temporary threads to the thoughts of subjects with severe amnesia, or to reactivate emotions in unreceptive patients. Sacks also describes what deficiencies in appreciation of music can tell us about how the brain models the world.
The book is more free in form than Sacks's earlier books: some chapters focus on his patients, others are more abstract and scientific accounts of the brain's workings. As ever, the writer's passion, insight and humanity make this a big success.
Erwin Schrödinger
What is Life? / Mind and Matter / Autobiographical Sketches
Like most great scientists, Erwin Schrödinger was also a great thinker, as interested in the philosophical implications of his theories as much as in the theories themselves. In his seminal popular essay What is Life?, published in 1944, he contemplated the emerging science of genetics with a physicist's eye - and maintained that quantum mechanics must play a fundamental role in genetic mutation.
The bulk of What is Life is given over to a discussion of the process of mutation, and is fairly technical, though not inaccessible to the lay reader. Schrödinger argues that the chemical "jump" involved in mutation is, in a very deep way, analagous to, indeed causally linked with, the unpredictable "jumps" made by subatomic particles from place to place and state to state.
The later sections of What is Life? posit answers to the question asked in the essay's title: Schrödinger's succinct definition of a living organism is of one that continually draws negative entropy from its environment, thus enabling it persist in a state of complexity. Schrödinger also speculates perspicaciously on the nature of consciousness, observing that it is can only be experienced as a singular phenomenon, regardless of how many individual "inputs" make it up.
Schrödinger elaborates on the theme of consciousness further in Mind and Matter. An idea that I found particularly interesting was that organic processes gradually recede from consciousness to subconsciousness or unconsciousness as they become more "familiar" to the organism: that consciousness is sharpest where the organism interacts directly with its environment, and therefore needs to make "decisions" on courses of action. He offers this as a possible explanation of the "tortured genius" syndrome, arguing that "an unusually bright light of awareness" predisposes one to perceive life as a problem to be solved rather than as an experience to be enjoyed. The thesis, fascinating though it is, is somewhat undermined by the case of Schrödinger himself, who was evidently untroubled by neuroses.
At times, Schrödinger waxes positively mystical, and takes seriously the idea of some kind of transcendent consciousness that overarches individual minds.
These two essays are very interesting and by no means as dated as one might imagine, over half a century later. That surely says something about how little fundamental theoretical scientific progress - as opposed to technical filling-in-of-blanks - was made in the second half of the twentieth century. A true resolution between biology and quantum mechanics still proves elusive, in no small part thanks to the reluctance of the biological community to properly engage with modern physics.
The Autobiographical Sketches give a very brief account of Schrödinger's life, which seems to have been a pretty charmed one. A happy childhood in Austria was followed by university posts throughout Europe, his political integrity in refusing to work under the Nazis ironically being rewarded in a very peaceful wartime spell in Dublin. And while his marriage was not all it might have been, clearly he found compensation in his numerous affairs, which he alludes to briefly but candidly.
Rupert Sheldrake
The Sense of Being Stared At
Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist, is one of the few scientists who's prepared to stick his neck out and entertain publicly the possibility of what are commonly called paranormal phenomena. Much of this book comprises a tour of Sheldrake's database of accounts of weirdness submitted to him by spooked punters. It's interesting reading, if one is open-minded about these things, but of course anecdotes prove nothing. To beef up his claims, Sheldrake presents results of experiments that appear to suggest that telepathic ability is not uncommon in human beings, and virtually rampant in many animals. The author also briefly describes his vague theory of "morphic fields", whereby consciousness extends beyond the physical confines of the body. He doesn't suggest any clear mechanism for this extension, arguing that the solution must lie in as yet unguessed-at physical laws.
Sheldrake talks about "telepathic incidents" as though the existence of telepathy can be taken for granted, and all that remains to be done is to prove that beyond doubt. This attitude, together with his somewhat earnest prose style, clearly opens him to the ridicule of sceptics; and there is relatively little mention here of experiments on ESP that have yielded negative results. But he does draw attention to an important point: that much data supporting the existence of ESP has not been discredited by the scientific establishment, but rather disregarded or explained away as due to chance - a "Joker card" rarely played with regard to research in less controversial areas. The fact is that science as it stands cannot begin to account for such results. So is science deficient, or are the results "wrong"? The jury's out - but let it not be forgotten that our current theories can't actually explain consciousness in any form, whether personal or transcendental.
I found this an interesting and thought-provoking book - not always credible in its contentions, but a serious and important contribution to the debate about phenomena beyond the current limits of explicability.
L Dudley Stamp
Britain's Structure and Scenery
A detailed survey of the geological make-up of the British Isles. Fascinating, but it gets rather complicated, and is best understood with the aid of an illustrated geology text book. In fact, the book was written when the theory of plate tectonics was in its infancy (1946), so although the description of the surface landscape may be accurate, the sections on volcanism are somewhat out-of-date.
Ian Stewart
Does God Play Dice?
A few years now since I read this, and a lot of it was over my head even then. However, I understood enough to find it very interesting. It's about the mathematics of chaos, and why so many natural phenemena are inherently unpredictable: a minute change in the initial state of a system can fundamentally alter its behaviour later on - though it may be a very long time indeed before the bifurcation is manifested.
That's about as much as I can remember of this book. Stewart makes a good attempt at explaining some very arcane mathematical concepts in layman's terms, sweetening the pill with a slightly wacky, Douglas Adams-like prose style which sometimes comes off and sometimes grates a little.
An occasionally difficult read for the non-scientist, but a worthwhile one.
Life's Other Secret
"This book will set you on the road to make a great discovery" - so asserts John D. Barrow in a quote on the cover of this book. And, amazingly, he's right!
In this book, Ian Stewart sets about explaining how mathematical patterns play a vitally important role in the development of life forms - the shapes of protein molecules, the numbers of petals on flowers, and the rhythms a horse's gaits, to name just a few. The central message of the book is that genes are only a starting point for the development of living organisms - maths (with a bit of help from physics) does the rest.
I found this a truly fascinating book. Stewart's style is lucid and accessible, and here is less hampered by intrusive wackiness than that of Does God Play Dice?
Nature's Numbers
A short, largely non-technical introduction to the role played by mathematical patterns in the natural world. Interesting enough, but if you're really curious about this fascinating subject, I'd recommend jumping straight to the meatier Life's Other Secret by the same author.
Michael Talbot
The Holographic Universe
In this intriguing and readable, but ultimately incoherent book, Michael Talbot explains why he thinks the universe is a giant hologram, converted by our brains from waveforms to sensory perceptions.
Talbot didn't invent this notion: it was first postulated by neurophysiologist Karl Pribram and physicist David Bohm. Indeed it doesn't really constitute a theory at all: rather, it's a model that may ultimately, it seems, offer new inroads into understanding the nature of reality, consciousness and perception.
Unfortunately, Talbot takes the anology literally, while at the same time being very vague about the picture of reality he's painting. He says "the brain is a hologram" and also that "the cosmos is a hologram" - apparently unaware of the contradiction, and without ever addressing the question of what the "film" is on which either of these "holograms" is supposedly recorded.
Talbot, it should be noted, is not a scientist: he's a novelist-cum-mystic, and his real interest in the holographic model is clearly almost entirely down to its ability, according to him, to account for paranormal phenomena. Most of the book in fact is devoted to anecdotal accounts of hallucinatory or mystical experiences, and other "psi" phenomena such as psychokinesis. Every now and then he'll throw in a claim that "the holographic model offers a way to understand these experiences" or suchlike, but he rarely lingers long on the "explanation" holography offers and, when he does, the "explanation" is again so hopelessly vague as to seem nothing of the sort (for example, he uses as evidence the descriptions of people who've had near death experiences (NDEs) of entering a world of "light" and "higher frequencies").
As it nears its end, the book starts filling up with the most tedious, saccharine new age mumbo-jumbo. "We live in a universe that is far more benevolent than we realise," he croons; and a little later, "We are indeed on a shaman's journey, mere children struggling to become technicians of the sacred". He takes the experiences of NDEers at face value and seems to accept uncritically the idea that the "purpose" of life is moral edification - which leaves as something of a mystery what the life lesson of, say, a Nazi concentration camp guard, or a wasp, is meant to be.
Still, I can't deny that I found many of the descriptions in this book of mystical and paranormal phenomena intriguing, even if Talbot is altogether too uncritical of his sources. To account for this is perhaps his own apparently extensive first-hand paranormal experience: to him the case is already proven, so he doesn't necessarily appreciate how improbable it all sounds to the more sceptical reader.
One aspect of the holographic model that, I felt, might prove genuinely useful in investigating the ultimate nature of matter and consciousness is the notion of "the part containing the whole". As Talbot shows, each area of a holographic film contains an image of the whole, albeit a fuzzy one: the bigger the area of the film we use to generate the holographic image, the sharper the image is. The parallel with an idea of Bohm's is tantalising: that in some sense, the whole of the universe is manifest in every quantum particle. Might consciousness, then, be the "sharpening" of an image of the world through the activity of billions of particles acting in concert? To me, the idea definitely sounds neat enough to have mileage.
James D Watson
The Double Helix
This isn't the first book to read if you want to learn about what DNA actually is and does, but on its own terms it's highly successful. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with Francis Crick, recounts the events that led up to the great moment when their revolutionary paper was published in Nature. He makes no attempt to see events from the outside or with the benefit of hindsight; instead, one senses his reliving those halcyon days as he writes. The result is a lively, opinionated and (at least apparently) candid account, vividly conveying the personalities of the half-dozen scientists involved in the quest - and, no less vividly, the rivalries and friendships between them.
Watson is a blunt writer, and his notoriously sardonic portrayal of the prickly crystalographer Rosalind Franklin must now seem decidedly unfair in the light of recent revelations of how great her contribution was, and how unreasonably she was treated by many of her male peers (including Watson and Crick themselves).
Some very basic background knowledge of the functions of DNA, RNA and proteins may be useful before reading this book, but on the other hand its greatest achievement is to convey the thrill, both personal and intellectual, of working at the cutting edge of science. The short chapters and Watson's eager prose make it, perhaps unexpectedly, a breeze to read.
DNA: The Secret of Life
By several accounts vain, arrogant, bad-tempered and self-seeking, James Watson has his critics as a human being, but let no word be said against him as a writer. His gift for clear exposition, pace, and analysis both intellectual and moral, should be an example to every other science populariser on the planet (and of course Watson isn't primarily a populariser at all).
In this rich and meaty book, Watson traces the history of the principles of genetics from Mendel onwards, discusses in detail the controversies and scandals that have attended the race to make money from genes, reveals what DNA tells us of human history, and elucidates the ongoing scientific struggle to understand and find cures for inherited illness.
Every topic is covered in exhaustive depth, the reason the book isn't longer than its 430 pages being the wonderful concentration of Watson's prose, which never lapses into waffle and follows explanations, themes and arguments to their conclusions with total focus. Of course it helps that the author knows his material inside out; yet what comes through in DNA as much as in The Double Helix, written almost forty years earlier, is his undiminished passion for his subject. No less refreshing is his famed bluntness; it's a joy to read his sarcastic comments on ex-colleagues he considers to have "sold out" to big-money pharmaceutical companies, as much as his criticisms of the over-the-top political correctness responsible for facts such as that genetic understanding of skin colour remains minimal because no one will "touch" research in that area.
Blunt Watson may be, but he's no bigot: he argues his points carefully and vigorously, and however strong his opinions, they mostly appear to be the results of long and considered thought. While he comes out strongly in favour of GM foods and even genetic modification of embryos, he admits the counterarguments and makes clear that his position is a result of weighing things in the balance. I can't deny I found some of his ideas rather unpalatable and even distasteful, but it's important that someone makes a persuasive case for them because it challenges those of us who "instinctively" think differently to examine the integrity of our own positions.
My only significant criticism of this book is the relative paucity of illustrations. Having studied basic genetics at an evening class, I found Watson's textual explanations, on the whole, very clear; but for anyone coming to the subject cold, a few more detailed diagrams wouldn't have gone amiss.
Richard Wolfson
Simply Einstein
... or "Relativity for Dummies". A very good introduction to relativity that emphasises the fundamental geometric simplicity of Einstein's theories. In particular, special relativity is covered with exhaustive thoroughness, the author displaying endless patience in iterating and reiterating concepts until they can't help but sink in.
General relativity (the more complex elaboration on the special theory that takes in gravity and acceleration) is dealt with rather more speedily - in fact Wolfson skips altogether explanations of why black holes, gravitational waves, and other weirdnesses, should exist, opting instead for geometric analogies using fewer dimensions (e.g. the familiar "balls on a rubber sheet" model for gravity using two rather than three spacial dimensions). Even here, though, the underlying concept - that gravity and acceleration are fundamentally the same thing - is pretty straightforward. What's somewhat less easy is getting the imagination round the bendy vision of spacetime that it implies.
All told, though, an exceptionally clear and readable account.