Fire in the mind
science, faith, and the search for order
by Johnson, George
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In this stunningly original book, set among the mountains and canyonlands of northern New Mexico, George Johnson explores the human hunger for pattern, the innate drive to find (or impose) order in our capricious world. In this land of strange juxtapositions where magic and science, religion and reason, constantly bump up against each other, Johnson introduces us to an amazing diversity of people who see the world through varied lenses, who find vastly different pictures in the night sky.
Just north of Santa Fe, the Tewa pueblo of San Ildefonso sits at the bottom of the plateau on which stands the laboratory city of Los Alamos. While the people of San Ildefonso carry out secret ceremonies in their kivas and dance to the rhythms of the seasons, the physicists of Los Alamos struggle with some of the most complex ideas of quantum theory, particle physics, and a new science called the physics of information, which seeks to understand the very source of pattern and order in the world.
Los Alamos and San Ildefonso are just two pieces in this jigsaw puzzle of world views. In the dizzying heights of the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) Mountains, the faithful flock to an old Catholic church for samples of holy soil said to cure all ills. Descending from this land of miracles to the foothills around Santa Fe, we visit a revolutionary think tank called the Santa Fe Institute.
Here scientists are focusing their research on questions that seem to hover within the penumbra between science and religion: How, from the random jostling of molecules, did life arise and evolve to the point where it can contemplate its own beginnings? Are we accidents of the universe - miracles - or is there a reason for us to be here?
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1
Fire in the mind: science, faith and the search for order
1996, Viking
in English
0670847399 9780670847396
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2
Fire in the mind: science, faith, and the search for order
1995, Knopf
in English
- 1st ed.
0679411925 9780679411925
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Book Details
Table of Contents
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. 353-363) and index.
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Work Description
Fire in the Mind is on one level a conventional--albeit exceptionally well-executed--work of science journalism. Johnson provides an up-to-the-minute survey of the most exciting and philosophically resonant fields of modern research. This achievement alone would make his book worth reading. His accounts of particle physics, cosmology, chaos, complexity, evolutionary biology and related developments are both lyrical and lucid. They made me realize, somewhat to my consternation, how poorly I had grasped David Bohm's pilot-wave interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the links between information theory and thermodynamics.
What sets Fire in the Mind apart from other science books is its profound questioning of such theories. [...] Fire in the Mind is a subversive work, all the more so because it is so subtle. Johnson's style is less polemical than poetic: he advances his position through analogy, implication, innuendo. That may be why previous reviewers of Fire in the Mind, including the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, seem not to have appreciated just how serious an assault Johnson has mounted against the concept of objective knowledge.
Johnson chips away at science's foundations with tools drawn from science itself. Physicists have demonstrated that even some apparently simple systems are chaotic; that is, minute perturbations of nature (the puff of the proverbial butterfly's wing in Iowa) can trigger a cascade of utterly unpredictable consequences (a monsoon in Indonesia). These arguments also apply to our own mental faculties. Neuroscientists often emphasize that the brain, far from being a perfect machine for problem solving, was cobbled together by natural selection out of whatever happened to be at hand. [...]
Fire in the Mind serves as a provocation rather than a definitive statement. It challenges readers to reconsider their assumptions about what is true, what merely imagined. [...] [U]nless they are radical relativists to begin with, they are unlikely to finish the book without undergoing a crisis of faith [Excerpted from John Horgan's review, 1995, 2015; see link]
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| November 17, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
| July 27, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
| February 14, 2020 | Edited by MARC Bot | remove fake subjects |
| April 28, 2016 | Edited by contulmmiv | Added description, link to full review |
| December 10, 2009 | Created by WorkBot | add works page |