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The Big Questions: Probing the Promise and Limits of Science
An acclaimed science writer takes on humanity's greatest enigmas, from the existence of God to the state of things before the Big Bang.
Science has stretched its bounds in recent years, and bestsellers on topics such as string theory prove that readers are fascinated by these new perceptions of the world and universe around us. Bringing a thought-provoking perspective to bear on state-of-the-art science, Richard Morris now tackles age-old conundrums in a fresh way.
A fascinating, entertaining investigation of our biggest metaphysical puzzles, The Big Questions explores issues such What is time? What is consciousness? And what is truth, really? Does the future already exist? Where does God fit into this? Surveying the latest scientific theories, Morris makes quantum mechanics, cosmology, genetics, and cognitive research accessible and applicable to everyone. Engaging and provocative, The Big Questions is science at its most compelling.
Science has stretched its bounds in recent years, and bestsellers on topics such as string theory prove that readers are fascinated by these new perceptions of the world and universe around us. Bringing a thought-provoking perspective to bear on state-of-the-art science, Richard Morris now tackles age-old conundrums in a fresh way.
A fascinating, entertaining investigation of our biggest metaphysical puzzles, The Big Questions explores issues such What is time? What is consciousness? And what is truth, really? Does the future already exist? Where does God fit into this? Surveying the latest scientific theories, Morris makes quantum mechanics, cosmology, genetics, and cognitive research accessible and applicable to everyone. Engaging and provocative, The Big Questions is science at its most compelling.
- GenresScience
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
14 people want to read
About the author
Richard Morris
510 books13 followersLibrarian Note:
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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 19, 2019
Ah but, where are the answers?
Questions are important. Just asking the right questions can be the most important step toward understanding. Answers are easier in the sense that they are related to the question being asked--that is, when the answers can be found. Unfortunately, for the really, really BIG questions that Morris is asking, the answers, for the most part, cannot be found.
The biggest question to my mind and the question of his fourth chapter is, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" A lot of people have asked that question. Morris gives credit to Gottfried von Leibniz for first posing it three hundred years ago (p. 9) but trust me, it was asked long before Leibniz ever existed. It is to me the most fundamental of all questions and the most mystifying. Just asking the question is an enlightenment--at least it was for me when I was a young man. I asked the question and immediately I was struck with how incredible any answer to it might be. The very fact that there is something rather than nothing seemed amazingly miraculous; and in fact the real lesson of asking the question is that it provides a hint, just a hint, of how stupefying to our feeble minds everything is, and how far we are from understanding more than the tiniest bit of what there is to know.
But Morris (of course!) does not answer this question. He really doesn't answer--satisfactory, at any rate--any of the other questions either:
What is time? (Chapter 1): He gives several answers. My favorite is that time really doesn't exist except in reference to events. No events. No time. Or, as one of my students told me: time is a mathematical point.
Does the future already exist? Again, nobody knows the answer to this question, but I personally like the idea that it does. Past, present, and future, as in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughter-House-Five, are all present if only we had the ability to discern them. What Morris does here and throughout most of the book is present scientific as opposed to philosophic or religious answers to these questions in so far as science can possibly apply. He takes his license from the fact that in physics in recent years it has become fashionable to speculate aloud and in public about things before the Big Bang and beyond this present universe. It has become okay to speak of parallel universes even though there is no way they can be discerned and no empirical evidence for or against their existence.
For some of the questions the scientific approach seems almost ludicrous, but maybe not. For example Chapter 3's question, "Is the world there when we're not looking?" is really a philosophic question with the negative answer being akin to solipsism--an answer that can never be proven false, by the way. Bishop Berkeley famously held such a position, but equivocated by saying that God was always watching (just in case none of us were).
However, according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, particles do not exist in the usual sense of having a specific location and a specific spin or momentum until they are observed. So in a sense they don't exist until observed and even then we can't get complete information about their qualities. What this means is that when we observe a quantum event we stop the event. We cannot observe a quantum event without stopping it. It makes no sense to say that in the ongoing quantum event the particle is "here" in one particular place and has momentum "x" at such and such a "time." When an event happens, as Einstein taught us, depends on where the observer is.
In the chapter on "Is there a God?" what Morris really addresses is the argument from design and the Anthropic Principle from cosmology. Again he doesn't answer the question. I'll give you a start to an answer: it depends on your definition of "God."
The problem with all this for me is that my personal belief about the power of science, which is just common sense codified and shared, is that I don't think that science can come to final answers about the nature of the universe, or existence or life. We can learn more and more about the world around us, and we can extend our sensual reach further and further into space and time, both forwards and backwards, but never enough to reach ultimate knowledge. We are finite creatures in an infinite expanse.
So ultimately to use science to answer these questions is sophistry. Indeed one of Morris's questions, "What is the purpose of it all?" cannot have a scientific answer, not even conceptually. "Purpose" is purely an anthropomorphic notion.
Sometimes we ask the wrong questions and sometimes questions make no sense, like the question of Chapter 6: "What happened before the beginning?" Of course Morris means before the beginning of the Big Bang, which is the kind of question that gives the lie to this theory of how the universe began since the question implies something prior. More significantly our minds require something prior. An endless precession of priors is locked into the human mind--or at least into mine--and like an insistent and annoying child I will always ask, "And before that...?"
So the book is specious, but for those interested in Morris's take on the latest (copyright 2002) near the frontiers of science, this might make for an interesting read.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Questions are important. Just asking the right questions can be the most important step toward understanding. Answers are easier in the sense that they are related to the question being asked--that is, when the answers can be found. Unfortunately, for the really, really BIG questions that Morris is asking, the answers, for the most part, cannot be found.
The biggest question to my mind and the question of his fourth chapter is, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" A lot of people have asked that question. Morris gives credit to Gottfried von Leibniz for first posing it three hundred years ago (p. 9) but trust me, it was asked long before Leibniz ever existed. It is to me the most fundamental of all questions and the most mystifying. Just asking the question is an enlightenment--at least it was for me when I was a young man. I asked the question and immediately I was struck with how incredible any answer to it might be. The very fact that there is something rather than nothing seemed amazingly miraculous; and in fact the real lesson of asking the question is that it provides a hint, just a hint, of how stupefying to our feeble minds everything is, and how far we are from understanding more than the tiniest bit of what there is to know.
But Morris (of course!) does not answer this question. He really doesn't answer--satisfactory, at any rate--any of the other questions either:
What is time? (Chapter 1): He gives several answers. My favorite is that time really doesn't exist except in reference to events. No events. No time. Or, as one of my students told me: time is a mathematical point.
Does the future already exist? Again, nobody knows the answer to this question, but I personally like the idea that it does. Past, present, and future, as in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughter-House-Five, are all present if only we had the ability to discern them. What Morris does here and throughout most of the book is present scientific as opposed to philosophic or religious answers to these questions in so far as science can possibly apply. He takes his license from the fact that in physics in recent years it has become fashionable to speculate aloud and in public about things before the Big Bang and beyond this present universe. It has become okay to speak of parallel universes even though there is no way they can be discerned and no empirical evidence for or against their existence.
For some of the questions the scientific approach seems almost ludicrous, but maybe not. For example Chapter 3's question, "Is the world there when we're not looking?" is really a philosophic question with the negative answer being akin to solipsism--an answer that can never be proven false, by the way. Bishop Berkeley famously held such a position, but equivocated by saying that God was always watching (just in case none of us were).
However, according to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, particles do not exist in the usual sense of having a specific location and a specific spin or momentum until they are observed. So in a sense they don't exist until observed and even then we can't get complete information about their qualities. What this means is that when we observe a quantum event we stop the event. We cannot observe a quantum event without stopping it. It makes no sense to say that in the ongoing quantum event the particle is "here" in one particular place and has momentum "x" at such and such a "time." When an event happens, as Einstein taught us, depends on where the observer is.
In the chapter on "Is there a God?" what Morris really addresses is the argument from design and the Anthropic Principle from cosmology. Again he doesn't answer the question. I'll give you a start to an answer: it depends on your definition of "God."
The problem with all this for me is that my personal belief about the power of science, which is just common sense codified and shared, is that I don't think that science can come to final answers about the nature of the universe, or existence or life. We can learn more and more about the world around us, and we can extend our sensual reach further and further into space and time, both forwards and backwards, but never enough to reach ultimate knowledge. We are finite creatures in an infinite expanse.
So ultimately to use science to answer these questions is sophistry. Indeed one of Morris's questions, "What is the purpose of it all?" cannot have a scientific answer, not even conceptually. "Purpose" is purely an anthropomorphic notion.
Sometimes we ask the wrong questions and sometimes questions make no sense, like the question of Chapter 6: "What happened before the beginning?" Of course Morris means before the beginning of the Big Bang, which is the kind of question that gives the lie to this theory of how the universe began since the question implies something prior. More significantly our minds require something prior. An endless precession of priors is locked into the human mind--or at least into mine--and like an insistent and annoying child I will always ask, "And before that...?"
So the book is specious, but for those interested in Morris's take on the latest (copyright 2002) near the frontiers of science, this might make for an interesting read.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
August 21, 2010
Interesting scientific analysis of philosophical questions. Morris does a pretty good job of explaining concepts and theories of physics for a wide audience. Worth a read just to see what the current theories are (current in 2002 anyway).
October 24, 2018
Mildly technical book. With its title, I thought the book had an agenda, i.e, to prove or disprove God. It really does neither, but focuses on the limits of what we know from science through an analysis of history, philosophy, and science. It reads like a book headed somewhere but doesn't end up arriving anywhere. A reminder that true meaning is driven by true Promise.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews