Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation
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- Category: Science
Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation
In books such as The World Within the World and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, astronomer John Barrow has emerged as a leading writer on our efforts to understand the universe. Timothy Ferris, writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London, described him as “a temperate and accomplished humanist, scientist, and philosopher of science–a man out to make a contribution, not a show.” Now Barrow offers the general reader another fascinating look at modern physics, as he explores the quest for a single, unifying theory that will unlock nature’s secrets.
Theories of Everything is more than a history of science, more than a popular report on recent research and discoveries. Barrow provides a reflective, intelligent commentary on what a true Theory of Everything would be–its ingredients, its limitations, and what it could tell us about the universe. Never before, he writes, have physicists been so confident and so eager in the hunt for this “cosmic Rosetta Stone,” as he calls it: “a single all-embracing picture of all the laws of nature from which the inevitability of all things seen must follow with unimpeachable logic.” He lays out eight essential ingredients for a Theory of Everything and then explores each in turn, tracing how our knowledge has developed and how scientific discovery relates to our changing philosophy and religious thought in each area. Some of these ingredients are obvious–the laws of nature must be explained, for example, as well as its organizing principles–but others may be surprising, such as broken symmetries and selection biases. A Theory of Everything must account for the fact that the universe is “messy and complicated,” he tells us, and for the limitations imposed by the questions we ask and the information we can obtain. The key lies in the remarkable capacity of mathematics to express the fundamental workings of the physical world–a language that the human mind is uniquely equipped to understand and manipulate. Barrow examines what mathematics actually is and describes how it makes the universe intelligible and provides a path to the underlying coherence in nature–which has led, in fact, to arguments that the universe itself is a vast computer. Yet even the most complete theory, even the most comprehensive mathematical explanation, cannot account for the uncomputable varieties of human experience and thought. “No non-poetic account of reality,” he writes, “can be complete.”
In a field where the authorities converse in equations and mathematical notations, John Barrow speaks with the voice of thoughtful and knowledgeable humanist. Written with eloquence and expertise, Theories of Everything establishes a new perspective on humanity’s efforts to explain the universe.
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Customer Reviews 16 of 16 people found the following review helpful I expected a book that would focus on Theories of Everything that have been proposed to date– a history of Grand Unified Theories, their proposers, to what extent they have been correct and have unified previously disparate theories, and to what extent they are not really Grand Unified Theories. That is not what I got. I got something not necessarily better than described above, but different; certainly not worse. To highlight the difference from what you might expect, during one early chapter, I thought I had started rereading Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind by mistake. And the Penrose is about consciousness and Artificial Intelligence. (Also a very good book, by the way.) Theories of Everything is more of a cookbook. Whether you will come out with a cake at the end is doubtful, but it gives you what the necessary ingredients are to bake a successful theory of everything. You need some universal principles or laws, some logic, some math, some chaos/complexity theory, the initial conditions of the universe (possibly quantum), some time theory, some elementary particles, a bit of gauge theory, possibly some wormholes and parallel universes, some questionable constants, some symmetries and symmetry breaking, an absence of theoretical bias (probably an impossible ingredient), and a philosophical mathematical basis. And that is exactly what you get. Barrow seems to love philosophy as much as he loves physics, math and logic. That makes me like this book even more, as those are the fields of my concern, as well. My one area of contention with Barrow is that he is ultimately a dualist, I am a physicalist. I disagree with him that a theory of everything could not contain music, poetry, consciousness, etc. An alternate reading from the cookbook reading is that this book _is_ theories of everything–not a unified singular one, but it contains theories on all of the topics mentioned above and then some. Barrow is an extremely intelligent man and a very entertaining writer. Don’t pass this book up.  Impossible search., September 6, 2002 By Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) – See all my reviews  The author believes that it is beyond the human reach to find a ‘Theory of Everything’, in other words an abbreviated representation – an algorithm or formula – of the logic behind the Universe’s properties. A theory that unites the four fundamental forces. His reasoning is solid, but sometimes difficult to follow. Not an easy read. Here are a few of his arguments: (1) the world (e.g. chaotic processes) is not totally algorithmically compressible. (2) many constants of Nature got their values in the earliest stages of the universe. From the predictions emerging from the ‘Theory of Everything, we should arrive at the current structure of the universe. This is nearly impossible. (3) If random elements of the Universe, inherited from its quantum origins, differ significantly from place to place, the knowledge of its global structure from our point of view will be incomplete. (4) Superstrings and its corollary ‘many dimensions’. What happened with the vanished dimensions? To the bargain, the author believes that even if we should find this theory, the factual impact on our life would be very limited. Why then are all members of the physicists guild searching fot it? And why writes the author such a challenging book about it? It is like the quest of the Holy grail in the Middle Ages. The sheer beaty of Einstein’s simple formula left everybody dumbfounded, but the person who will find a new equation ‘for everything’ would provoke a long lasting general silence followed by a burst of applause nearly as loud as the Big Bang. By the way, I am not so sure that the impact on our life of this theory would be limited. The theory of general relativity and his counterpart ‘quantum mechanics’ had an immense impact on our daily lives, for the good and the bad. A must read for everybody interested in the fate of the universe, or better multiverse.  Not so much about the ultimate theory but what it should be, February 15, 2001 By Kevin W. Parker (Greenbelt, MD) – See all my reviews
This was not quite what I expected it to be, which was an overview of the latest ultimate theories of physics. The book does go into that topic to some extent, but it is as much about the philosophy of science as about science itself: not just the ultimate theories, but what constitutes a successful theory and what characteristics an ultimate theory should have. As such, it addresses such topics as symmetry (especially the broken symmetry believed to explain the four basic forces), compressibility (the capability of a simple theory to explain complex consequences), constants, laws, the anthropic principle, initial conditions, and much more. It’s difficult going at times, and I can’t pretend that I understood all of it. However, I think it’s a book that will bear rereading, which I will plan on doing. Oh, and the quotes at the beginning of each section are great!
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