by Walter
Thirring, Templeton Foundation Press. Paperback ISBN 9781599471150, $19.95.
This is a translation from German of Kosmische Impressionen: Gottes Spuren in der Naturgesetzen so, in principle, I should have little to add to the excellent review by Herwig Schopper (CERN Courier March 2005 p48). The book is a presentation of the universe, its history and its laws, as well as covering cosmology, physics, chemistry and biology. It describes the fantastic progress of our knowledge from the end of the 19th century to the present. Thirring’s point of view is that the structure of the universe is so beautiful, and the conditions of our existence on Earth so miraculously set, that it is difficult not to see the signs of a superior architect behind it all. Whether or not you agree with the author (I do), this volume is extremely informative for everybody. It also contains colourful accounts of the encounters between Thirring (not only a witness but an important player) and the great men who made these incredible changes to our views of the world. (For more details, see Schopper’s review.)
The book makes it clear to all, including atheists, that naive positivism à la August Comte is dead. First you have the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics: if you take a uranium nucleus you cannot predict if it will decay tomorrow or in one million years. Even in purely classical mechanics, you cannot predict the evolution of a complex system from initial conditions known with an arbitrarily small uncertainty beyond the “Lyapounov time”. Moreover, in nature you find spontaneously broken symmetries, which break in an unpredictable way. Many people, such as Murray Gell-Mann, think that the universe can be randomly projected on certain states at random times. Therefore we are far from the “clockmaker” God of Descartes. Despite all of this, however, the predictivity of physics has never been as fantastic as now: the calculated value of the magnetic moment of the electron given to 12 digits agrees perfectly with the experimental value.
Like Schopper, I can only recommend this book. The author makes a considerable effort to avoid technicalities. As a scientist, I am not in a position to say whether someone without a scientific background could follow it, but I believe that it is ideally suited to engineers, especially accelerator engineers, who aren’t always aware of the beautiful endeavour to which they contribute so much.
