Book Description
SEX HAPPENS...all year long!
More that 120,000 copies in print!
Just when you thought the Kama Sutra couldn't get any hotter, Cosmo cranks up the erotic heat with detailed, instructive illustrations and essential sex advice. This great looking gift book is packaged in a sensual red slipcase--what a way to say, "Be my Valentine!"... 365 days a year.
Three million fun, fearless readers of Cosmopolitan agree on one thing: no one knows sex better. And these 77 fully-illustrated passion positions, adapted from the magazine's hugely popular Kama Sutra series, will take anyone's lust life to a whole new level. Cosmo's steamy how-to guide is no ancient text: it's modern, all about pleasure (for both partners), and couldn't be more fun. Replete with newly commissioned drawings and instructions that explain exactly how to master each move, this carnal collection is destined to be a staple on nightstands across the nation. All 77 positions--from the Wanton Wheelbarrow to the Passion Pretzel to the Romp with a View--come with a "Carnal Challenge" rating to indicate the degree of difficulty. Add to that a slew of sex tips, and you've got a torrid tour-de-force that will be as much fun to give as to receive!
Customer Reviews:
i like this one...........2007-09-10
because the pictures aren't of real people but are like bathroom figures. i'm not a big fan of the kama sutra books that have naked people all up in them...i feel like i'm looking at porn. if you're like me this is the book for you.
Not pleasurable at all!.......2007-08-30
UNCOMFORTABLE! Most of these positions were created out of desperation for "NEWNESS" opposed to created for pleasure and good sex! It is as though the point were not to create sexual satisfaction, but to test the couples physical flexibility and endurance for discomfort.
The Cosmo Kama Sutra: 77 Mind-Blowing Sex Positions.......2007-05-14
Unless you spent your entire life doing acrobatics in a circus this is not helpful at all. I returned it because it was in no way realistic and seemed it would be quite painful for those of us who are not from the circus.
Cosmo Kama Sutra.......2007-03-15
I didn't feel the book had anything in it that the average person hadn't already tried before in their own experimenting. After like the first five positions, the book started repeating itself by switching the man with the woman, the left side with the right, or leaning forward or more backward. I don't really recommend buying this book, there wasn't anything in it that I didn't already know.
Mind blowing?!?!.......2007-02-16
I should have known that it wasn't real Kama Sutra. cosmo just makes it up as they go.
Product Description
Is Earth merely an insignificant speck in a vast and meaningless universe? On the contrary: The Privileged Planet shows that this cherished assumption of materialism is dead wrong. In this provocative book, Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards present a staggering array of evidence that exposes the hollowness of this modern dogma. They demonstrate that our planet is exquisitely fit not only to support life, but also to give us the best view of the universe, as if Earth were designed both for life and for scientific discovery. Readers are taken on a scientific odyssey from a history of tectonic plates, to the wonders of water and solar eclipses, to our location in the Milky Way, to the laws that govern the universe, and to the beginning of cosmic time. The Privileged Planet contains astounding findings that should lead any individual to reevaluate and even to reconsider our very purpose on what so many have dismissed as nothing more than an accident of cosmic evolution.
Customer Reviews:
A Better Reference Than A Reader.......2007-08-14
I really appreciated the work & thought that went into this book. I was already a proponent of intelligent design & actually got boored by the extensive examples of cosmological features that suggest design. Someone new to the subject & open-minded might find it far more interesting. The issue itself has eternal consequences & is therefore inherently interesting.
I was impressed that these fellows are capable philosophers of science & did well in their presentation of their argument as well as responding to criticisms. My main challenge for the intelligent design camp is to focus it's excellent critical examination skills upon the assumptions that undergird mainstream dating methods for the earth & cosmos. This is a weak link for them, which has been pricked by authos such as Kenneth R. Miller in Finding Darwin's God.
Have they read the book?.......2007-08-12
I do find it interesting to note, from the one star reviews, just how many of these "reviewers" take on the concepts of the book rather than engaging in personal insults and name calling. Seems like this book, and others, strikes a nerve that the secular humanist has a hard time dealing with?
Overall, this is a fabulous book. Written at an appropriate level of technical detail for general readers but chock full of the references to the hard science underlying the ideas. Like the distance from the earth to the moon, the diameter of the earth and the diameter of the moon. This interesting "coincidence" that these few facts present allow us to enjoy a total solar eclipse. The eclipse, in large part, allows us to understand what the sun is all about. We can then generalize to other stars in the universe. My what an interesting group of coincidences. These facts sounds like "Christian Science" to me?
Just as Michael Behe and Michael Denton and scores of others are rightfully bringing up questions about "just so" stories in biology relative to how we got here Guillermo Gonzalez and Mr Richards are bringing up many questions relative to just exactly where our earth happens to find itself in the universe.
God in a cheap suit.......2007-08-01
This is not a book about science, this is a book about a myth, written by people who do not understand science.
Worthwhile to look through to see what an "intelligent design" believer will claim.
Sure this book sucks, buuut..........2007-07-30
Sure this book sucks, but it's great for scientists and philosophers to use as a teaching guide for what is not science. There are so many fallacies, straw men and just plain false "facts" that it makes someone who is a scientist sick to his stomach. This kind of propagandistic filth is what holds back science and our youths from advancing. Thanks Gonzalez!
First-rate scholarship.......2007-05-15
On many occasions, I have loaned the DVD summary version of the book, "The Privileged Planet" to my college students to challenge their thinking in the field of Intelligent Design. The results have almost always been favorable. What is especially engaging about both the book and the DVD, is the "non-preaching" format: the research is purely scientific and presented in a manner that a wide range of readership should both understand and appreciate. My only "critical" comment would be this: the authors systematically build a scientific foundation of contingency. Since Jay Richards has a strong background in philosophy, I would have enjoyed an approach to the subject based upon Aristotle and his development of the argument of contingency. But this is a moot point. If you have high school students, read the book together with them and discuss.
Book Description
Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind—acclaimed by leading voices in philosophy, religion, psychology, and history—sets the stage for this major work, thirty years in the making, that dramatically reframes our understanding of the universe in the light of extraordinary new evidence.
Cosmos and Psyche is the first book by a widely respected scholar to demonstrate the existence of a consistent correspondence between planetary movements and the unfolding drama of human history. A vast and impressive body of evidence illuminates patterns of meaning and precise correlations between the universe and the world of human endeavor. With meticulous detail, Richard Tarnas takes us on a journey that begins with the ancient Greeks and culminates in our own era and its transformative potential, putting into perspective these chaotic, tumultuous times—from the sixties to September 11, 2001—and pointing the way towards the future.
In terms of planetary cycles, our present moment in history is most comparable to the period five hundred years ago—that era of “extraordinary turbulence and creativity,” the High Renaissance. Not since Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory has the human community faced such a profound realignment of the way we think. Readers of every persuasion will be impressed by the vast canvas here, the wealth of research and analysis, and the profound conclusions that may be drawn—conclusions that reunite religion and science, and restore a transcendent dimension to the universe.
Customer Reviews:
hard to see.......2007-10-03
Poor quality printing. Content material seemed fasinating but I could not read this book. I had trouble reading this print since there was not enough contrast between page and ink.
Sweeping societal/cultural insights by astrological events. And happening now. .......2007-09-28
Insightful and dense read on the significance of astrological events noting the timing of sweeping social and cultural upheaval, revolutions, renaissance and change. And 2007 marks the beginning of another great opportunity to be part of bringing the best of change that can happen to make the world better. A must read for astrologers and those who wish to be inspired to be part of our own renaissance.
on the far side..........2007-07-23
GNPR 69b: The Real Blockbuster Book!
As well as the Harry Potter book is selling, I think the real Blockbuster book of the summer is Paul Tarnas' new book, "Cosmos and Psyche." If you, one of your children, or one or more of your grandchildren has taken a "History of Civilization" course in College in the last fifteen years, chances are the text for the course was Tarnas' remarkable book, "The Passion of the Western Mind." Having taught various such courses over the years, I was bowled over a few years ago when Joe McGrath used the book for a year-long course I took at the U. of Arizona SAGE program. The book does a brilliant job of highlighting how the two streams of modern western civilization, Hebraic religion and Greek rationalism, met, and cross-fertilized each other, and in some real sense gave rise to what has become modern western culture. The book sold more than 300,000 copies, and in an age of abundant new text books, has managed to outsell all its rivals.
All the more stunning is Paul Tarnas' long-awaited new book, "Cosmos and Psyche." It is not merely a follow-up to the previous book, it is the summary of Tarnas' own work over the past thirty years on the interaction between the external world, the cosmos, and the internal world, the psyche. Tarnas accurately describes the aftermath of the Copernican revolution as generating a "disenchantment" of the world, as the world was seen as mechanical instead of animated, impersonal and material, instead of inhabited by some kind of spirit.
Now, as one might expect, Tarnas offers a remedy for overcoming that disenchantment, that distancing of self and world, that the scientific revolution brought about. But prepare yourself for a shock. This scholar, with outstanding credentials and a huge following, claims the way to overcome this breach between self and world, can take place only by rehabilitating the much disgraced science of astrology. Not the newspaper or fortune teller version of astrology, he says, but the real astrology, that which was subscribed to by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Kepler, Goethe, Yeats, and Jung. Yes, C.G. Jung, the founder of that "depth psychology" that Tarnas says is the one true royal road into understanding the subconscious.
Tarnas' opening quotation, in the attempt to document his case, comes from Jung: "Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most objective reaches of the psyche." Tarnas claims the works of Jung alone give us an acceptable alternative to the blunt materialism proclaimed by the likes of the physicist Steven Weinberg: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless." What Jung and the astrological tradition offers is the antithesis to the godless theme of the materialistic evolutionists like Jacques Monod: "Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance."
Unless we return to the wisdom of the astrological tradition, Tarnas claims we risk negating the spiritual dimension of the empirical universe, and thereby lose "any publicly affirmable ground for moral wisdom and restraint." Tarnas again turns to Jung for support: "We have not understood yet that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization." No mean task this, but the very preservation of our civilization!
A central tenet of Jung's depth psychology is the experience of synchronicity, those apparently incredibly unlikely simultaneous events, that had less than a one in a million chance of happening at the same time, --like meeting your long-lost lover at the train station, or having your lucky number show up when you really need the money. It is the experience of such synchronicities that turn skeptics into true believers, as happens with physicist Victor Mansfield: "I have encountered too many synchronistic experiences to ignore them. Yet these surprisingly common experiences pose tremendous psychological and philosophical challenges for our worldview. They are especially troubling experiences for me as a physicist trained within the culture of scientific materialism."
Even the committed skeptic would be brought up short by the journal entry of C.G. Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up..."
Given this background, Tarnas says he turned to the study of the astrology practiced by the likes of Kepler and Newton, which brought him to this conclusion: "The coincidence between planetary positions and appropriate biographical and psychological phenomena was in general so precise and consistent as to make it altogether impossible for me to regard the intricate patterning as merely the product of chance."
So what conclusions does Tarnas reach? "Together with many colleagues and students, I have now steadily pursued this research for three decades. What I have found far surpassed my expectations. I have become convinced that there does in fact exist a highly significant--indeed a pervasive--correspondence between planetary movements and human affairs, and that the modern assumption to the contrary has been erroneous."
Personally, I am left speechless. When I picked up this book, the last thing I expected was an ardent defense of astrology, however far removed from the newspaper horoscopes, and however authoritatively documented with quotations from Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Aquinas, Galileo and Kepler. So I pose this question to you: are you open-minded enough to want to read the "evidence" that Tarnas offers, or do you dismiss such reflections as simply beyond the pale of the possible? Would you regard as credible someone who told you your birth chart could predict the climactic events of your life, or that planetary conjunctions decisively influence your most important decisions?
As I always say, tell me what your first principles are, and I will tell you what your most logical conclusions should be. My mind is simply boggled by the fact that a scholar of Tarnas' eminence should propose astrology as a legitimate science, or that he should conclude this remarkable book with a chapter entitled: "Observations on Future Planetary Alignments." I take this to be one of the most paradigm-breaking books I have ever read, for I take the basic thesis to be completely nuts. And yet, that a scholar of this eminence would appear to be so completely convinced....
Where do these concepts come from?.......2007-05-21
For an astrologer, a new book on mundane astrology is already an event. The use of planetary cycles in mundane astrology is traditional, the astrologers of the past used especially the Jupiter Saturn cycle and the zodiacal sites of their conjunction.
On the other hand, the use of planetary cycles of transsaturnian planets has been extensively used and developed since 1970 by the french astrologer André Barbault, who reintroduced also the astrology of Morin de Villefranche in France (published by AFA) . Certainly, Richard Tarnas has written a best seller with the passion of the Western mind: he published also an interesting booklet on Uranus.
Unfortunately, this document doesn't hit again the target. Good references to the work of Barbault are lacking, altough Barbault developed the theory of planetary cycles in a deeper and more convincing way. Did Richard Tarnas really ignore this work? Does Richard Tarnas has a real good understanding of mundane Astrology? Not sure... Furthermore, the number of pages could be reduced by half. There are too many repetitions in the book, they hamper a good undertanding of the key concepts. Written for non astrologers, Richard could now extend his study and deliver a real and usable book of mundane astrology for propfessionals...
Wordmongering.......2007-05-15
After carefully reading about the first hundred pages of Cosmos and Psyche, I concluded that an in-depth reading wouldn't repay the time invested, and began to skim. There are several reasons for this.
One reason is that Richard Tarnas is a wordmonger, in several senses. First, he uses words impressionistically, so that many of his sentences do not yield a precise meaning even when closely analyzed. Second, he is extremely fond of stringing together clause after clause. An example (p. 77): "The range of correspondences between planetary positions and human existence is just too vast and multidimensional -- too manifestly ordered by structures of meaning, too suggestive of creative intelligence, too vividly informed by aesthetic patterning, too metaphorically multivalent, too experientially complex and nuanced, and too responsive to human participatory inflection -- to be explained by straightforward material factors alone." Others may consider such prose "lucid", but I don't.
However, if I had felt that Tarnas had something important to say, I would have plowed through his vast tome. And so we come to the main reason that I largely gave up on the book: his attempt to rehabilitate astrology for the modern mind is preposterous. Of course, given his vague writing style, it isn't clear exactly what he is claiming, and he hedges his bets with numerous qualifying phrases. He admits that astrology cannot be used to predict specific, concrete events; instead, one has to interpret history in terms of archetypes. And don't forget that archetypes can manifest themselves in numerous ways (p. 132): "Many diverse factors appear to play determining roles in shaping how an archetypal complex is concretely embodied: cultural, historical, ancestral, familial, circumstantial. To these must be added such factors as individual choice and degree of self-awareness, as well as, perhaps, karma, grace, chance, and other unmeasurables." In short, anything can happen.
In the end, Tarnas's correlation of historical events with astrological archetypes is purely semantic, and therefore highly subjective. Although Tarnas claims that an archetypal interpretation can provide a "wealth of insight" (p. 168) or help historical events become "intelligible" (p. 169), any attempt to impose an archetypal pattern on historical data will in fact narrow, not broaden, one's receptivity to different interpretations. And is it really to be believed that researchers could never understand a grouping of historical events and the connections between them without having an archetypal pattern to work from? How could knowing a single astronomical datum (e.g., Uranus and Pluto are aligned) make the connections more intelligible?
There are some reviewers who believe that, decades from now, Tarnas's book will be heralded as a watershed in human thought. I believe that his book is representative of the superstitious thinking that still lingers on. Is Tarnas really any different from those who pore over the quatrains of Nostradamus or delve into Bible prophecy?
Postscript
In the early part of the twentieth century, a Russian by the name of Alexander Chizhevsky worked up an elaborate theory on the causation of many human phenomena, including wars, revolutions, epidemics of disease, and so on. He amassed an enormous corpus of material in support of his theory that solar activity is the primary influence, and attempted to show correlation with the eleven-year solar cycle. I have a copy of one of his books (in Russian), and it is replete with tables of historical events, charts of epidemics, etc. Thus Chizhevsky and Tarnas have put forward incompatible theories, while each claims to have persuasive evidence. I wasn't persuaded by either one.
Amazon.com
As a boy, Brian Greene read Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and was transformed. Camus, in Greene's paraphrase, insisted that the hero triumphs "by relinquishing everything beyond immediate experience." After wrestling with this idea, however, Greene rejected Camus and realized that his true idols were physicists; scientists who struggled "to assess life and to experience the universe at all possible levels, not just those that happened to be accessible to our frail human senses." His driving question in The Fabric of the Cosmos, then, is fundamental: "What is reality?" Over sixteen chapters, he traces the evolving human understanding of the substrate of the universe, from classical physics to ten-dimensional M-Theory.
Assuming an audience of non-specialists, Greene has set himself a daunting task: to explain non-intuitive, mathematical concepts like String Theory, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and Inflationary Cosmology with analogies drawn from common experience. For the most part, he succeeds. His language reflects a deep passion for science and a gift for translating concepts into poetic images. When explaining, for example, the inability to see the higher dimensions inherent in string theory, Greene writes: "We don't see them because of the way we see…like an ant walking along a lily pad…we could be floating within a grand, expansive, higher-dimensional space."
For Greene, Rhodes Scholar and professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, speculative science is not always as thorough and successful. His discussion of teleportation, for example, introduces and then quickly tables a valuable philosophical probing of identity. The paradoxes of time travel, however, are treated with greater depth, and his vision of life in a three-brane universe is compelling and--to use his description for quantum reality--"weird."
In the final pages Greene turns from science fiction back to the fringes of science fact, and he returns with rigor to frame discoveries likely to be made in the coming decades. "We are, most definitely, still wandering in the jungle," he concludes. Thanks to Greene, though, some of the underbrush has been cleared. --Patrick O'Kelley
Book Description
From Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading physicists and author the Pulitzer Prize finalist
The Elegant Universe, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way.
Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? From Newton’s unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein’s fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics’ entangled arena where vastly distant objects can instantaneously coordinate their behavior, Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world.
Customer Reviews:
Enough with the stupid pop-culture references.......2007-10-01
As other reviewers have pointed out, the book tends to unnecessarily incorporate stupid pop-culture references to make the material seem more accessible to the layperson. Instead of making the material more accessible it seems extremely contrived and insults the intelligence of the reader. References to the Kwik-E-Mart, Mulder and Scully, and all of the other hoohah this book contains obscure the reader from what is essentially a fine work. Brian Greene's writing and explanatory power is unbelievable and it is a shame that the publisher probably insisted on the pop-culture references.
The book was definitely worth the purchase for its clear explanations of extra dimensions and the arrow of time. However, I did feel the portions dealing with time travel and black holes to be of lesser quality than writings by other authors like Michio Kaku. I recently read Kaku's "Parallel Worlds," and this book back to back and would say that if you're purchasing one book I would side with Kaku. This book contains much more on time than "Parallel Worlds" but the other topics covered are pretty much identical.
Excellent book!! not written like an encyclopedia.......2007-08-16
I found this book to be excellent. The author really understands how to take a complex subject like this and not make it read like a tedious textbook, also without dumbing it down to the point you feel like a 2 year old.. excellent read. Fascinating. Highly reccomend
This book is great.......2007-08-11
This book is great but I do not know if audio version is the best choice.
I would like to re-read some parts and see the releated illustrations. I believe it makes it easier to understand.
einstein for dummies.......2007-07-12
makes a very complicated subject readable for the layman.
it seemsthat the more science advances the more mysterious the
world becomes.
for me it reveals Gods creation as even more amazing as time
goes by
h.g.
Marvelous (if occasionally uneven) presentation of marvelous physics.......2007-07-11
I read the first half of _The Elegant Universe_, but I didn't finish it. I think it was because I felt that Greene was giving too much string theory without enough justification for giving me so much string theory. This may sound like an odd complaint, but it makes sense if you compare the earlier book with The Fabric of the Cosmos. Greene spends more time walking through..well..the fabric of the cosmos, and when he does get to string theory, it makes more sense why.
I actually found the string theory portion of the book (section 4 out of 5) less interesting than the first sections, which give a lot of experimentally based information about really, really crazy things in general relativity and quantum mechanics (inflation, entanglement, the time "loaf," quantum uncertainty, multiple pasts, entropy, symmetry, etc.). Greene is very good at explaining what these experiments & theories mean on an intuitive level. Sometimes too good. (Some of the examples using Bart Simpson, etc. are a little slower than necessary, but never egregiously so.) There are plenty of moments in the text that hurt your brain, however, so if the material is new to you, the presentation will not detract.
One of the best features of the book is the leitmotiv of time's arrow. Greene keeps returning to the problem of time: why does it only flow in one direction, when physical law seems to suggest that it could just as well flow in both directions? The answer (as far as we know) is entropy, and he uses time and entropy to tie his narrative together.
The last section of the book (section 5) is a pastiche, and some of it seemed disjointed. But the book ends on a fascinating reflection on the composite, non-fundamental nature of spacetime, and he does encourage his reader to check out Lee Smolin's theory of quantum loop gravity, which is a counter to string theory.
Having recently read Dawkin's _God Delusion_, I took note of the fact that Greene also declares himself (toward the end of the book) as a determinist-materialist-monist. I was struck by how infinitely less aggressive Greene's representation of this position is.
A great read!
Book Description
"A wonderful book... Ginzburg is a historian with an insatiable curiosity, who pursues even the faintest of clues with all the zest of a born detective until every fragment of evidence can be fitted into place." -- New York Review of Books
Customer Reviews:
Very Interesting.......2007-07-23
Researching within the archives of the Inquisition in northeastern Italy, Ginzburg came across a set of records describing the trials of an obscure miller from the Friuli area. Menocchio, as he was known, repudiated a wide variety of conventional positions on religion, on politics, and even on cosmology. The title of the book reflects Menocchio's unusual and somewhat naturalistic idea about the origin of the universe. In Counter-Reformation Italy, these ideas were not merely unusual, they were regarded as actually dangerous. Following his second trial, in which Menocchio was found to be backsliding, he was executed.
Ginzburg presents Menocchio as an autodidact synthesizing ideas from a variety of sources. Menocchio may have acquired some ideas from Anabaptist radicals who had been active in the Friuli. Other ideas seem to have come from an eclectic, though limited, array of books. As Ginzburg points out, this is an example of the impact of printing. It brought such books as Mandeville's travels and possibly even the Koran into the hands of a lowly miller. Most controversially, Ginzburg argues that many of Menocchio's ideas result from or were influenced by a common European peasant world view whose nature has been largely lost to us. This is an interesting hypothesis which Ginzburg defends very well but it can only be a hypothesis. Neither Ginzburg nor anyone else has the data to evaluate this idea properly. It may be simply that Menocchio was a village crank; an intelligent man with relatively unique ideas.
Regardless of the final interpretation, this well written book provides an interesting view of life in Counter-Reformation Italy.
A rare view into the mind of a 16th century miller.......2007-05-30
It is rare that we can see how common people thought 500+ years ago (another source is the Icelandic Sagas). This book shows that books were read by common people, not just the leaders. In this case, this miller got into a lot of trouble by reading. Lets hope that our current freedom of thought is not restricted in the future.
Microhistory of the masses.......2004-12-13
Borne of the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" provides a glimpse into the life of a miller in medieval Italy. No ordinary miller is 'Menocchio', however, as he is inquisitioned for his radical religious philosophies. In a time and place where Catholicism was undoubtedly the religion of Europe, Menocchio harbored unique ideas about religious doctrine, the teachings of the Catholic Church, and man's purpose. Although some of his many ideas contradict others that he had, he was well-read and surprisingly well-educated for a man of his station. As Ginzburg says, though, we must look to the Protestant Reformation and the invention of the printing press as being major catalysts for such learning and religious evolution. Within the microhistory genre, "The Cheese and the Worms" is most fascinating when we ask the question: Was this an isolated phenonmenon or was this a reflection of many people's views? The answer, I suppose, lies with Menocchio, but there is still much to be gleaned from this book.
Well written, fascinating tale.......2002-05-13
Description of a miller with an intresting ('modern') cosmological belief whose rebellion in thought is prosecuted by the Taliban of that time, the Roman Catholic Church. Forced to explain his nonAristotelian views (and, if Ginzburg is telling the truth, he responded extremely well to the inquisitors' questions!), the miller outwits his arrogant, narrow-minded judges and so wins the reward of torture and imprisonment, losing his wife, family, everything in the end. Galileo, who had a higher social position and powerful protectors, suffered no worse than house arrest, in comparison.
Keep this book in mind.......2002-03-04
Anytime you want to tell yourself that the Catholic Church isn't that bad, just keep this book in mind. It is just more proof that the church is the most corrupt institution in the history of time. . .with that in mind. The book is very interesting, it deals with the trial of a smart man at the time who was accused of heresy. So throughout the trial we begin to realize how well read this man is and how well he has developed his ideas. It is a good case study of the life of a common man in 1599.
Book Description
Jay Pasachoff and Alex Filippenko combine extensive research experience, teaching experience, and textbook-writing experience to offer a book that is unparalleled in its ability to present the latest science in a way that students can understand. This brief, beautifully illustrated text - one of the briefest available for the course - offers concise coverage of a wide range of astronomical topics. The authors have struck a balance between the fundamental concepts and the exciting topics at the forefront of astronomy, conveying the spirit of contemporary astronomy within a big picture context. The authors emphasize the central theme of origins in this text, first by singling out specifics in the headings of each chapter and then by dealing with a variety of relevant material in the text itself. An early discussion of the scientific method stresses an importance on the verification of observations, and sets the stage for the text's consistent focus on astronomy as a science.
Customer Reviews:
Great - Simply Great.......2006-05-16
As I look at a beautiful new astronomy book like this one, I am reminded of Galileo who was sentenced to be shown the implements of torture and then confined under house arrest for the remainder of his life for publishing that the sun went around the earth rather than the other way around. Galileo's first telescope was probably about eight power, about standard these days for binoculars.
Today with the advanced state of even inexpensive commercial telescopes, CCDs and advanced software which can be processed quite easily on the very powerful home computers fo today, the home astronomer is up to about where the pros were a dozen or so years ago.
If you are a student using this book as a text, you are lucky.
If you are just interested in astronomy, this is a highly recommended book. It's writing quality, and the quality of its printed pictures is supurb. It's up to date with as good a discussion on recent findings such as the accelerating expansion of the Universe (one of the authors AF, was on one of the teams that discovered this), dark energy, dark matter, and of course the eleven dimensions that make up superstring theory as you will find in any book. They even make these subjects clear without having to go into deep mathematics. (Then again, going into deep mathematics may well not make these subjects more understandable at all.)
Now updated in its third edition this book accurately reflects the current state of astronomy. It would make a great present to an amateur astronomer.
Great Astronomy Text.......2006-02-24
This is a great introductory Astronomy text. It is easy to understand and learn the material presented. There are magnificent photos and easy to understand illustrations for those who are visual learners. I recommend it to anyone wanting to just have an understanding of the subject, whether in an educatinal setting or just wanting to learn it on their own.
The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium.......2002-11-26
This is a five-star book! Designed as a textbook for basic astronomy courses, it also serves as a stand-alone book for the average person who wants seriously to find out more about the universe. The content is clear and easy to follow, moving from the earth through the solar system, stars, galaxies, black holes, quasars, and finally issues of cosmology. Pages are well laid-out for easy reading, and enhanced with beautiful four-color photos and diagrams. Each chapter concludes with a concept review and questions for reflection. Help in learning terminology is provided by boldfaced vocabulary throughout the book and a glossary at the end.
Special features that are set apart in the text, either on separate pages or in boxes, include interviews with people in astronomy (excellent diversity of persons), exercises in calculation, expanded "closer looks" at topics, biographies of scientific figures, and exercises in finding things in the sky.
Web-enhanced features for students that go with the book include www sites for more information using the Internet, web-links, chapter maps, quizzes, and even a source on popular misconceptions. Instructors' ancillary materials include photo resource catalog, overhead transparencies/slides, and a computerized test bank.
You don't have to be a scientist to read this book! Anyone can learn a great deal about the universe from these 395 pages. Pasachoff and Filippenko have produced a winner. Enjoy!
Average customer rating:
- illustrating and entretaining
- Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos
- Great Introduction for the layman
- It's A Possibility
- Science Fiction
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Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos
Michio Kaku
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Book Description
In this thrilling journey into the mysteries of our cosmos, bestselling author Michio Kaku takes us on a dizzying ride to explore black holes and time machines, multidimensional space and, most tantalizing of all, the possibility that parallel universes may lay alongside our own.
Kaku skillfully guides us through the latest innovations in string theory and its latest iteration, M-theory, which posits that our universe may be just one in an endless multiverse, a singular bubble floating in a sea of infinite bubble universes. If M-theory is proven correct, we may perhaps finally find answer to the question, “What happened before the big bang?” This is an exciting and unforgettable introduction into the new cutting-edge theories of physics and cosmology from one of the pre-eminent voices in the field.
Customer Reviews:
illustrating and entretaining.......2007-08-23
The book gives a understandable review for the curious layman of the exciting ideas in cosmology and correlated areas , like string theory
it is spiced with personal details about the scientist involved
All over it is a exciting expirience and a highly recomended book
Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos.......2007-08-16
This book is actually to be a Christmas gift, so I haven't opened it. It arrived very quickly and in good condition. Thank you for expediting it.
Great Introduction for the layman.......2007-08-12
I truly enjoyed this book. It covers very profound subjects in a manner that the average layman can understand. With this book, I had to read it in small bites. Each page was packed to thought provoking ideas. After reading a little, I wanted to just sit, think and reflect. It is good book to read with others. The ideas need to be discussed to be absorbed.
I enjoyed the cosmology, the string theory, M-theory, and the standard model. I had heard about them but I never knew much about them. The author lets you know which areas are hotly debated in the science world. Most books about this subject have too much math for me to work through.
The ending was a little too much.
It's A Possibility.......2007-08-02
Michio Kaku has created a scenario of possibilities in the evolution of this world. Kaku explores the potentials of parallel worlds and realities. In quantum physics anything is possible. Kudos for Kaku. Bettye Johnson, award-winning author, Secrets of the Magdalene Scrolls.
Science Fiction.......2007-07-11
Kaku has an agreeable, engaging writing style that makes some of the more challenging physics and mathematics accessbile to the layman. Where I felt my interest waning, however, was in the section where he discusses at considerable length various exit strategies from the universe trillions of years from now when it will come to an end. A page (at most) would have sufficed to cover this scenario; instead he went on and on about the various possibilities for intelligent beings to escape from our universe into parallel worlds. The death of our universe is too distant an event for us to be expending too much brain power now on devising contingency plans.
Book Description
Reinterpreting the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes from the vantage of Middle Eastern mysticism, Douglas–Klotz offers a radical new translation of the words of Jesus Christ that reveals a mystical, feminist, cosmic Christ.
Customer Reviews:
How this book has been a gift to me.......2007-09-22
I have found that the poetic stanzas based on modern Aramaic to be a wonderful meditation tool that touches my heart and opens my mind. I do not actually use the "Body Prayers" in the book as I practice Kripalu Hatha Yoga as part of my health and spiritual practice.
Please note that I also read Taoist poetry,the "Cloud of Unknowing", the New Testament and have a Centering Prayer practice a.k.a. Christian meditation.
So Bless you all on your individual path. I love the book. You might not.
Depth spiritual work by a scholar.......2007-09-17
Careful translation of the original Aramaic "Lord's Prayer." Excellent depth and balance. Includes guides for meditation.
A Spiritual panacea for the Soul.......2007-01-06
There are a few books that contain such dazzling Spiritual Light. The depth of Divine Love and Wisdom in
this book is beyond measure. It will touch your Soul, transform your mind and heal your heart. One of the
best books I have ever read in my life! Friends don't let friends go into the Light, without reading this one!
Vaishali, Naples, FL
Get to know the historical Jesus.......2006-03-14
I feel blessed to have purchased this book. For most of my life I have been a member of a conservative Protestant church where Jesus was so high above me, I seemed unable to feel a connection. However, about five years ago, I began to read scholarly books and attend lectures about the man Jesus and have gotten a much clearer picture of him and his life. This little book by Neil Douglas Klotz is a great follow up and one I think anyone could understand. Klotz shows how important it is to know the language the historical Jesus spoke and gives a rich and highly spiritual translation of the Lord's Prayer, the Beautitudes, and a few other sayings of Jesus from the Aramaic, which was the native language that this native Jewish rabbi spoke.
An Exploration of the Aramaic Roots of The Words of Jesus.......2006-03-06
The book is a brilliant exploration into the spiritual depths of the Words of Jesus as contained in the New Testament. It uses the Aramaic roots of Jesus' sayings and in doing so leads to a spiritual depth of meaning that the Greek and English translations of his statements are not able to give.
The translations from the Aramaic are then used to develop meditations that give the user an opportunity to explore the words and their depth in a mediated and gradual process.
Douglas-Klotz has obviously developed a wealth of scholarship in this area and made it available in this small and accessible book.
Book Description
As Charles Seife reveals in this energetic new book, information theory, once the province of philosophers and linguists, has emerged as the crucial science of our time, shedding new light on the mysteries of physics, the nature of space and time and the creation and destruction of the universe itself.
With his gift for making cutting-edge science accessible and entertaining, Seife explains how theorists came to understand that information is not a construct of the mind but a fundamental element of the physical world, something that sits inside every living cell and surrounds every black hole in the cosmos. It exists, like energy, even if there is no life to observe it. Starting with the breaking of the Enigma code during World War II and building momentum with the computer revolution, information theory has taken its place at the forefront of theoretical physics as scientists begin to use it to reconcile the paradoxes of relativity and quantum mechanics that have puzzled theorists since Einstein. Lucid and exhilarating, Decoding the Universe probes the mind-boggling advances that are taking us to the brink of a new understanding of the universe.
Customer Reviews:
Information theory, the third physics revolution of the XXth century.......2007-10-03
The author has a degree in probability theory and artificial intelligence, but he is a professor of journalism and has therefore written a book which is both very entertaining and not too difficult to understand. The subject is information, which Seife claims is the third XXth century revolution in physics started by Claude Shannon and which has relations with the other two: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
Of course, information is also related to thermodynamics and entropy, so the book contains a discussion of all these topics: thermodynamics, relativity and quantum mechanics. Famous conundrums such as Schroedinger's cat, entanglement, Maxwell's demon, etc. are analyzed from the point of view of information theory.
Here are some snippets of the book:
According to Seife, Einstein dictum "Nothing can travel faster than light" is really about information:" Information speed cannot exceed c". Another interesting fact is that what really causes computers to heat is the erasure of bits.
Seife describes recent achievements and experiments, proof that he is familiar with the latest results. One curious example is the solution of "the knight problem" in 2000 by using a DNA computer! Another one is that the entire human race has less genetic diversity than a few scores of chimps due to some kind of cataclysm about 500,000 years ago. A third one is the 1996 experiment demonstrating the existence of virtual particles (the so called Casimir effect).
In chapter 7, quantum computers are introduced and the possibility of the brain being one is briefly discussed. Unfortunately, it seems that Max Tegmark proved Roger Penrose wrong on this count. You begin to understand the power of quantum computation when the author describes Grover's algorithm to guess a number out of 16. Classically you need four yes/no answers to four questions. Grover manages the same task with two. Quantum computation reduces the complexity of some problems from n to square root of n.
I found also very interesting the reasons why the photoelectric effect cannot be explained by waves. On the other hand, interference cannot be explained by a corpuscular theory of light, so we are stuck with duality.
Towards the end, the author discusses black holes and the holographic principle: the quantity of information contained in a ball is not limited by its volume (surprisingly), but by its area. Since most cosmologists consider now the universe infinite (inflation seems to imply this) we are led, via the holographic bound, to the conclusion that the universe contains infinite copies of our own bubble universe. Seife admits that this is the most bizarre thing among the many ones described in his book.
Very Well Rounded.......2007-09-20
I have a Ph.D. in Physics and therefore know many well educated scientists, but very few have a functional concept of Information as a physical science. Begun with, mostly, Claude Shannon, this topic of study has been growing into a real science for decades now, but for some reason it is one of the most misunderstood subjects out there, even for seasoned professional scientists. Seife cuts to the heart of the matter with very clear thinking and examples from a very well rounded range of scientific points of view. Seife clearly and very engagingly demystifies many confusing topics and brings a real and almost visceral familiarity to a complex subject. After reading this, you will understand many esoteric scientific concepts better than even some professionals... and enjoy it immensely!
Basic information.......2007-08-02
This book is easy to read and is well written, but does not have much depth. The author has proven to be able to explain clearly complex ideas, but seems to lack enough background for some of the fields that the book explores. E.g., the enthusiasm with which the author explains that in an infinite universe there are many (infinite) worlds like ours seems annoying, and has little if anything to do with information or the holographic principle. It is a quite trivial idea valid for many cosmological theories.
Anyway, you can have a good time reading it, and if you are not an expert in information theory, you can find here good explanations of some basic concepts.
covers the science of information theory.......2007-07-21
This book is about information theory. The first few chapters describe information theory and then these theories are applied to biology and physics. I thought the introduction to information theory was well done, I came away with enough knowledge to follow the rest of the book. The chapter on biology, called Life, was interesting but I thought the best part of the book was the physics part. The author talks at length about Boltzman's statistical physics in a very comprehensible manner. He also explains how, although some experiments have allowed parts of light waves to travel faster than light, you can't send information over those parts of light waves so in effect you still can't travel faster than light. The author states that, from information theories perspective, you can't send information faster than light and that this law has not even been bent. Even the "spooky action at a distance" of superposition of atomic spin, which has to do with quantum mechanics, does not allow transferal of information at speeds faster than light. After reading this book my knowledge of the central concepts of information theory and statistical mechanics was greatly expanded. I even made some headway into the concepts of quantum mechanics. I highly recommend this book for those people looking looking for information about the above topics.
Information Theory, Entropy, and Shannon.......2007-07-06
1. Boltzmann, wrote S=k log W , the first law of thermodynamics deals with explaining heat, work, and energy.
2. The industrial revolution needed more powerful engines. The steam engine stars with a fire that cause water to boil into steam, which takes up more room than the equivalent water-it expands. The expansion of steam does work; it moves a piston which, in turn, can move a wheel or lift a rock or pump water. The steam then either flies away into the sky or moves into a cool chamber exposed to air and then condenses, flowing back toward the fire to begin the cycle again. The steam engine sits between high temperature object (fire) and a cold-temperature object(the air). The system will tend toward equilibrium. In allowing the heat to flow, the engine extracts some of the energy and perform useful work. Work and heat are always ways of transferring energy.
3. Carnot put a super engine flowing heat from the hot resevoir to the cold. While allowing the same amount of heat, Q, to flow the cold reservior through a heat pump back into the hot reservoir. Some of the work from the super engine can be diverted to the heat pump. "All, told no, net heat flows from the cold reservoir to the hot reservoir". A perpetual motion machine. "But nothing comes for free. It's the law." "Energy can not be created or destroyed. Energy is conserved." The second law of equilibrium states that anytime you do work, you are irreversibly increasing the equilibriumness of the universe." The second law explains why there does not exist a super engine. "Entropy always increases". "Entropy captures the configuration of the entire collection of matter in terms of probabilities-in terms of the most probable configurations of a collection of atoms, or, in our box-and marble example, the most likely outcomes wen we dump marbles in a box. The higher the probablity of a configuration of mater, the higher the entropy of that configuration."
4. "Some of themost fundamental rules in physics, the laws of thermodynamics, for example, andthe laws that tell how collections of atoms move in a chunk of matter-are deep down, actually laws about information." Shannons helped translate differential equations into a form the computer could understand and creating designs of electrical relays and flip-flo switches. Shannon created boolean logic using mathematics of manipulating 0s and 1s. Shannon uses 0s and 1s to measure the mass flow of information; he included compression algorithms into the model by exploiting redundancy in a given message. A question with N possible outcomes would need log N bits of information to distinquish between the information. Informtion encoded in 1s and 0s cand answer any question, so long as that question has a finite answer. Written language is a stream of finite symbols. Each symbol can be represented as a stream of bits. Bits are the universal medium of information. Five bits can be compressed into a one or two bits through a mapping rule. The rules make the string redundant. Shannon creates his channel capacity theorem to explain how much stuff can be sent over communication lines. "Information is intimately related to entropy and energy. The function Shannon derived was, roughly speaking, a measure of how unpredictable a string of bits is. the less predictable it is, the less able you are to generate the entire message from a smaller string of bits-in other words, the less redundant. The less redundancy a message has, the more information it can contain, so by measuring this unpredictability, Shannon hoped to be able to get at the information stored in the message." In the marbles in the box, the distribution of half the marbles on both the left and right side had the highest entropy and the distribution with all the marbles on either the left or right side had the lowest entropy. The entropy distribution of 1s ands 0s of symbols directly relates to the amount of information of the stream.
5. Shannon figured out how much energy was required to transmit a bit from place to place under certain conditions. Information theory is the science of manipulation and transmission of bits, is very closely tied to thermodynamics. Maxwell's entropy problem could use information theory instead thermodynamics to separate the hot atoms from the cold atoms. Information does not come free, it requires energy. Szilard calculated that kT log 2 joules for every bit of information. Using that useful energy increases the entropy of the box. The process of obtaining and acting on the information increases the entropy of the universe. The opening and closing of the shutter was based on the information and decreases the entropy. Shannon information entropy and thermal entropy are related. Once the energy is stopped the box returns to equilibrium. A turning machine could acts as the controller for the shutter, opening and closing.
6. Memory reusablity requires energy and increases entropy. "Bits can be added without consuming energy or increasing the energy of the universe. You can multiple bits. You can negate them. But one action in a computer generates heat, which when dissipated into the environment, increases the entropy in the universe. That action is erasing a bit."
Book Description
What is the ultimate destiny of our universe? That is the striking question addressed by James Gardner in The Intelligent Universe.
Traditionally, scientists (and Robert Frost) have offered two bleak answers to this profound issue: fire or ice.
The cosmos might end in fire—a cataclysmic Big Crunch in which galaxies, planets, and life forms are consumed in a raging inferno as the universe contracts in a kind of Big Bang in reverse.
Or the universe might end in ice—a ceaseless expansion of the fabric of space-time in which matter and energy are eternally diluted and cooled; stars wither and die, , and the cosmos simply fades into quiet and endless oblivion.
In The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner envisions a third dramatic alternative—a final state of the cosmos in which a highly evolved form of group intelligence engineers a cosmic renewal, the birth of a new universe.
Gardner's vision is that life and intelligence are at the very heart of the elegant machinery of the universe. It is a viewpoint that has won outspoken praise from an array of leading scientists, including Sir Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, and Templeton Prize winner Paul Davies.
The Intelligent Universe is both a look into the past and a road map for the future of the universe. It explores the mysteries of the universe and of consciousness, and provides a frank and fascinating look at where our minds are taking us.
Customer Reviews:
Evolution debacle.......2007-08-10
The cosmos seems to be intelligent and friendly to life. Intelligent in the sense there exists many biological patterns that are self-similar. Friendly, in the sense of the existence of the elements of carbon, hydrogen, gravity, water, super novas, the organization of universes, and the diversity of DNA. Evolution fails to explain this intelligence in life. All evidence points to God, as the creator. The cosmo self-organizing algorithms seem to be low order simple programs with highly condensed information. Intelligence seems to be everywhere in time, space, and matter.
Richard Dawkins work seems exciting. Dawkins looks to overthrow the Drawin doctrines that have kept science in the dark for hundreds of years. Dawkins biological algorithms suggest intelligent design rather than random mutation as the process of organization.
Celluar Automata Genius, Wolfram, author of "A New Kind of Science" is search for "The Algorithm of Everything", a sort of genius program, once started would generate all patterns in the universe, says, Wolfram, "the entire cosmos, from quantum particles to the formation of galaxies, was a perpetual runtime flowing from simple rules. Complexity arises from simple rules. The universe can be understood by running computer simulations of these rules. The algorithm is more powerful than fragmentational stitching of equations. Extraterrestial might be communicating with us in messages we can't perceive. Drawian natural selection is overrated. Maximum levels of complexity are equivalent from human thought to rain hitting pavement, "Wolfram's Law". The only way to discover the consequences of complex processes is too let things proceed naturally. Computational equivalence means that computer programs can do all the stuff that happens in nature. Does this mean "Thinking Machines"? The Kurzeil prediction, "Singularity", 2050.
"Yet despite all our learning, human beings have missed the point of it all, because of the elusive nature of complexity." Considering the big bang theory, as singularity, almost instantly, matter begin to form, in an amazing dimension of plasma, high energy particles, and light. Considering the emense region of the cosmos, 13 billion light years of increasingly expanding matter and homogeneous distribution, the event seems intelligent by design.
The authors deduce that there must be other worlds that support life. The authors also theorize that life on those planets would not differ too much from life on earth. Similar patterns for plants, animals, and humans would exist on those planets. The intelligence of the cosmos would not create structures that were nonfunctional.
I found Kauffman discoveries interesting, but he spends too much time attributing life diversity to "evolution". Kauffman did not demostrate evolution could create the tree of life in his book, "Self-Organization and Complex System". However, Kauffman does support the idea that intelligent design can be discovery by applying physics equations to biology. Kauffman in his book, "At Home in the Universe" does not demonstrate adequately 1. how life emerged from the elements 2. how protein strains emerged into multi-cell life 3. the lineage links too a single original parent celluar structure.
The author conclude that the universe is becoming more intelligent. Life is become better adapted, more resourceful, and the universe will serve the purpose of man. Man himself is thought to be the source from which the new emerging reality is being created. Science can not explain all truth.
There are two truthes evolution does not explain: why does man need God? What does God want for man? The purpose of man is too find joy, an emotion. Emotion is required to act and without emotion man becomes a "flesh and bones machine". Man is moves contrary to the second law of thermodynamics because he exercises free will.
stimulating speculation about the underlying nature of the cosmos.......2007-05-11
Having read Gardner's earlier work Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe, I was prepared for "The Intelligent Universe" to be the work of a visionary thinker who is not afraid to speculate about the cosmological principles underlying our universe. I cherish the work of authors who are not afraid to think big. Gardner does not disappoint in the grandeur of his vision. If you think there is nothing new under the sun, I encourage you to read "The Intelligent Universe". One can't help but find enlightening material in the book. Oliver Wendell Holmes said "Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." This sentiment certainly applies to my reading of Gardner's book.
Gardner's book is, however, not without flaws. One criticism I won't make of the book is that the ideas are hopelessly speculative. The book employs the kind of theoretical flights of fancy that John Horgan dismisses as "ironic science" in his book The End of Science (Helix Books), a book which says that science is asymptotically approaching a point at which there won't be any major new scientific theories, not because of science's failures but because science has been so successful. I mention Horgan because the scope of Gardner's vision encourages me to believe that we haven't even begun to exhaust our potential to develop breathtaking scientific theories of the cosmos. I came away from The Intelligent Universe with an excitement about the power of large-scale thinking about the universe.
Having said that, while Gardner presents an original "story", weaving together the work of numerous cosmologists and other scientists, perhaps paradoxically, the book often reads as a rehashing of the ideas of numerous big-picture thinkers. Maybe both perspectives can be accurate: Gardner summarizes the work of many while putting together the pieces in a unique way. There is nothing wrong with synthesizing the views of one's peers. However, the book too often lapses into a series of synopses of the big ideas of other scientific thinkers, brilliant though these thinkers may be.
To give you an idea of Gardner's method I reproduce the train of thought found in a few early chapters. Gardner uses extended paragraph-long quotations to run through the following thinkers (not all of which Gardner ultimately endorses):
Fred Hoyle on the fine-tunedness of physical constants, Francis Crick on directed pansperma (the idea that extraterrestrials seeded the biosphere with the first life forms on Earth), Stephen Wolfram and Ed Fredkin on cellular automata principles underlying physics, Seth Lloyd on the cosmos as quantum computer, Erwin Schrodinger on quantum physics underlying life, John Wheeler's on the "participatory anthropic principle" (the idea that only with conscious life does the universe summon itself into being), John Koza on genetic programming, Roger Penrose on the quantum physical underpinnings of consciousness, (leading to a gloss on the implications of combining quantum computing and genetic programming). Then Gardner begins the next chapter with Mark Bedau on artificial life, with an interlude about the perils of nanotechnology run amok, alluding to Michael Crichton's techno-thriller Prey. After that, we move on to topic of the technological singularity, where Ray Kurzweil plays a prominent role, both for his vision of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence and his optimism about the prospects for immortality. In the same chapter Gardner describes how Vernor Vinge forsees the arrival of super-human intelligence as more likely to result from intelligence amplification (at least at first) than from artificial intelligence.
Many of the later chapters work in a similar fashion, cycling through the big ideas of major thinkers. If a book is going to run through thinkers as this one does I guess what I would wish for is a book with the kind of comprehensiveness of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford Paperbacks). Instead, too often there is only a superficial treatment of one thinker before we move on to another superficial treatment of the big idea of the next thinker. Such a technique is particularly unsatisfying for someone who is already familiar with many of the thinkers presented. I would relish a deeper engagement with the work of many of the thinkers treated. So one problem that I have with the book is simply that it is not in-depth enough. The body of the text takes up 196 pages, with an additional 46 pages comprising reprints of three articles from the International Journal of Astrobiology and Complexity magazine (2 articles).
I don't mean to dismiss Gardner's writing style. The value of his approach was demonstrated to me by his discussion of Beatriz Gato-Rivera's proposed solution to the Fermi Paradox. I had never heard of Gato-Rivera but Gardner's treatment of her position in The Intelligent Universe provided a nice jumping off point to her work. It is easy to see how the book could function as a window into a lot of other scientific topics. I was wondering how Gardner would reconcile the Fermi Paradox with Gardner's view that the universe is "hard-wired" to produce intelligent life, and Gato-Rivera's work figures prominently in his proposed resolution to the conundrum, although, characteristically, there is no attempt made to contradict this hypothesis or to pronounce on the merits of any alternative explanations.
"The Intelligent Universe" ultimately attempts to answer what Brian Greene has called the biggest of the big questions: Why is the universe life-friendly? Gardner, bold and original thinker that he is, thinks he knows the answer. His solution is the Selfish-Biocosm Hypothesis. The central claim of his Selfish-Biocosm Hypothesis is "that the ongoing process of biological and technological emergence, governed by still largely unknown laws of complexity, could function as a von Neumann controller, and that a cosmologically extended biosphere could serve as a von Neumann duplicating machine in a conjectured process of cosmological replication." In other words, the universe comes to life and then reproduces itself through the creation of other universes. This comes right out of Gardner's first book Biocosm. In this picture, human beings (or other intelligent life forms) might be thought of as the mitochondria of the cells that make up the universe as organism. The Intelligent Universe can be seen as the exploration of this basic storyline, and this includes dealing with the religious implications of the radically new perspective afforded by the Selfish-Biocosm Hypothesis. All in all, the story is well worth reading.
Interesting, but speculative.......2007-03-24
I read this as a follow-up to Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" and found it interesting. However, it seems a bit overly speculative on the ultimate origin of the universe(s) (which I suppose is the point). I found the use of closed timelike curves to imply that the universe created itself too much of a stretch. Ultimately the question of what started it all was never answered to my satisfaction.
Excellent Read.......2007-03-22
Anyone with a slight interest in cosmology will find this a wonderful reading experience. With my programming background I found the chapter on The Software of Everything particularly inviting but it is written for readers with no programming experience. Obviously Mr. Gardner has close contact with some very intelligent people at prestigious universities and he develops their complex ideas and efforts into something the everyday reader can appreciate and enjoy. He has spent a great deal of effort making cosmology a very interesting subject. I personally believe the concept of Biocosm will shortly be proven to be on the right track.
Life, the Universe and Everything.......2007-03-03
This book takes you through the thinking of the foremost scientists about the universe and the development of intelligence. The theory of the universe growing in intelligence, backed by the numerous quotes and examples, is apt to rock the common paradigm for all time. The author in his book "Biocosm" lays a firm foundation for his argument and in this book explores the idea further. As proposed in his books "the purpose of the universe" is startling. Two things, in particular, I liked about this book: The summation of the current thinking in Cosmology and the mind-blowing conclusion of the purpose and origin of the universe. The author is very brave to tackle these subjects and he does so masterfully
Books:
- The Day of the Triffids (20th Century Rediscoveries)
- The Deep Sky: An Introduction (Sky & Telescope Observer's Guides)
- The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
- The Finest Atlas of the Heavens / Der Prachtigste Himmelsatlas / L'atlas Celeste Le Plus Admirable: Harmonia Macrocosmica (Harmonia Macrocosmica of 1660)
- The Gods of Change: Pain, Crisis, and the Transits of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto (Arkana's Contemporary Astrology Series)
- The Landmarks of New York: An Illustrated Record of the City's Historic Buildings
- The Last Colony
- The Mechanical Universe: Introduction to Mechanics and Heat
- The Normans in Sicily: The Normans in the South 1016-1130 and the Kingdom in the Sun 1130-1194
- The Planetary System, Third Edition
Books Index
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