Overview

Lee Smolin offers a new theory of the universe that is at once elegant, comprehensive, and radically different from anything proposed before. Smolin posits that a process of self organization like that of biological evolution shapes the universe, as it develops and eventually reproduces through black holes, each of which may result in a new big bang and a new universe. Natural selection may guide the appearance of the laws of physics, favoring those universes which best reproduce. The result would be a cosmology according to which life is a natural consequence of the fundamental principles on which the universe has been built, and a science that would give us a picture of the universe in which, as the author writes, ""the occurrence of novelty, indeed the perpetual birth of novelty, can be understood."" Smolin is one of the leading cosmologists at work today, and he writes with an expertise and force of argument that will command attention throughout the world of physics. But it is the humanity and sharp clarity of his prose that offers access for the layperson to the mind bending space at the forefront of today's physics.

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9780195126648

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Reviews

The argument is as mentally thrilling as shooting Niagara in a dishpan, plunging the reader into a dizzying no-man's land between physics and metaphysics. --Curt Suplee, The Washington Post<br> It's great fun to see the implications of this fantastic idea laid out by so original a thinker.... Smolin makes some of the strongest arguments I've seen that understanding the universe will require a serious search for some kind of laws of complexity. --George Johnson, The New York Times Book Review<br>

<br> The argument is as mentally thrilling as shooting Niagara in a dishpan, plunging the reader into a dizzying no-man's land between physics and metaphysics. --Curt Suplee, The Washington Post<br> It's great fun to see the implications of this fantastic idea laid out by so original a thinker.... Smolin makes some of the strongest arguments I've seen that understanding the universe will require a serious search for some kind of laws of complexity. --George Johnson, The New York Times Book Review<br>

Physics has long assumed that the laws of nature are immutable; here's a cosmological theory that challenges even that common-sense notion. The great problem facing physics at the end of the 20th century remains the integration of relativity and quantum theory. While both have scored impressive triumphs in their spheres of concern, the two operate at different poles of the physical universe: Relativity concerns itself with large objects and great distances, whereas quantum theory is at home with subatomic particles. And while quantum theory has brilliantly accounted for three of the four major forces in the universe, it has failed to make heads or tails of gravity - the one force that affects all the particles in the universe, no matter what the distance between them. A further difficulty, from Smolin's point of view, is that the ratios of the masses of the known particles do not fall into any coherent pattern, and small changes in those parameters would lead to a universe radically different from ours. So why is our universe as we see it? Why, for that matter, do we exist at all? Smolin (Physics/Penn. State Univ.) suggests that an evolutionary principle has been at work, that the Big Bang was only the most recent in a series of creations, and that the laws of physics can vary (although only a tiny bit) with each new bang. Universes that tend to create many stars (and thus many black holes, as those stars die) can give birth to more descendants than those with a paucity of stars. Thus the universe evolves according to a principle similar to natural selection. Much of the material is fascinating, and Smolin gives the reader a thorough tour of the latest in cosmological speculation. The early chapters are slow going, but once his argument builds up momentum, Smolin is a thought-provoking theorist. (Kirkus Reviews)

The most exciting and possibly the most important science book of 1997. Smolin is an American cosmologist, who argues that the universe is literally alive, and that it has evolved from mutations affecting successive generations of universes. This is not a crank theory, but a fully worked out scientific hypothesis, which weaves together Einstein's theory of relativity and natural selection, presenting the synthesis in an absorbing style. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Lee Smolin is Professor of Physics at the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University. As a theoretical physicist, he has contributed several key ideas to the search for a unification of quantum theory, cosmology, and relativity.

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