Morris’s afterword makes it clear that science doesn’t have all the answers—perhaps never will—but it’s diverting and...
Really big questions: Morris, a physicist who writes frequently on science, borrows a leaf from the philosopher’s book to discourse engagingly on God, time, truth, mind, and such like.
There was a time when philosophers provided much of the enlightenment on matters metaphysical, cosmological, and ontological. Morris wants us to know that modern science can illuminate many of these issues, in some cases providing answers based on experimental evidence. Up to a point. For example, if we accept the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, then we can resolve the issue of free will versus determinism—because any and all possible futures exist in one or another parallel universe. But what about time? The laws of physics are indifferent to time’s arrows—with the exception of a couple of exotic particles. That still leaves us with questions about reconciling subjective time with the “t” in equations. Berkeley’s conundrum about whether the world exists if no one is looking? More quantum theory and, alas, no resolution. The question of whether Schrodinger’s cat is alive or dead (or capable of existing in both states until we look) remains a puzzle, but comes with an eerie aside about experiments that show that electrons streaming around superconducting loops appear to move clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously. So it goes with most of the other questions Morris discusses: all wonderful foils for expounding on the five current superstring theories and the mysterious 11-dimensional M theory that relates to them all, or about quantum fluctuations that can produce a universe out of nothing. In the end, contemporary physics has some tantalizing ideas, but most of the issues remain ambiguous.
Morris’s afterword makes it clear that science doesn’t have all the answers—perhaps never will—but it’s diverting and instructive at least to see the process.Pub Date: June 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-7092-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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