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

What is endlessly fascinating about this book -- which lays out the human search for patterns and meaning -- is the quality of the writing. Johnson can turn a sentence like nobody's business. Highly recommended.

Great thesis tying the human need to find structure and order to science and religion. Atheists can learn from the religion drivers, and religious folks can have a succinct and intelligent review of science.

Holy science

good reading

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!

Love the book

This book flirts with profundity, but in the end never really crosses over into the "epiphany" category for me. What it's about is pretty easy to summarize -- but the way it gets there is through a long, circuitous, wide-ranging and fairly-comprehensive series of discussions. The book therefore *feels* more profound than it is due to the monumental build up. As another reviewer points out, this also makes it a fairly daunting read for the dedicated amateur.In a nutshell, the book is about patterns, and whether the laws of nature and principles of physics are real or not. Are they embedded in the world around us, or are they merely illusions of mankind's relentless drive to find order. The author brings up many examples of people "discovering" hidden patterns in random data, from alien messages in TV snow to gamblers who study roulette wheels to the Anasazi Indians who feel they must perform elaborate dances because the weather depends on them. "It is a terrible responsibility, keeping the universe running." (pg.16) In the end of course sometimes randomness is just randomness, sometimes God hides, sometimes chaos contains more complexity than our little brains can handle. It's true that if one knew the state of every particle in the universe then the future would be pre-determined, free will would be an illusion and there would be no mysteries. But as a practical matter everything is just too complex for that level of understanding, and to imagine any being could have that kind of omniscience is to assign intention to processes which have no consciousness.The preface (and the word "faith" in the subtitle) make one think the book will argue the discredited idea that all knowledge is equal, that the creation myths of Native Americans are equally likely to be true as the latest scientific theories. The author however is toying with us, and comes around in the final chapter to putting down this popular New Age philosophy. The journey he charts between these two flagpoles is the meat of his argument.Chapter 1 is written in the style of John McPhee ( Basin and Range ), describing the geology around Santa Fe (New Mexico) and introducing the concept of Deep Time. Chapter 2 segues into atomic decay, and how we can tell the age of rocks. This leads to a discussion of Mendeleev's periodic table, and how the Pauli exclusion principle explains the atomic basis for matter. However as physicists delve deeper into sub-atomic physics the certainty of Mendeleev gradually gives way to a theoretical wonderland of quarks, bosons, mesons, muons, gluons and gravitons which can be postulated but remain frustratingly beyond proof. Are they real, or just another example of mankind seeing pictures in the stars?Chapter 3 turns the telescope around and looks out into the heavens. Planets, stars, galaxies and clusters are discovered and explained, but once again at the edge of science we find speculations which are much less certain. Why does the universe appear to be 90% unobservable? What happens inside a black hole? How can some clusters appear to be older than the accepted date for the Big Bang? Chapter 3a talks about chaos theory, strange attractors, initial conditions, nonlinear dynamics, and how superstition and gambling depend on imagining patterns in the noise. Chapter 4 takes up the theory of information, whether it violates the second law of thermodynamics , whether information of itself is a fundamental element like matter and energy. Chapter 5 addresses QED (quantum electrodynamics), particle/wave duality, emergent phenomena ("a single particle of water cannot be said to be wet"), Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and how quantum indeterminancy leads to a "many worlds" cosmology. Chapter 6 expands on this by tracing quantum theory back to the Big Bang (if time and space expand with the universe, what does it mean to describe a time when the universe was very small? Compared to what?)Chapter 7 discusses the origin of life in terms of covalent bonds, how basic chemistry leads to amino acids and self-organizing molecules and eventually organisms. Here the author quotes the groundbreaking Jacques Monod ( Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology ) but unfortunately this book predates the equally groundbreaking emergence of evolutionary developmental biology described in Sean Carroll's  Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo . His discussion of life's origins is therefore limited to a 1995 understanding. Chapter 8 describes the transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, the beginning of evolution as a motive force and how pockets of complexity arise in a system drifting relentlessly toward entropy. Chapter 9 anticipates and explains the issues of "irreducible complexity" brought up by Michael Behe ( Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution ) ten years later. Chapter 10 once again visits the difficulty of interpreting data, and determining if patterns that appear to appear are really there or not.Johnson sums up this summary of the current state of science by stating that, for all its flaws, science has three big advantages over religion and superstition -- and those are that science can change with the discovery of new data, and science can make predictions, and science can be tested. It's an imperfect undertaking -- prone to "seeing animals in the clouds" -- but he concludes that eventually (painfully, laboriously) science discovers patterns that are real.Now, what about Chet? Well I bought this book at a second-hand bookshop, and inscribed inside the cover is this note: "Christmas 1997. Dear Laurie, By giving you this book proves [sic] one very important point: I love you for your mind too! Love Chet." Unfortunately not only did Laurie dump the book, but it appeared very much unread when I bought it.

When Steven Johnson wrote "Emergence"  Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software , I found myself pulled into the concept that ordered systems could combine to create higher ordered systems. And this, of course, gave rise to the fact that ordered systems can be deconstructed to reveal lower ordered systems. This process works not only in life systems --- cultures, bodies, cells, DNA, etc --- but with inanimate systems in physics, e.g. planets, buildings, steel girders, molecules, atoms, neutrons, subatomic particles, etc. As it turns out, it also applies to ideas as well: language, books, words, letters, etc. When I began my research into frameworks, which follows and expands upon Thomas Kuhn's (and others') thinking regarding paradigms  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , I found that the order and disorder of the physical and non-physical (including the spiritual) universe follow common patterns: each "framework" of order contains laws, boundaries, "zones" of freedom, and variables, some of which are "visible" and some which are not.So George Johnson's book, which I somehow had skipped in my research, intrigued me. In my opinion, the book was fresh, insightful and original. The main point he reached, which I also found in my book  Frameworks: Conflict in Balance , is that the mind is the clearinghouse of all order in the universe. This ties George Johnson to Spinoza and Einstein in many respects. But unlike them, Johnson realizes we can't uncover all order. Because we can't "see" the mass of order, we rely on tools, such as math, or telescopes, or computers, or even religious seers to find and report patterns for us. But ultimately we have to "believe" in the order via the credibility of others, or through the similarly ordered systems in our brains. To the extent that we doubt, or that our brains are too small to examine the bulk of order, or the information is "unimportant", we fail to see it. Consequently, even if we could discover all knowledge in the universe, where would we store it? Certainly not in our puny heads. Certainly not in the computers --- because much of the "information" is useless random noise and would fill the planet with more computers than grains of sand.Still, the pursuit of order provides us meaning. But it is an endless pursuit and the only reason we continue the pursuit is because, in most ways, it's an existential effort. We seek truth because we are humans.The science of the book is fascinating. Johnson did a great job explaining complex ideas, and explaining why complex ideas can't always be explained. The book was sometimes hard to read for any length of time because it was so packed with information. Nevertheless, I give it an A+.

サイエンスライターが、科学と信仰という深遠な問題に取り組んだ本です。信仰に関しては、カトリックについても触れられていますが、ネイティブアメリカンの信仰がメインの調査の対象となっています。ニューメキシコ州の荒野とそこに住む人々の生活がすてきな文体で綴られています。科学は主に究極の真理の探究を目指すとされる現代物理学が中心に扱われています。（サイエンス物の常であるように）ある程度の心得（たとえば量子論や宇宙論や進化論の基礎）がないと少し困惑する箇所もあるかもしれませんが、もし知識がなかったとしても全体の理解に関しては何ら支障はないと思われます。ニューメキシコという舞台は、実際にプエブロインディアンがまだ住んでいる土地であり、スペイン人のもたらした古いカトリックの風習も残っており、同時に複雑系の研究で有名なSanta Fe Instituteという現代理性の象徴のような施設も同居しているという不思議な場所で、これが物語りとしてうまく作用しています。宗教色が強いアメリカ社会において物議を醸すような事は書かれておりません。人間には皆、まわりの世界に関する真実や秩序を理解したいという強い欲求があり、そういう意味で科学も宗教も共通するものがあり・・・云々という点に落としどころを求めているという意味では、特に独創的な視点も見られません。しかし、本自体はとても誠実に書かれた秀作です。おすすめ。