Fire in the Mind : Science, Faith, and the Search for Order

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Summary: Great concepts, well explained, where's my dictionary?
Review: Fire in the Mind was extremely satisfying in its treatment of some very complex topics and provided an excellent overview of all the big issues of science today. Johnson ties in a lot of disciplines and draws some very interesting parallels between the work of some very diverse groups. It was also a great vocabulary expander. Apparently, there's a bigger market for big words in the book business than in the pages of the Times.

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Summary: A literary spectacular
Review: George Johnson has taken on some of the most difficult issues and questions woven into the fabric of science and religion and seperates them into their component threads to be examined by ordinary readers. He explores various world views as seen from the mountains and plateaus of northern New Mexico, truly a Land of Enchantment. The vast majority of modern human beings take most of the information we process each day on faith, no less our ideas of science than our religious verities. Johnson explores these faiths in the context of the pueblos, mountains, cities and research institutions of this ancient land, and presents each of them with no hint of condescension or disparagement. A truly remarkable feat given his subject matter which ranges from bar fights in remote villages to sunsets brilliantly firing the walls of the Sangre de Cristo mountians to the rituals and traditions of the Catholic Church and the Assemblios de Dios, to those of the Tewas and the myths and rites of the most primative peoples of the region. This is the best book exploring the escatologies of science and religion that I have ever read. It makes me anxious to retire so that I can attend lectures at the Santa Fe Institute and explore the mesmerizing landscape of nortern New Mexico. Read it. You will never again think of the struggle between science and religion in the same way.

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Summary: The Atmosphere of Science
Review: It is unfair to call George Johnson just a science writer, the term is not appropriate. George Johnson is also an author, and a very good one. I make the distinction because an author can describe atmosphere, a science writer can describe the unimaginable. GJ does both.

This is an unexpected book to stumble upon. Wonderfully written. A complete suprise.

If you are inquisitive about how the science world is progressing, just drop in for the ride and George Johnson will take you there. Just sit back and relax whilst his prose sweeps over you, informative, interesting, atmospheric.

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Summary: Want to have something to think about?
Review: Johnson delivers a riveting account of how humans construct outlooks on the world by exploring the intellectual landscape of several local tribes - scientists perched on the mesas of Los Alamos, Native Americans arranged in the surrounding valleys, and the Penitentes cloistered in the high peaks of the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Johnson is gifted at explaining both Native American cosmology and particle physics with engaging vividness. This book draws the reader in - and at the end one is left feeling enchanted with the book and in awe of the journey that the reader has been lucky enough to undertake with such a masterful guide as George Johnson.

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Summary: In the mountain of New Mexico
Review: Only 7 years have passed. However an interest to the good book can not become outdated. In Russia usually speak any paper owes to have pins and needles in one's arm. And it is correct haste is necessary at catching fleas.

The composition of the author concerns to magic and science. His characters see absolutely other sky.

It is usually somewhere in an average strip at cloudy weather at the night I can see 300-500 stars. In southern breadths at clear weather it is possible to see more than 3000 stars.

It is difficult to come off a kind installed and charming description of the author.

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Summary: A remarkable overview
Review: The most important new scientific paradigm of the last two or three decades has been the notion of complexity- especially as it figures in the questions of the emergence of structure in the physical (and mental) world. Where do the chemicals that make up life come from? Where, for that matter, does life come from? Is the chemestry of life inevitible- or is it purely accidental? Or is it, as many would still hold, the sign of an intellignet designer?

A good many authors have taken a shot at illuminating these questions in the popular press, with varying degrees of success. Too often the author falls into the trap of proferring metaphor in place of explanaition, and finally settling for a bit of hocus-pocus handwaving- "and then something magical happens, and life arises".

Johnson's book is different. He manages, without recourse to excessively complex mathematics, chemestry or biology, to clearly elucidate the big questions as well as the various theoretical approaches that have been taken to answer them. And the way he does so is as entertaining as it is educational.

Johnson's stories all begin in Santa Fe, where three very different entities serve to illustrate many of the principles he discusses. One is the landscape of Santa Fe itself, the rocky outcroppings that serve not only as an illustration of geography, but also as metaphor for the notion of a "fitness landscape" and as the home of the Pueblo Peoples of New Mexico.

The second entity is the peoples of the Pueblo themseves. Through the evolution of their culture and their biology, Johnsom explore change in a population as it interacts with its environment, including other populations. Last is the newest entity in the area, the Santa Fe Institute, where, for something over a decade, scientists have been meeting to study and debate issues of complexity and the emergence of form and content.

Johnson manages, in only a little over 300 pages, to explore essential questions in the notion of structure in the universe, from the most elemental levels of quantum physics all the way through the emergence of intelligence without trivializing any of it. Whether discussing the philisophical implications of quantum thoery or the problems of explanation in Darwinism, Johnson presents the central issues- not some dumbed down version- and yet does do in a way that never talks down to the reader. Certainly one of thoe most outstanding popular science books of the year, and one that would be an excellent introduction to the universal nature of the questions involved for some specialists, too.

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Summary: I CAN'T PUT THE BOOK DOWN
Review: This book is about things that tend to frighten people: 'cosmology,' 'indeterminacy,' 'metaphysics,' 'complexity,' 'information theory,' 'wave function,' 'entropy.' Trying to decrease the fright factor "popular science" books tend to be popular but not very scientific. This brilliant book, however, is definitely good science, and leads me to a definition of science: intelligent induction based on an intimate knowledge of some one or two very specific aspects of the world. The book is about the physicists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, who have their own cosmology, and the Tewa Indians living in the plains just below, who have their own, and these two tribes, living just six miles apart, understand each other as little as if they were on different planets. For all intents and purposes, they are. George Johnson understands them both with utter clarity, and communicates this understanding so lucidly I can't put the book down. You can open anywhere and read ten or twenty pages, because everything you need to know is right there; and you can use the excellent index (excellent indexes are something of a rarity) and read on a topic of your choice

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Summary: An epiphany.
Review: This book started out slow and then became an epiphany. The book is set against the backdrop of the greater Santa Fe area of New Mexico. Johnson uses places and cultures in this area as a vehicle to lead into his description of current scientific thinking in cosmology and evolution. I didn't understand the connection at first, but one piece of rationale did emerge: the various high-powered scientific conferences held at the Santa Fe Institute beginning in 1989 that dealt with information and physics. This is where the epiphany came in, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The other reason he used this backdrop, I believe, is his obvious love for the area - its history, geography, and cultures.
The first part of his book is a fairly straightforward tour of cosmology, albeit at a bit more intellectual level than most popular descriptions. One theme he starts with, and to which he returns several times throughout the book, is that our interpretation of the universe is determined by our inherited ability to understand, by our genetic evolution. That is to say, we see the universe through our own lens, tempered by our limitations. Nothing startlingly different here from my previous readings. In fact, it's rather intuitive. However, he delves into chaos theory, with which I am only slightly acquainted, and brings attractors into the discussion, about which I know nothing. The point about attractors is that they may account for the evolution of the universe (and, as I would see later, the evolution of complex organisms on Earth). Things were starting to warm up.
He goes on into an understandable discussion of quantum mechanics and quantum physics. Wrapped in here is the epiphany: the fundamentals upon which the universe are built (as we understand it) are mass, energy, space and time. To these we have added information -- a fifth fundamental that is as much a part of existence and evolution, and cause and effect as any of the other four. His weaving of the significance of information into the tale of the evolution of complex organisms is all new to me, as is the concept that information is such a "real" player in the universe. It plays a role in entropy and a fundamental role in evolution, starting with organic molecules -- order leads to complexity, which leads to chaos.
I struggle with how to summarize him. I have flagged several dozen pages. To try to review them will be like rereading most of the book. This is one that I may, in fact, reread.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful read!
Review: This was a wonderful book - couldn't put it down! The contrast between the Tewa indians and the scientists at Los Alamos made a wonderful backdrop from which to explore the frontiers of current thinking in cosmology and physics. George Johnson is a great writer. Perhaps being from New Mexico enhanced my enjoyment. Anyway, I loved it!