Selected reviews of books about science, 1992-2000  
Reviews by Damien Broderick

BRIGHT AIR, BRILLIANT FIRE: On the Matter of the Mind

by Gerald M. Edelman, Allen Lane, 280pp

In this decade of the mind, one of the most impressive grand treatments comes from Nobel winning immunologist Edelman. Adapting the principles of species evolution to the individual developing brain, Edelman's `neural Darwinism' or `topobiology' tries a favourite game: explaining consciousness in one mighty leap. Australian Nobelist Sir Mac Burnet's famous explanation of antibody formation showed how a thousand natural shocks prune or select a vast pre-existing array of immune cells. Just so, says Edelman, each person's experience sculpts the wild forest of prenatal brain cells into the adult's neat garden of mind. We are born neither `blank slates' nor pre-programmed.

            His audacity is breathtaking, for he has a strong opinion on every stage of the transition from brute matter to consciousness. From quantum theory to networks of nerves, from `re-entrant maps' which chunk groups of nerves all the way up to language acquisition (he doesn't think much of Chomsky's in-built grammar), Edelman offers a testable, integrated model. It's strenuous work for the general reader, made worse by a series of awful after-dinner jokes thrown in for light relief... but wonderfully exciting in its grand unfolding. Those who wish to get a simpler taste of these debates might try The Pinnacle of Life: Consciousness and self-awareness in humans and animals, by Australian Derek Denton (Allen & Unwin, 250pp), the book of the recent ABC Science Show radio series.

DREAMS OF A FINAL THEORY: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature

by Steven Weinberg, Hutchinson Radius, 260pp

THE MIND MATTERS: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World

by David Hodgson, Oxford, 484pp

FUZZY LOGIC

by Daniel McNeil and Paul Freiberger, Bookman, 319pp

THE MYTH OF IRRATIONALITY: The Science of the Mind from Plato to Star Trek

by John McCrone, Macmillan, 340pp

Like the Mabo decision, a rumour that science is on the verge of a Theory of Everything has ruffled the easily upset. Whose bailiwick is safe? Watch the cutlery! In the Mabo case, of course, the human stakes are more poignant, and opposition far more disgraceful. Still, fears about the inroads of a Final Theory also have a political dimension, and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg addresses them in his fine new book on the search for the deepest principles of physics.

            Weinberg won his 1979 prize by unifying two of the four fundamental and apparently distinct forces of nature. Now, he believes, we are in sight of a solution encompassing all four--perhaps based on the suggestion that everything is built of `strings', tiny rips or `glitches in space-time'. Indeed, `in the latest version of string theories space and time arise as derived quantities'. A final theory would require its mathematical model of reality to be so savagely restrictive that not one variable can be altered without crippling the whole.

            `Once nature seemed inexplicable without a nymph in every brook and a dryad in every tree,' remarks Weinberg. `There are still countless things in nature that we cannot explain, but we think we know the principles that govern the way they work.' So we are in no danger that a final theory of physics will try hubristically to claw back the domains of biology, psychology or art. Weinberg is not, as evolutionist Ernst Mayr called him, an uncompromising reductionist. Wryly, he dubs himself a `compromising reductionist'.

            What this means is a hope and faith that every question `Why?', every separate arrow of explanation, points to a common denominator: the strange but rigorous laws of quantum mechanics. And yes, `the reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works'. Weinberg's subtle account of how this is so begins charmingly with a meditation on a piece of chalk, an updating of Thomas Huxley's lecture a century back to workingmen in the chalky region of Norwich. Why is chalk white? By steps, Weinberg shows that at every level of explanation, we are pushed back to quantum theory, and perhaps beyond that to a final theory.

            But can such a theory explain the mind itself? An impressive attempt to unite consciousness and rarefied theory has been offered by David Hodgson, a NSW Supreme Court Judge. Trained as a philosopher, Justice Hodgson taught himself quantum theory on the long train trip home from work, and here argues the case that mind and even deity lurk in the Schrödinger equation. His scientific exposition is crisp but demanding, and his exploration of paradox and puzzle in the quantum realm resembles a cool judicial summing-up. He punishes the `many worlds' version of cosmological quantum theory favoured by Weinberg--the universe is supposed to `split' whenever alternative or superposed quantum pathways branch--but points also to discrepancies in the evidence for other interpretations. I disagree, however, with his religious verdict that mind transcends and `collapses' quantum probability-states into the reality of matter, that `truth may be allegorized, and thus in a sense approximated, in different ways, which are mutually inconsistent, but which are all approximations to the unexpressable truth'.

            But is my revulsion for this ruling no more than a prejudice in favour of traditional hard-edged logic and rationality? It's true that quantum theory seems to prove our world is just an averaging of radically indeterminate parts. This notion of indeterminacy has been imported into the humanities as deconstruction, another kind of Theory disputing traditional boundaries and verities. At the same time, unnoticed by most western theorists (and, indeed, technologists), a similar assault on determinable truth has been meted out by Lotfi Zadeh and his associates, prophets of `fuzzy logic'.

            There's an overlap here, perhaps, with `fuzzy' versus `black-letter' law in the legislative realm. Lawyers have always recognised their domain as a world of interpretation, argument, assessment, quite unlike the cosmic purity sought by scientific theorists of `final laws'.  The human world is built of language. However hard we try, language blurs at the edges. So does measurement, as Japanese industry has found to its profit. Classical logic, with its crisp die-stamping `A' versus `not-A', isn't always the best way to parse an inherently fuzzy or open-ended world.

            How tall is a medium-short man? Any cut-off is arbitrary. Zadeh's approach assigns a graded membership, so that Tom might be 0.6 tall, while even dwarfish Bill is still 0.2 tall. The benefits of this curious analysis are proselytised in McNeil and Freiberger's delightfully readable pop account of fuzzy logic. Notoriously, Asian business has adopted methods pioneered by Americans like Zadeh and gung-ho Bart Kosko while their US colleagues disdain a theory which seems to proffer fuzz (while in fact, of course, counselling techniques to defeat or manipulate fuzziness).

            A provocative bid to explode many of these false polarities is John McCrone's full-on sabotage of our culture's dearest tenet: the irrational source of the distinctively human, especially creativity and madness. I recommend McCrone's pioneering study as a bracing tonic, even though it's inevitably coarser in texture than many of the nuanced, supple doctrines it assails. 

            His case is this: our world is shaped by the legacies of Romanticism, with its split between wild, unchecked forces of nature (emotion, good) and wussy restriction (mind, bad). When Freud told us the irrational Id had to be throttled and harnessed by the work-a-day Ego and Super-ego, we mourned the repressive cost of unbuttoned joy. Artists, lunatics and Byronic lovers elude these strictures, and psychoanalysis tracks our own deepest impulses to endlessly deferred `Desire for the Phallus'.

            Not true, says McCrone. We are made human by social language, as Lev Vygotsky taught. It completes our physical hardware (our bodies) with a specialised software (our minds). My voice, literally, make me human--the voice(s) we each speak within our own heads, telling ourselves the story of our social world. Feral children, lacking exposure to language in the first crucial years, never became properly human. Deaf mutes denied non-vocal coding languages like Sign suffer tragically impaired identity.

            Madness and dream result not from unleashing some deep irrationality or the slithering signifiers of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but (by and large) from `the broken-backed functioning of the bifold mind', the confused tussle of an inner voice trying to make sense of a faulty `biological ground of sensation'--disrupted neurotransmitters in the case of madness or drugs. In dreams, stray vivid memory fragments are juggled in sleep by linguistic machinery designed to narrate the tale of an organised external world. McCrone's story of human two-part rationality is over-simplified but compelling, a challenge to our hapless civilisation potentially as important as fuzzy logic, as fundamental as any Final Theory.

THE WORLD TREASURY OF PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY AND MATHEMATICS

Edited by Timothy Ferris, Little, Brown, 859pp

EIGHT LITTLE PIGGIES: Reflections in Natural History

by Stephen Jay Gould, Cape, 479pp

FEARFUL SYMMETRY: Is God a Geometer?

by Ian Stewart and Martin Golubitsky, Penguin, 287pp

IN THE BEGINNING: The Birth of the Living Universe

by John Gribbin, Viking, 274pp

Timothy Ferris is an adroit writer, as well as a trained astronomer, as his lovely book Coming of Age in the Milky Way proved. So the awful title for his grand anthology of science writing must be blamed on his series editor, Clifton Fadiman. No doubt, the inner cynic assures me, there are World Treasuries of Baseball, Yachting, Canine Dressage, and Cuticle Maintenance. This one, though, is a winner--a delight to the poet's ear, as well as the scientist's eye (and vice versa).

            Relish this fragment from Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk, about viewing totality or complete eclipse of the sun. Dillard is a gothic, gonzo naturalist/essayist. `I saw a circular piece of that sky appear, suddenly detached, blackened, and backlighted; from nowhere it came and overlapped the sun. It did not look like the moon. It was enormous and black. If I had not read that it was the moon, I could have seen the sight a hundred times and never thought of the moon once.... Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The heart screeched.... The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out.... It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like a plague behind it.'

            There's something of the phenomenological clarity of the child in this, informed by adult knowledge. Ferris has found over 90 fine passages on science, from Feynman on atoms in motion, via Wigner on the unreasonable accuracy of maths and Rilke on machine ravages, to Einstein on science and religion.

            Stephen Jay Gould, oddly enough, did not make the final cut, perhaps because his own portly essay collections are a regular event. His shorter pieces are an acquired taste, and I think this year I'm off them, as I was when I first found them reprinted in New Scientist. Gould helped invent the fecund notion of `punctuated equilibrium' in evolution, a spin on classic plodding Darwinism, and his egalitarian The Mismeasure of Man should be mandatory reading for all would-be social engineers. These pieces, though, popped out one a month for Natural History magazine, have an avuncular tone, a little more grown-up than Isaac Asimov's but no less cheerfully self-regarding. This gathering, he notes, `is a book of middle life, and it does contrast, entirely favourably I think (but I am no longer talking to my thirtysomething self)' with his youthful efforts. Perhaps.

            Why eight piggies? Well, suppose we'd had two less fingers--how would we count? Gould is good at these little thought-experiments, designed to shake up our complacency as God-designed Lords of Creation. Still, he has a kind word for William Paley, who tried to prove deity through the intricate design of world and life. And he offers a sharp nudge to those know-alls who easily mock Bishop Ussher and his calculation that it all started on 23 October, 4004 BC, at noon precisely.

            It seems you just can't keep God out of popular books on science. The sub-title for mathematicians Stewart and Golubitsky's book asks William Blake's question: is God a geometer? The Old Chap is shown on the cover, white mane roaring in the gale of His own Being, measuring the void with compasses. Our modern experts in symmetry, in a customary wry move, prefer a gender shift. Their final chapter asks: `Well, Is She?' And their tentative answer, equally wry, makes sense only in the light of all the maths they canvas in the book: `She uses Euclidean geometry to symmetrize your bodily form, conformal geometry to map your visual senses to your brain, differential geometry to string muscle fibres through your heart, Riemannian geometry to bend the universe and create gravity, symplectic geometry to let there be light.' Ah.

            But even as theories of symmetry trim the Blakean beard, a hunger for larger scales of explanation apparently continues to gnaw. In his latest books, with or without collaborator Paul Davies, John Gribbin seems on the verge of pulling God from the Big Bang like a hat from a rabbit. Unlike Davies, he stops short of that fateful step, restricting himself to the claim that the earth, the galaxies, and probably the whole universe are literally living organisms. `But there is no longer any basis,' he concludes, `for invoking the supernatural.' Phew.

            Gaia, for some, is a way of picturing our enriched world as a tangled web of life in which every aspect depends on the prosperity of the rest. Even geology and the balance of ocean and atmosphere are stabilised by the elaborate balance of living species. Pushing the analogy, maybe we can say that this makes the planet a single mega-organism (though one that can alter its very definition through time, as if a snake might turn into a cow at the turn of summer).

            Gribbin, in an audacious and perhaps crack-pated bid, pursues that dodgy logic remorselessly, and finds turtles all the way up. Most exciting is his borrowing from Lee Smolin, who thinks black holes extrude out of our universe and expand as Bangs into new universes, re-mixing the laws of nature a tad each time. Thus, a set of laws congenial to the manufacture of abundant black holes will birth more universes just like Mum. Barren ensembles of laws will die out. After a while, most of the universes in superspace will be fertile. Smolin and Gribbin believe ours is just that kind--and it's a side-effect of universes that make oodles of black holes that they also build the elements of life, and then hang about long enough for it to evolve and start wondering about the meaning of life. That's us, folks.