Something about The Search

John Barrow is one of the best popular science writers we have. I was quick to pick his New Theories of Everything on my last trip to Landmark. I had expected a discussion of the current candidates for TOE, especially string theory. The book has that, but rather than focus on particular theories it takes a broader approach. It begins with the concept of 'Laws of nature', how the idea came to be, how we discovered some, and are they really there, or as some philosophers (especially Kant) would have us believe, are just constructions of the human mind. Then it ranges over Godel's incompleteness theorem and its possible implications for Physics, the relationship between Mathematics and Physics, the role of initial conditions and symmetry breaking (which is essentially random) in the birth of the universe, the emergence of complexity and a lot of other relevant stuff. It's more of a sketch of how a TOE might look like and whether it could be really present. And Barrow is remarkable not only in the breadth of the material but also in the lucidity of explanations. Let me give you an example. Conservation laws (notably the one for Energy) were discovered in Nineteenth Century. It's a standard scientific fact. What Barrow adds is it lead to a growth of Atheism among the scientists because earlier they all had believed that some divine control was required (at least periodically) to keep the world from going astray. What conservation laws showed was Nature has measures of her own. To take another example, at the beginning of the twentieth century it was discovered that the conservation laws can be expressed as invariances, like the conservation of angular momentum as invariance of the laws of nature to orientation in space. But it also lead to the deemphasis of the nature of time, with a revival of Parmenidan Philosophy from some two thousand years ago, because the focus shifted from studying change to studying invariances. Barrow has written entire books about some of the topics discussed here eg. Infinities (The infinite book) or fundamental constants of nature (Constants of Nature), so the discussions here may serve as useful summaries of those more detailed works.

If you want a readable view of the current search for TOE (with a lot of stuff about how that reflects upon other areas of enquiry, like philosophy or theology), you should read this book.

Enjoy!!