New Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation (Gifford Lectures)

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It is like the quest of the Holy grail in the Middle Ages. The sheer beaty of Einstein's simple formula left everybody dumbfounded, but the person who will find a new equation 'for everything' would provoke a long lasting general silence followed by a burst of applause nearly as loud as the Big Bang. By the way, I am not so sure that the impact on our life of this theory would be limited. The theory of general relativity and his counterpart 'quantum mechanics' had an immense impact on our daily lives, for the good and the bad.

A must read for everybody interested in the fate of the universe, or better multiverse.

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Religion is a boundary limit. I was going to be a astrophysicist; when I arrived at university, however, the department told me that I knew too much for the introductory courses, and to come back in a few years to take the advanced courses.

Alas, I studied on my own and never returned officially still an honourable course in astronomy, which has a great love and need of the dedicated amateur , and went professionally in different directions. However, I should have known even back then what my ultimate directions would be as John Barrow's book, 'Theories of Everything' has as a subtitle 'The Quest for Ultimate Explanation', I may slip into a lot of 'ultimates' here , for when I picked up the book in the shop and began reading the first page, I knew I had to read it and read it right away when I came across the following quotation: Ironically, few theologians have an adequate training in physics to keep abreat of the details, and few physicists have a sufficient appreciation of the wider questions to make a fruitful dialogue easy.

Some physicists of late have begun to have confidence that human progress is very close to this. Perhaps this is a misplaced confidence; one is reminded of the Director of the Prussian Patent Office a century ago who stated that the office might as well close soon, since everything that was going to be invented probably already had been.

There was a confidence in Newtonian-based world views that was very strong indeed a mighty fortress, one might say, to support the altar of physics -- this was discovered to be a golden calf, which was in turn melted by Einstein et al. It the 'Theory of Everything' another idol?

It could well be argued that no culture arrived at a robust concept of the latter without a preliminary concept of the former. This is what Barrow meant by theologians and, by extension, the general public not being aware or familiar with the details. In discussing symmetries in the universe and the idea of creation ex nihilo, Barrow brings in ideas of overall net roation and electric charge to the universe where is the evidence for these?

It could suddenly thus appear spontaneously without violating the conservation of mass-energy. The science is sound, and fair in presentation. Barrow presents opposing viewpoints with clarity and critique. Barrow expands into mathematics of course, incompleteness theorems, that gem of philosophical speculation that is so often misapplied beyond its narrow purview, is here , biological ideas of organising principles is this natural or a fluke, or did it require an outside intervention?

Of course, there is a caution in the 'Theory of Everything'. This is not, in fact, meant to explain everything. It will not explain human inspiration i. No Theory of Everything can ever provide total insight. For, to see through everything, would leave us seeing nothing at all. This was not quite what I expected it to be, which was an overview of the latest ultimate theories of physics. Pi in the Sky: Counting, Thinking and Being.

Oxford University Press, ; various languages This book grapples with the meaning of mathematics. It begins by tracing the origins of counting in ancient cultures and follows the development of mathematics to increasingly abstract levels.

Laterza, Rome, ; various languages A series of lectures delivered at the University of Milan to a general student audience about the nature of mathematics. The Origin of the Universe. Orion, London; Basic Books, New York, ; 26 languages A short, simple description of what we think about the origin of the universe. The first volume in the Science Masters series that was subsequently published in many languages and as an audio book.

John D. Barrow

Oxford University Press, ; various languages This book looks at the links between our aesthetics senses and the nature of the universe round us. We have emerged out of the physical world and we reflect many of its features. It was recently republished as an enlarged new edition under the title The Artful Universe Expanded.

Oxford University Press, ; various languages A novel discussion of the limits of science, mathematics and human thinking. This book shows that the limits of scientific explanation are as revealing as its successes. The most mature theories that we possess seem always to be self-limiting. They predict that at some level they cannot predict. Between Inner Space and Outer Space. It is the source of breaking nature into pieces and analysing each fragment separately often resulting in disparerpte conflicting zig saw puzzles that never mesh with each other. That's the reason classical physics never found a theory of everything.

Only when science ended up at a counterintuitive non linear picture , the whole showed a hint at a distance. Still, it remains a distant image because the world of science is unable to escape the delusion of monotheism. Instead of labelling eastern mysticism as premature for development of science, he should have seen the fact that the key to modern revelation of science was hidden thousands of years ago in eastern mysticism ; not in western monotheism.

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