The Artful Universe |
What it's all about The Artful Universe, By John D. Barrow. Oxford University Press: 1995. pp.274. £1.99, $27.50.
A FEW years ago the United Kingdom was captivated by a science-fiction saga entitled "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". The hero finds himself hurtling through space in search of the secret of Life, the Universe and Everything. The secret turns out to be the number 42. In his new book John Barrow embarks on a similar quest, but with a less definitive outcome. Unlike his fellow cosmologist Roger Penrose, author of The Emperor's New Mind, he is sufficiently artful to cut a revolutionary figure without saying any thing remotely controversial. Barrow also has the wordly wisdom to eschew mathematical equations in favour of illustrations and colour plates, essential for a grand tour that starts with the role of perspective in the visual arts and proceeds, by way of Darwin's theory of evolution, to the anthropic principle, taking in environmental concerns on the way; and that is only the first leg of the journey. (The anthropic principle - the subject of one of Barrow's earlier books - asserts that the Universe must be much as it is, otherwise we would not be here to note the fact.) At first the argument seems to be leading somewhere - to be exploring the relationship between aesthetics and physics. Barrow makes the point that it was in the arts, not the sciences, that the role of the observer first rose to prominence. But if Renaissance painting exploited the principles of perspective, Chinese art has always favoured a more definite viewpoint. Barrow suggests an analogy with the subjective-objective opposition that has played such a central role in the recent history of physics. But his enquiry soon appears to be much wider in scope. A quick survey of Kant's theory of spatial perception and the non-Euclidean geometries of the great nineteenth-century mathematicians leads unexpectedly into an account of the opposing biological theories of Lamarck and Darwin. The three standard preconditions for Darwinian evolution, namely variation, inheritance and selection, are paraphrased by three "requirements" carefully tailored to cover social and cultural as well as genetic evolution. But has human evolution in the Darwinian sense been brought to an end by cultural transmission? On such matters, Barrow warns, opinion is divided.
There follows a discussion of language and its origins, which are safely wrapped in prehistoric obscurity. After comparing and contrasting the ideas of Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Barrow ventures the suggestion that "Chomsky appears to have an ambiguous attitude towards the origin of our universal grammar". But before there is time to contemplate this embarrassing lapse we are whisked in rapid succession through a sequence of essays on "the evolution of mental pictures", "the care and maintenance of a small planet" (Barrow has a jackdaw's eye for a glittering phrase), "gravity's rainbow" (his own stamping ground), "death and immortality" and "the human factor". The take-home message of this bewildering chapter is presumably the one spelt out in the introduction: "If life is to be possible within them, universes must have particular forms. When conscious life does emerge, its experiences and conceptions are strangely influenced by the fact that the Universe must be big and old, dark and cold." (Who said that scientists were not poets at heart?)
As the acceleration builds up, it becomes more and more difficult to discern
a coherent train of thought, and one is forced to the conclusion that the
title of The Artful Universe is no more than an ingenious excuse for
publishing in a single book Barrow's assorted reflections on a variety of
eminently fashionable but - essentially unconnected topics. But perhaps it
doesn't really matter whether there are any general principles-such as those
of complexity theory, that elusive discipline
- uniting the size of animal populations with the aesthetics of
computer
art (two of the main subheadings in the chapter on "size, life, and
landscape"). One can skip the general waffle and turn with pleasure to Barrow's
observations (he is a professor of astronomy) about
the
Sun, the
Moon and the stars, and about the intricate connections between the week,
the month, the seasons, the traditional constellations and the
signs of the
zodiac, not to mention the religious observances associated with these
and other celestial phenomena. In the last main chapter Barrow turns to
music, with
the questions:
"Why
do we like it?" "Where does it come from?"
and "Full of sound and fury, does it signify anything?" In the course of
not answering these tricky questions (although he is quite kind about this
reviewer's ideas on tonality) the author suggests that the appeal of music
may have something to do with its 1/f power
spectrum; but the best part of the
chapter is about something entirely different, namely the competing
theories of
mathematics -
formalism, inventionism, Platonism and intuitionism. Possibly expecting an
open verdict on The Artful Universe, Barrow disarms criticism at the
outset by quoting the words of the philosophical taxi-driver who picked up
Bertrand Russell one evening. "I said to him: 'Well, Lord Russell, what's
it all about?' and, do you know, he couldn't tell me". |
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