Views from Crestmont Drive

I’ve spent my blogging time this afternoon refining yesterday’s post about Michio Kaku’s book THE GOD EQUATION. I’m not sure reducing 20 bullets about each chapter to 10 bullets will make much difference, in terms of my goal to pass along knowledge I’ve gained to anyone reading this blog. But that’s what I did today, and I’m always thinking toward the big picture, that my accumulation of blog essays and summaries of significant books will add up to something, in the long run.

About this book — I remain a bit queasy about the author’s consideration of a “grand planner,” as if one were needed to explain the mathematical consistency of the universe, which he is agnostic about only because it can’t be proved. I am much more inclined to be persuaded — about the “reason” for the existence of our universe — by the idea that only one set of physical constants and mathematical principles is consistent. That somehow, our universe exists because nothing else can exist. And that, if were we far more intelligent, this would be obvious.

At the same time, I suspect these big issues are simply incomprehensible to primates like us, wandering around on the surface of an average planet, forever blinkered by the limitations of our senses, and our capacity to understand abstract concepts. Just think how tiny a proportion of the human population is able to understand the physics so far identified. We are like dogs thinking we might be able to understand arithmetic, and oblivious to concepts like geometry and calculus.

Here’s a book I thought suspect on two or three counts, but which turned out to be quite worthwhile. It’s a succinct, crisp history of physics, from the Greeks to the present, and ending with, though not dwelling too much on, string theory. Along the way we meet all the famous physicists we’ve heard about, matched up to their key discoveries, and in turned matched up to how those discoveries changed human history and have played out in the modern world.
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