The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

by Sean Carroll

Overview

The instant New York Times bestseller about humanity's place in the universe—and how we understand it.

“Vivid...impressive....Splendidly informative.”—The New York Times
“Succeeds spectacularly.”—Science
“A tour de force.”—Salon

Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview?

In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique.  

Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.

The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525954828
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/10/2016
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	364,332
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

SEAN CARROLL is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. He received his PhD in 1993 from Harvard University. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the arrow of time, and the emergence of complexity. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the American Physical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London. His most recent award, in 2014, was from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Carroll has appeared on The Colbert Report (twice), PBS’s NOVA, and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, and he frequently serves as a science consultant for film and television. He has been interviewed by various NPR shows, Scientific American, Wired, and The New York Times. He has given a TED talk on the multiverse that has more than one million views, and he has participated in a number of well-attended public debates concerning material in his new book, including one in New York City in 2014 with Eben Alexander.

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Excerpted from "The Big Picture"
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Copyright © 2016 Sean Carroll.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part 1 Cosmos

1 The Fundamental Nature of Reality 9

2 Poetic Naturalism 15

3 The World Moves by Itself 23

4 What Determines What Will Happen? 30

5 Reasons Why 38

6 Our Universe 47

7 Time's Arrow 54

8 Memories and Causes 60

Part 2 Understanding

9 Learning about the World 69

10 Updating Our Knowledge 75

11 Is It Okay to Doubt Everything? 84

12 Reality Emerges 93

13 What Exists, and What Is Illusion? 105

14 Planets of Belief 115

15 Accepting Uncertainty 123

16 What Can We Know about the World without Actually Looking at It? 130

17 Who Am I? 139

18 Abducting God 144

Part 3 Essence

19 How Much We Know 153

20 The Quantum Realm 159

21 Interpreting Quantum Mechanics 166

22 The Core Theory 172

23 The Stuff of Which We Are Made 178

24 The Effective Theory of the Everyday World 186

25 Why Does the Universe Exist? 195

26 Body and Soul 205

27 Death is the End 215

Part 4 Complexity

28 The Universe in a Cup of Coffee 225

29 Light and Life 237

30 Funneling Energy 244

31 Spontaneous Organization 250

32 The Origin and Purpose of Life 260

33 Evolution's Bootstraps 273

34 Searching through the Landscape 279

35 Emergent Purpose 291

36 Are We the Point? 302

Part 5 Thinking

37 Crawling into Consciousness 317

38 The Babbling Brain 327

39 What Thinks? 336

40 The Hard Problem 348

41 Zombies and Stories 355

42 Are Photons Conscious? 363

43 What Acts on What? 372

44 Freedom to Choose 378

Part 6 Caring

45 Three Billion Heartbeats 387

46 What Is and What Ought to Be 394

47 Rules and Consequences 403

48 Constructing Goodness 412

49 Listening to the World 419

50 Existential Therapy 428

Appendix: The Equation Underlying You and Me 435

References 443

Further Reading 451

Acknowledgments 455

Index 456

What People are Saying About This

Carlo Rovelli

With profound intelligence and lucid, unpretentious language, Sean Carroll beautifully articulates the world view suggested by contemporary naturalism. Thorny issues like free will, the direction of time, and the source of morality are clarified with elegance and insight. The Big Picture shows how the scientific worldview enriches our understanding of the universe and ourselves. A reliable account of our knowledge of the universe, it is also a serene meditation on our need for meaning. This is a book that should be read by everybody. --Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Weaving the threads of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy into a seamless narrative tapestry, Sean Carroll enthralls us with what we've figured out in the universe and humbles us with what we don't yet understand. Yet in the end, it's the meaning of it all that feeds your soul of curiosity.
—Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey

Editorial Reviews

Coming to terms with science is not getting any easier. Today's popularizers face two challenges, both of which are admirably met by Sean Carroll…in his new book…First, there is more to explain than ever before, as the sciences extend their embrace to a widening range of phenomena. Fortunately, Carroll is something of a polymath. His accounts of the latest thinking about microbiology or information theory are as adroit as his exploration of the links between entropy and time or his elucidation of Bayesian statistics. The second challenge for today's explainers is that the theories are getting weirder…Carroll does not claim to clear up all the mysteries of quantum mechanics…Still, his exposition of quantum theory is vivid, and all the more impressive for managing to eschew mathematics…Carroll's gentler science includes a fair bit of philosophy. His knowledge of the subject not only deepens his book's account of contemporary theories but is a boon to its historical part…[The Big Picture is] splendidly informative…

The New York Times Book Review - Anthony Gottlieb

03/07/2016
Carroll (The Particle at the End of the Universe), a theoretical physicist at Caltech, marshals an impressive array of scientific information to convince readers that the universe and everything in it can be explained by science. He posits “poetic naturalism” as a philosophy, which for him serves as a way to figure out “the best way to talk about the world.” He distinguishes his poetic form from other variants of naturalism by affirming that there is an underlying physical reality that exists independently of the human mind, and that there are “many useful ways of talking about it.” His determination to counter supernatural ontologies drives the book, and Carroll acknowledges that his philosophy may seem like “an appealing idea” to some and “an absurd bunch of hooey” to others. Carroll can be repetitive, and some of his the anecdotes, such as the connection between Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, are interesting but tangential. Much of the material here will be new to many readers, but regardless of familiarity, Carroll presents a means through which people can better understand themselves, their universe, and their conceptions of a meaningful life: “It’s up to us to make wise choices and shape the world to be a better place.” Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman Inc. (May)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2015
A theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, Carroll won the Royal Society Winton Prize for The Particle at the End of the Universe, his explication of the world-blowing discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. As if that weren't a big enough deal, here he guides us through several centuries' worth of scientific discoveries to show how they have forged our understanding and indeed how the laws of nature are linked to the most fundamental human questions of life, death, and our place in the cosmos.

Library Journal

★ 2016-02-28
"From the perspective of a vast, seemingly indifferent cosmos," do our lives really matter? As might be expected, Carroll's (Theoretical Physics/Caltech; The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, 2012, etc.) answer is affirmative but not simple. "We are not the reason for the existence of the universe," he writes, "but our ability for self-awareness and reflection make us special within it." Furthermore, "understanding how the world works, and what constraints that puts on who we are, is an important part of understanding how we fit into the big picture." In this fascinating book, Carroll explores "how and why, in the context of mindless evolution from the Big Bang to the present, the laws of physics brought about complex, adaptive, intelligent, responsive, evolving, caring creatures like you and me." To effectively navigate these complicated matters, he turns to an area of his own research regarding how the emergence of increasing complexity in the evolving universe relates to increasing entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Although intuitively, we associate entropy with disorganization and increased randomness, it plays a crucial role in the development of complex structures. For example, it is randomness and apparent disorganization—the role of chance variation and mutations—that are central to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. At each successive level of complexity—from stars and planets to life and conscious beings—different levels of descriptive language are necessary. This introduces a poetic aspect into the language used by scientists in their attempts to understand our place in the universe. The author affirms his conviction that "nothing we…know about consciousness should lead us to doubt the ordinary, naturalistic conception of the world," including the provisional nature of scientific theory. Carroll is the perfect guide on this wondrous journey of discovery. A brilliantly lucid exposition of profound philosophical and scientific issues in a language accessible to lay readers.

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for The Big Picture
Included on Brain Picking’s “The Greatest Science Books of 2016” List
Included on NPR Science Friday’s “The Best Science Books of 2016” List

“Weaving the threads of astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and philosophy into a seamless narrative tapestry, Sean Carroll enthralls us with what we’ve figured out in the universe and humbles us with what we don’t yet understand. Yet in the end, it’s the meaning of it all that feeds your soul of curiosity.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

“With profound intelligence and lucid, unpretentious language, Sean Carroll beautifully articulates the worldview suggested by contemporary naturalism. Thorny issues like free will, the direction of time, and the source of morality are clarified with elegance and insight. The Big Picture shows how the scientific worldview enriches our understanding of the universe and ourselves. A reliable account of our knowledge of the universe, it is also a serene meditation on our need for meaning. This is a book that should be read by everybody.”—Carlo Rovelli, author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

"Vivid...impressive....Splendidly informative."—The New York Times Book Review

“Never hectoring, always tolerant, the author presents a seductively attractive picture of a universe whose ultimate laws lie within our grasp....[Carroll] gives us a highly enjoyable and lucid tour through a wide range of topics....Even if you don’t agree with what he says, you are unlikely to be enraged by such an urbane and engaging lecturer; more likely, you will be enthralled.”—The Wall Street Journal

“A nuanced inquiry into ‘how our desire to matter fits in with the nature of reality at its deepest levels,’ in which Carroll offers an assuring dose of what he calls ‘existential therapy’ reconciling the various and often seemingly contradictory dimensions of our experience.”—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“[The Big Picture is] a tour de force that offers a comprehensive snapshot of the human situation in our infinitely strange universe, and it does this with highly accessible language and engaging storytelling.”—Salon

“Sean Carroll’s holistic vision accommodates the sciences and the humanities and has a high probability of provoking readers into clarifying their own views about the complex relations among science, religion, and morality.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“The Big Picture impresses. Carroll is a lively and sympathetic author who writes as well about biology and philosophy as he does about his own field of physics.”—Financial Times

“Carroll is the perfect guide on this wondrous journey of discovery. A brilliantly lucid exposition of profound philosophical and scientific issues in a language accessible to lay readers.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Carroll presents a means through which people can better understand themselves, their universe, and their conceptions of a meaningful life.”—Publishers Weekly

“Guides us through several centuries’ worth of scientific discoveries to show how they have shaped our understanding and indeed how the laws of nature are linked to the most fundamental human questions of life, death, and our place in the cosmos.”—Library Journal
“Intensely insightful.”—Scientific American

“With its delightful blend of evocative love paens and four-dimensional integrals, The Big Picture offers a uniquely physical vision of life's meaning. This is poetry.”—Physics Today

“[Carroll] sets out to show how various phenomena, including thought, choice, consciousness, and value, hang together with the scientific account of reality that has been developed in physics in the past 100 years. He attempts to do all this without relying on specialized jargon from philosophy and physics and succeeds spectacularly in achieving both aims.”—Science

“True to the grand scope of its title....Anyone who enjoys asking big questions will find a lot to consider.”—Booklist

“Language philosophy, quantum mechanics, general relativity—they’re all in The Big Picture. Sean Carroll is a fantastically erudite and entertaining writer.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Pulitzer Prize–winner The Sixth Extinction
 
“From the big bang to the meaning of human existence, The Big Picture is exactly that—a magisterial, yet deeply fascinating, grand tour through the issues that really matter. Blending science and philosophy, Sean Carroll gives us a humane perspective on the universe and our place in it. As gripping as it is important, The Big Picture can change the way you think about the world.”—Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish

“In this timely exploration of the universe and its mysteries—both physical and metaphysical—Sean Carroll illuminates the world around us with clarity, beauty and, ultimately, with much needed wisdom.”—Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and author of The Poisoner’s Handbook
 
“Sean Carroll is a leading theoretical cosmologist with the added ability to write about his subject with unusual clarity, flare, and wit.”—Alan Lightman, author of The Accidental Universe and Einstein’s Dreams
 
“Until now you might have gotten away believing modern physics is about things either too small or too far away to care much about. But no more. Sean Carroll’s new book reveals how physicists’ quest to better understand the fundamental laws of nature has led to astonishing insights into life, the universe, and everything. Above all, a courageous book, and an overdue one.”—Sabine Hossenfelder, Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies

“Instead of feeling humbled and insignificant when gazing upward on a clear starry night, Carroll takes us by the hand and shows us how fantastic the inanimate physical universe is and how special each animate human can be. It is lucid, spirited, and penetrating.”—Michael S. Gazzaniga, author of Who's in Charge? and Tales from Both Sides of the Brain

“Sean Carroll’s lucid The Big Picture reveals how the universe works and our place in it. Carroll, a philosophically sophisticated physicist, discusses consciousness without gimmicks, and deftly shows how current physics is so solid that it rules out ESP forever.”—Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature

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