The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe

Rating:
Summary: IT CANNOT BE LEGO!
Review: Besides being, like many others of Davies' books, a little masterpiece of scientific vulgarization, this is a deeply honest enterprise under a strict, intellectual standpoint. But one which, while clinging to a crystalline sense of science's autonomy, aims at promoting a persuasion: reductionism (something called by the less merciful critics "this ritual nothingbuttery") is no more viable as a means of convincing explanation for natural phenomena, especially for those of a higher, more complex order, like living systems, human beings and, on top of all, human conscience and intelligence, both as individual and social processes.

The book strikes a perfect balance - not in the sense of compromise at all costs but in that, more useful and enlightening, of creative dialectical synthesis - between a steady faith in the capacity of science to investigate and eventually unveiling natural truths and a sort of rational and humane optimism which makes one feel that our universe is a formidable work-in-progress with a built-in, but not mechanistic inclination at producing new principles and meaning.

Mystery and freedom (and that flavour of "philosophic poetry" associated with them!) are preserved in the frame of a non-deterministic worldview, because no precise and mandatory evolutionary path seems to have been established at the "beginning", which Davies assumes, like the majority of today's cosmologists, to have been the Big Bang, the "moment" at which all - space, time, matter and energy - broke into being. Rather a potentiality for progress which in the course of billions of years has reached and will reach numerous transition points, from where the universe can branch out into a wide choice of meaningful possibilities. The only "constraint" being represented by a sort of tacit, maternal invitation to follow the route to self-consciousness as if the universe was sketched in such a way as to eventually reach this fundamental stage. For this reason Davies appears to believe, but never in a fixed, dogmatic sense, that just something like a loose cosmic blueprint, whence the book's title, lies hidden at the very core of creation, secretly fostering the growth of that substance we call, with still a bit of approximation, Intelligence.

I think that, like any truly important book, this one was written to revisit old questions and pose new ones rather than to provide standard ready-made answers, because, Davies seems to imply, no definite and irreversible answer is written on the giant cosmic page before us. That's to say: open arguments, for open minds!

During his exposition Davies touches many of the issues on which the debate and the contrasts between reductionism and holism are more vivid and intellectually productive. And he affirms that a new turn towards holism is gaining momentum among the scientific communities the world over as the lego-like philosophy of reductionism shows all its conceptual inadequacy to provide convincing prospects for the advancement of our understanding of complexity and significance.

Such rich notions as Jung's principle of synchronicity and Elsasser's "biotonic laws" are discussed, as well as that nice and inevitable philosophical animal known under the name of Schroedinger's cat, which as every well-read scientific layman already knows implies a plunge into the spectral world of quantum-mechanics. These and many other ideas and hypotheses are presented in a fascinating review of the more suggestive attempts to forge new visions of the universe and its destiny.

As a final, if trivial, consideration I may say that after reading this kind of books you come back to your everyday routine problems with a refreshed notion of their limited importance and consequently with the conviction that you should not permit them to take away a too large amount of your intellectual and spiritual energies.

Rating:
Summary: IT CANNOT BE LEGO!
Review: Besides being, like many others of Davies' books, a little masterpiece of scientific vulgarization, this is a deeply honest enterprise under a strict, intellectual standpoint. But one which, while clinging to a crystalline sense of science's autonomy, aims at promoting a persuasion: reductionism (something called by the less merciful critics "this ritual nothingbuttery") is no more viable as a means of convincing explanation for natural phenomena, especially for those of a higher, more complex order, like living systems, human beings and, on top of all, human conscience and intelligence, both as individual and social processes.

The book strikes a perfect balance - not in the sense of compromise at all costs but in that, more useful and enlightening, of creative dialectical synthesis - between a steady faith in the capacity of science to investigate and eventually unveiling natural truths and a sort of rational and humane optimism which makes one feel that our universe is a formidable work-in-progress with a built-in, but not mechanistic inclination at producing new principles and meaning.

Mystery and freedom (and that flavour of "philosophic poetry" associated with them!) are preserved in the frame of a non-deterministic worldview, because no precise and mandatory evolutionary path seems to have been established at the "beginning", which Davies assumes, like the majority of today's cosmologists, to have been the Big Bang, the "moment" at which all - space, time, matter and energy - broke into being. Rather a potentiality for progress which in the course of billions of years has reached and will reach numerous transition points, from where the universe can branch out into a wide choice of meaningful possibilities. The only "constraint" being represented by a sort of tacit, maternal invitation to follow the route to self-consciousness as if the universe was sketched in such a way as to eventually reach this fundamental stage. For this reason Davies appears to believe, but never in a fixed, dogmatic sense, that just something like a loose cosmic blueprint, whence the book's title, lies hidden at the very core of creation, secretly fostering the growth of that substance we call, with still a bit of approximation, Intelligence.

I think that, like any truly important book, this one was written to revisit old questions and pose new ones rather than to provide standard ready-made answers, because, Davies seems to imply, no definite and irreversible answer is written on the giant cosmic page before us. That's to say: open arguments, for open minds!

During his exposition Davies touches many of the issues on which the debate and the contrasts between reductionism and holism are more vivid and intellectually productive. And he affirms that a new turn towards holism is gaining momentum among the scientific communities the world over as the lego-like philosophy of reductionism shows all its conceptual inadequacy to provide convincing prospects for the advancement of our understanding of complexity and significance.

Such rich notions as Jung's principle of synchronicity and Elsasser's "biotonic laws" are discussed, as well as that nice and inevitable philosophical animal known under the name of Schroedinger's cat, which as every well-read scientific layman already knows implies a plunge into the spectral world of quantum-mechanics. These and many other ideas and hypotheses are presented in a fascinating review of the more suggestive attempts to forge new visions of the universe and its destiny.

As a final, if trivial, consideration I may say that after reading this kind of books you come back to your everyday routine problems with a refreshed notion of their limited importance and consequently with the conviction that you should not permit them to take away a too large amount of your intellectual and spiritual energies.

Rating:
Summary: The Cosmic Blueprint
Review: In 1987, James Gleick released Chaos, which was regarded as a seminal work in the subject, but in the same year, a much less popularised book by Paul Davies - The Cosmic Blueprint was also released - a vastly wider-ranging and advanced introduction to the theory of Complexity, as chaos came to be known.

Davies' book clearly explains the fundamental concepts and ties them all in - emergence, nonlinearity, the second law, self-organization, stochastic structures, complex and dynamic systems, darwinism and creativity - in all their cosmological and terrestial implications, with excellent philosophy to back it.

This is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in contemporary science. It still stands as a classic explication of an emerging new scientific paradigm which is now in full swing, and which Davies called and contextualized years ahead of his time.

If you read one science book in your life, this should be it.