PART IV
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PART IV: I wonder if Sean Carroll’s newest, The Biggest Ideas In the Universe, would help. The Science Friday interview today made me wonder! and his title choice for the new position at Johns Hopkins — “Professor of Natural Philosophy” — has a familiar ring to it!
From the Amazon description:
“High school calculus is itself a centuries-old marvel as worthy of our gaze as the Mona Lisa. And it may come as a surprise the extent to which all our most cutting-edge ideas about black holes are built on the math calculus enables.
“No one else could so smoothly guide readers toward grasping the very equation Einstein used to describe his theory of general relativity. In the tradition of the legendary Richard Feynman lectures presented sixty years ago, this book is an inspiring, dazzling introduction to a way of seeing….”
Look forward to checking out his Mindscape podcast & website
Attaching a screen capture from the Amazon “Look Inside” Intro.
Thanks, Daryl, for your reflections and questions here!
Ach… Part IV… methinks we will need all the help we can get when we get there! It does get very “mathy” I hear!
Thanks for making us aware of Carroll’s new book Elizabeth. I will surely read it – but with a critical eye. I have had a longstanding love-hate relationship with Carroll’s writing! He is a top-notch physicist, a gifted thinker and synthesizer, and an excellent writer in a genre that I appreciated and enjoyed for a long time: popularization of modern physics and cosmology. He is much more readable than Hawking and a tad less quarrelsome than Brian Greene. But he remains a relentless materialist (we’ll see with this new book). I feel that over the years he has modulated his self-description as he struggles with the growingly-evident limitations of substance materialism – he recently described himself as a “poetic materialist” or something like that.
Nevertheless I am delighted that “Natural Philosophy” will gain increased prominence in the academy through his efforts. I notice many formerly “hard-core materialist” folks like Carlo Rovelli, Sam Harris and philosopher Galen Strawson sidling into a comfort zone with questions about consciousness and metaphysical viewpoints such as idealism or panpsychism – and in the process they are producing less “strident” and much more open-ended thinking. [Some, like Dennett and Dawkins seem more permanently stuck.]
Of course what they are all struggling with is the problem that Whitehead pointed out almost a century ago – that the framework of substance materialism can only stand if one ignores the entire suite of actual human experience in the world. Including even the experience of being a thoughtful philosopher or physicist. (I think philosophers call this a “performative contradiction”: the very act of questioning consciousness being itself an act of consciousness).
Ah well… I should be less grouchy and just appreciate the shift, however slow, of such smart people as Carroll toward more non-materialist views of the nature of things. Given the current critical unravellings of the human element of these it is difficult to be patient.
thanks for posting
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