Product Description

In "A Brief History of Time" Stephen Hawking described our attempts to formulate the physical laws of the universe. In this work, Nobel Laureate, Gell-Mann, argues that this is only the beginning of what we need to know about our world and ourselves. What if we know those laws? What next? Seeking a unified theory of all matter, whether it is the structure of galaxies or the moment of creative thought in the human mind, this book defines the underlying unity in such diverse fields as linguistics, archaeology, economics and politics.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #144371 in Books
• Published on: 1995-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
'Reports from the cutting edge, presented with eloquence and style . it gives the dizzying sense that science is poised on the brink of a new world of discovery - a world stranger and still more beautiful than anything imagined yet' - F.T. ' Every once in a while a physicist, with a gift for writing and an empathy for the non- scientific mind, reports back like an anthropologist from Mars. Gell- Mann has written such a book' - SPECTATOR

About the Author
Murray Gell-Mann, Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1984 he helped establish the Santa Fe Institute, where he now works.

Customer Reviews

Popular science at its best
This book is written by a true Renaissance mind. Gell-Mann gives us a tour of existing and emerging areas of science and by showing the connections between these diverse areas he shows that there is more to science than the unfortunate extreme specialization that tend to make people from different fields unable to communicate fruitfully. He also shows us how much we may gain from a genuine interest in research areas different from our own.

Gell-Mann's authorship convinces me that that C. P. Snow's argument about the two cultures is not a law of nature.

Popular science, though difficult and often rightfully criticized, is vitally important, especially when introducing young people to scientific ideas. The Quark and the Jaguar is my new standard.

Disappointing
Gell-Mann is a brilliant scientist and his contribution to particle physics and chaos theory cannot be underestimated; his thought is first-class. The topic of this book is emergence, complexity and the future of world, and he has a lot to say about all of these: the importance of holism as opposed to pure reductionism, of generalisation as opposed to pure specialisation.

But as a whole this book does not cohere. It lacks focus and narrative thread, weaving between topics with only minimal attempts to connect them. I have no doubt that the three parts of this book are intimately linked, but the links Gell-Mann imagines to be obvious are, to most minds, far from it.

In short, the ideas espoused here are admirable, but are better addressed elsewhere. A couple of popular science books examine parts of this: James Gleick's 'Chaos' and Steve Grand's 'Creation' are examples. Unfortunately there is nothing else I have experienced that looks at the whole, even in the fragmentary way Gell-Mann does, so there is still a genuine need for this book. If you can get through it, that is.

An excellent book from a first-rate mind
Too often, we have been subjected to speculative theory-of-everything-is-nigh type books from physicists and physics writers with dubious credentials. This is written by a first-rate thinker, probably the greatest theorist since Feynman. It is fascinating to see sober, well argued analysis and comment on his own field of endeavour, and the sections where he casts his eyes over politics, environmental problems, economics, and the transitions that need to be made by societies show how a top class thinker can operate at high levels across disciplinary boundaries. Undoubtedly the best non-fiction book that I have read in the past few years.