GOD AND THE NEW PHYSICS

by Paul Davies ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 1983

A disappointing discourse on questions of creation. Physicist Davies, who has provided some high-level exposition of rarefied scientific topics (The Runaway Universe; The Edge of Infinity), here ruminates--uncertainly--on matters metaphysical and religious. Is there a Prime Mover? Is God beyond space-time? Why does the Universe consist of the things it does? To a degree, his attempts to clarify issues are instructive. One cannot, for example, speak of what there was before the Big Bang since time did not exist. The new physics may also help resolve some specific conundrums. (Why, if matter and antimatter were created symmetrically in the Big Bang, does our present universe consist overwhelmingly of matter? Maybe a tad more matter came into being--say a billion and one protons for every billion antiprotons created.) For the most part, however, dipping into the assorted chapters--""Did God Create the Universe?"" ""What is Life?"" ""The Self"" ""Accident or Design?""--is like taking a refresher course in elementary philosophy with homage to Zeno and Hume, Leibniz and Descartes. Davies may well be right: as physics moves to grander explanations and greater schemes of unification of nature's forces, it may generate a model of the universe as an organized whole that is self-creating (a fact that may not comfort religionists). For now, he writes with more assurance and conviction about black holes and the second law of thermodynamics.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION