The intriguing long title of this book along with its equally enigmatic subtitle of And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World captured my curiosity when I read a review of it on BookBrowse.
This wide-ranging rambling commentary on everything from psychedelic trips to ancient history, literature and philosophy, to mathematics and cosmology is by an Italian theoretical physicist who is brilliant and articulate. In 46 essays previously published in academic outlets between 2010 and 2020, his insights into the way the world works range from the problem of free will, the poetry of the Epicurean Lucretius, Dante and Milton and the attempts to reconcile quantum mechanics to relativity. He discusses the contributions of such luminaries as Stephen Hawking, Joannes Kepler, Roger Penrose, Nickolas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei.
Some of this is away beyond my simple comprehension, and he lost me completely in discussions of paradoxes such the three essays about black holes from which nothing can supposedly escape nevertheless emitting heat, and a future collapsed universe where time ceases to exist. The Big Bang origin of an expanding universe which was cosmic gospel truth until recently has now been largely discredited, a development which he could not have foreseen when he wrote the densest essays of cosmology in 2014.
The positive life-affirming essay “Why I am an Atheist” could well be adapted and adopted as the manifesto of the many humanist societies around the world. The analysis of the philosophical enigma of free will is as lucid as any I have read.
The author is not only an observant scientist and communicator, he is also a remarkably brave intrepid individual wandering alone through hunter-gatherer villages and tribes in Senegal and Kenya with fearless infectious curiosity to learn about radically different cultures from his own.
As I read these essays, it struck me that they are so diverse that they could readily be divided into two books, one expanding the horizons of simpleton concrete thinkers like me on how the real world works, and another for dedicated to cosmologists and related deep thinkers and scientists.
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Thanks, BookBrowse.
The Passionate Reader 