I just finished reading a delightful book by Lee Smolin, a physicist and
comsmologist at the University of Pennsylvania titled "The Life of the
Cosmos". It is a dramatic departure from cosmology as usual. His basic
thesis is that up until now cosmological/Grand Unified Theories have
been searching for the "Fundamental Laws" that govern our universe. He
departs by saying that our extremely arbitrary and coincidental
"constants" that seem to be just right for life (See the Anthropic
Principle) are in fact a product of NATURAL SELECTION akin to
evolutionary biology. Most striking about his proposals is that he is
talking pure science by providing methodologies for its disproof.
That Chapters of the Book are:
PART 1 - THE CRISIS OF FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICS
1. Light and Life
2. The Logic of Atomism
3. The Miracle of the Stars
4. The Dream of Unification
5. The Lessons of String Theory
PART 2 - AN ECOLOGY OF SPACE AND TIME
6. Are the Laws of Phyiscs Universal?
7. Did the Universe Evolve?
8. Detective Work
9. The Ecology of the Galaxy
10. Games and Galaxies
PART 3 - THE ORGANIZATION OF THE COSMOS
11. What is Life?
12. The Cosmology of an Interesting Universe
13. The Flower and the Dodecahedron
14. Philosophy, Religion, and Cosmology
15. Beyond the Anthropic Principle
PART 4 - EINSTIENS LEGACY
16. Space and Time in the New Cosmology
17. The Road from Newton to Einstien
18. The Meaning of Einstien's Theory of Relativity
19. The Meaning of the Quantum
PART 5 -
20. Cosmology and the Quantum
21. A Pluaralistic Universe
22. The World as a Netwrok of Relations
23. The Evolution of Time
Eiplogue/Evolutions
Appendix: Testing Cosmological Natural Selection.
The book was so compelling I couldn't put it down all weekend!
Cheers,
Bobby Whalen
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