Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order

by George Johnson

Overview

Are there really laws governing the universe? Or is the order we see a mere artifact of the way evolution wired the brain? And is what we call science only a set of myths in which quarks, DNA, and information fill the role once occupied by gods? These questions lie at the heart of George Johnson's audacious exploration of the border between science and religion, cosmic accident and timeless law. Northern New Mexico is home both to the most provocative new enterprises in quantum physics, information science, and the evolution of complexity and to the cosmologies of the Tewa Indians and the Catholic Penitentes. As it draws the reader into this landscape, juxtaposing the systems of belief that have taken root there, Fire in the Mind into a gripping intellectual adventure story that compels us to ask where science ends and religion begins.



"A must for all those seriously interested in the key ideas at the frontier of scientific discourse."--Paul Davies

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307765444
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	10/06/2010
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	184,371
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

George Johnson writes regularly about science for the New York Times. He has also written for National Geographic, Slate, Discover, Scientific American, Wired, and the Atlantic, and his work has been included in The Best American Science Writing. A former Alicia Patterson fellow, he has received awards from PEN and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and his books were twice finalists for the Royal Society’s book prize. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Kivas, Moradas, and the Secrets of the Nuclear Age

I. Four Magic Mountains
1. Phaedrus's Ghosts
2. The Depth of the Atom
3. The Height of the Sky
Tesuque Interlude: The Riddle of the Camel

II. "The Cold, Gray Cave of Abstraction"
4. The Demonology of Information
5. The Undetermined World
6. The Democracy of Measurement
San Ildefonso Interlude: The Mystery of Other minds

III. "A Fever Matter"
7. The Dawn of Recognition
8. The Arrival of the Fittest
9. In Search of Complexity
10. In the Eye of the Beholder
Truchas Interlude: The Leap into the Unknown

Conclusion: The Ruins of Los Alamos

Editorial Reviews

Science writer Johnson visits cutting-edge scientific think tanks and ponders the thin lines between order and chaos, fact and belief. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Fundamental to science is a belief that reality can be understood through observation, experimentation, and measurement. Could it be, however, that humans can grasp just the parts of reality that can be experienced by our limited sensory and cognitive equipment and that what we call science describes a cultural rather than a physical reality? These are heady questions but not necessarily esoteric. Through their traditional myths and religions, the Native American and Spanish populations of the remote areas around Santa Fe have addressed similarly abstract possibilities. Today, scientists at the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory also envision a universe where physical reality transcends any human efforts to explain or describe it. The new theories go by exotic nameschaos, complexity, the physics of information, and others. Johnson, a New York Times science writer, captures the radical excitement of a scientific revolution but also looks backward to Southwestern cultures that have long intuited these deeper realities. With grace and insight, he evokes a vivid sense of place and depicts both the rigors and wonders of a modern scientific quest, giving all readers something to ponder. Highly recommended.Gregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib.

Library Journal

Johnson, science writer for the "New York Times" and author of "In the Palaces of Memory" (1991), excels at making esoteric scientific theories comprehensible, a feat he elevates to new heights in this invigorating analysis of the interface between faith and science. Johnson uses the glorious and fabled landscape of New Mexico, his home state, as a template for his eloquent and probing discussion of how our hunger for order in a seemingly arbitrary world is at the heart of religion, cosmology, and quantum physics. New Mexico is the perfect setting for this explication because such diverse peoples as the Tewa Indians and the Hermanos Penitentes consider it holy, and the physicists at Los Alamos value it as a place where secrets can be kept and risks taken. As Johnson explains each group's belief system (drawing some unexpected and gratifying connections), we see that faith plays as great a role in physics as it does in religion. People in each tradition believe they're revealing preexisting truths, but Johnson suggests that spirituality and theoretical science are actually "conceptual lenses," beautiful abstractions our imaginative and pattern-oriented minds construct in pursuit of meaning.

Donna Seaman