The Big Picture: On the Origins
of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. By Sean Carroll. Dutton. $28.
The ability to explain
science, math, medicine and other complicated and technical topics in language
that non-specialists can understand is very, very rare. The ability to do so while
also looking at what these highly abstruse topics mean is rarer still. All of which makes California Institute of
Technology theoretical physicist Sean Carroll very rare indeed. In The Big Picture, Carroll tackles the
complex and difficult and makes it comparatively simple and reasonably
understandable for the third time, after From
Eternity to Here and The Particle at
the End of the Universe. This time Carroll tries to use science to answer a
philosophical, even spiritual question: do our lives matter? Anyone who thinks
such a query is not the proper province of scientific investigation has not
encountered Carroll yet.
Carroll firmly believes that
human lives do matter, but not in any simple or simplistic way. “We are not the
reason for the existence of the universe,” he states directly, but we are still
“special within it.” Why? Not because we are the creations of an
anthropomorphic divinity – which would, in any case, not necessarily be a good
thing: “Many people may be comforted by the idea of a powerful being who cares
about their lives, and who determines ultimate standards of right and wrong
behavior. Personally, I am not comforted by that at all – I find the idea
extremely off-putting. I would rather live in a universe where I am responsible
for creating my own values and living up to them the best I can, than in a
universe in which God hands them down, and does so in an infuriatingly vague
way.” Readers may accept or argue with Carroll here – and elsewhere – but he
does make his biases plain, and he acknowledges them as biases and states that
he is aware they may skew his thinking.
What, then, does show us
that our lives matter? Carroll looks for answers to his own research in the
relationship between emerging complexity over time and increasing entropy (the
second law of thermodynamics), also over time. This is a genuinely fascinating
notion, since entropy is taught, and generally regarded, as relating to
increasing disorganization – but evolution, both of living creatures and of the
universe itself, undeniably leads to states of greater complexity, human beings
being one such development. Carroll explains this by showing, for example, how randomness
and apparent disorganization – the role of chance variation and mutation – are central
to Darwin's theory of natural selection: what seems disorganized and, from one perspective, actually is, turns
out to be increasingly organized when viewed from a different angle. Carroll is
expert at finding the various viewing angles and at explaining them in language
that flirts with the poetic when it is not being resolutely matter-of-fact.
Indeed, the paradigm that
Carroll recommends for understanding the world is called poetic naturalism, and his argument in The Big Picture is that this is the way to allow science,
philosophy, wonder, mystery, joy, purpose and meaning to coexist without the
necessity of a godlike being but without being dismissive of those who consider
such a being fundamental. Interestingly, poetic naturalism turns on the notion
of vocabulary. We have different
ways, Carroll says, to talk about quantum events than about those on a human
scale – which is certainly true if one compares Newtonian and Einsteinian
formulations. We have still other ways of discussing things at the cosmic
level. The various stories we tell ourselves, Carroll argues, are both
meaningful and correct within their assigned contexts – but words used in a
certain way in one context may mean something entirely different when used in
another.
This is complex thinking,
but no less helpful for its difficulty. At the atomic level, words such as
“meaning” and “purpose” have no referents. But there can be a “purpose” for
simple, more-complex, still-more-complex, and eventually human organisms. Same
word, different meanings – that is Carroll’s point. It follows from this
formulation that errors such as creationism and “intelligent design” involve
contextual misuses of words whose meanings are being applied inappropriately.
Carroll himself is expert at
finding pointed and informative ways to use words – his discussion of “stable
planets of belief” and “habitable planets of belief” is one example among many.
At the same time, he tends to lapse periodically into language that is second
nature to him but that readers may find confusing: “We aspire to be perfect
Bayesian abductors, impartially reasoning to the best explanation….” But
readers who get caught up in the swift flow of Carroll’s prose will rarely find
these forays into technical terminology off-putting.
What is particularly
attractive in The Big Picture is not
its bigness but the small ways in which Carroll makes his points. Consider a
mere nine-word sentence: “Science is a technique, not a set of conclusions.”
That is a marvelously pithy formulation whose implications, Carroll shows,
allow scientific thinking to go anywhere at all – even to supernatural
explanations of events. Carroll has no fear of using the technique, alloyed
with his explanatory clarity, to pursue grand questions in biology,
neuroscience, astrophysics, mathematics, as well as philosophy and religion. “Understanding
how the world works, and what constraints that puts on who we are, is an
important part of understanding how we fit into the big picture,” writes
Carroll. The Big Picture is a
bracing, thoughtful, well-argued, perceptive and always fascinating attempt to
attain and communicate an understanding of who and what we are, in what context
we live, and, yes, for what purpose.
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