An intensely detailed investigation of modern scientific fields that defy common sense.
Another attempt to explain quantum mechanics that sometimes succeeds.
A bedrock of science is that things happen for a reason. The window breaks after the rock strikes it, not before. Also, it doesn’t break because the stars are misaligned. This is the concept of cause and effect, writes physics professor Halpern, who begins with a history of science beginning with the ancient Greeks, who didn’t trust observation because human senses were imperfect. True knowledge, they taught, required deep thought. Aristotle explained a few things correctly but got many wrong. Once thinkers took observation seriously—Galileo was probably the first scientist—centuries of straightforward scientific explanations followed until the 20th century, when Einstein’s relativity muddled matter, energy, time, and space and then quantum mechanics proved that reasonable things such as locating a particle precisely are impossible—but the impossible happens routinely. Light changes from a wave to a particle and back again. Devoting two-thirds of his text to history, Halpern delves so deeply into quantum mechanics that readers unfamiliar with college physics will struggle. At this point, he introduces Carl Jung, the brilliant Swiss psychiatrist who both learned from and influenced physicist Wolfgang Pauli during 25 years of their relationship, beginning in the 1930s. Jung believed that humans share a collective unconscious revealed through religion, mythology, and art, with dreams playing a central role. That dreams rarely make sense stimulated Jung, who emphasized synchronicity, the idea that coincidences are connected provided one looks deeply enough. Thus, it was no accident that Mark Twain was born and died in a year of Halley’s comet. The experience left Pauli fascinated by mysticism, numerology, and psychic phenomena without contributing much to his scientific acumen. Since synchronicity is unprovable, few scientists take it seriously. Halpern is no exception, but he presents it as a painful example of the difficulty of understanding phenomena that seem to lack cause and effect.
An intensely detailed investigation of modern scientific fields that defy common sense.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7363-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.
A duo of French mathematicians makes the scientific case for God in this nonfiction book.
Since its 2021 French-language publication in Paris, this work by Bolloré and Bonnassies has sold more than 400,000 copies. Now translated into English for the first time by West and Jones, the book offers a new introduction featuring endorsements from a range of scientists and religious leaders, including Nobel Prize-winning astronomers and Roman Catholic cardinals. This appeal to authority, both religious and scientific, distinguishes this volume from a genre of Christian apologetics that tends to reject, rather than embrace, scientific consensus. Central to the book’s argument is that contemporary scientific advancements have undone past emphases on materialist interpretations of the universe (and their parallel doubts of spirituality). According to the authors’ reasoned arguments, what now forms people’s present understanding of the universe—including quantum mechanics, relativity, and the Big Bang—puts “the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table,” given the underlying implications. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, presupposes that if a cause exists behind the origin of the universe, then it must be atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial. While the book’s contentions related to Christianity specifically, such as its belief in the “indisputable truths contained in the Bible,” may not be as convincing as its broader argument on how the idea of a creator God fits into contemporary scientific understanding, the volume nevertheless offers a refreshingly nuanced approach to the topic. From the work’s outset, the authors (academically trained in math and engineering) reject fundamentalist interpretations of creationism (such as claims that Earth is only 6,000 years old) as “fanciful beliefs” while challenging the philosophical underpinnings of a purely materialist understanding of the universe that may not fit into recent scientific paradigm shifts. Featuring over 500 pages and more than 600 research notes, this book strikes a balance between its academic foundations and an accessible writing style, complemented by dozens of photographs from various sources, diagrams, and charts.
A remarkably thorough and thoughtful case for the reconciliation between science and faith.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9789998782402
Page Count: 562
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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