Uncover the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe with Sean Carroll's 'The Big Picture'

Rizwan Khan: excellent work

India on Sep 07, 2023

Feedback: Recebemos o livro, porém, ele veio sem proteção (saco plástico, filme plástico) por este motivo, a capa veio com uma das capas avariada, um pouco "puída", numa das orelhas
Poderiam ter embalado o livro corretamente. Não gostei deste detalhe. E ainda por cima, comprei para presentear.

Brazil on Sep 02, 2023

Book Shark: The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean M. Carroll

“The Big Picture” presents the fascinating scientific story of our universe (the big picture) and why we think it’s true and philosophically why despite being part of a universe that runs according to impersonal underlying laws, we matter. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll provides readers with an ambitious yet accessible view of topics pertaining to the big picture. This interesting 475-page book includes fifty chapters broken out into the following six parts: 1. Cosmos, 2. Understanding, 3. Essence, 4. Complexity, 5. Thinking, and 6. Caring.

Positives:
1. Professionally written, accessible and well-researched book.
2. The fascinating topic on the origins of life and its meaning.
3. Sean M. Carroll does a wonderful job of turning complex and interesting topics accessible to the layperson. He does this by making effective use of diagrams and concise descriptions and keeping mathematical equations to a minimum.
4. Describes how the purpose of life came to be. “Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being...

United States on Feb 26, 2023

David Roemer: “Life” and “consciousness” do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinary complex systems. (location 263)

There is the conscious knowledge of human beings as opposed to the sense knowledge of animals. We can see with our eyes that animals can see and hear and solve simple problems. We know about the “conscious knowledge of human beings” because we can make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. One is a scientific observation and the other is a metaphysical observation. There is a great track record of success with scientific questions. However, there is no such track record of success with metaphysical questions.

We don’t know how life began, or how consciousness arose. (location 306)

What caused life to begin is a question in science. What is consciousness and how it arose is a question in metaphysics. The answer is that we can comprehend what human consciousness is because we have it. But we can’t define human consciousness. Knowing that the sky is blue means more than that light is entering the eye and a signal is going to the brain. It means an...

United States on Apr 14, 2019

Paul: Nach den tollen Vorträgen auf Youtube von Sean Carroll in sehr gut verständlichem Englisch habe ich mir nun auch das Buch dazu im original Englisch gekauft. Das Englisch im Buch ist deutlich anspruchsvoller als bei den Vorträgen, aber verständlich. Leider kommt mir die theoret. Physik des Universums, die ich erwartet hatte, aber deutlich zu kurz. Hier wird statt dessen eine ganze Weltanschauung beschrieben, die das Primat der Wissenschaft als Erkenntnisquelle hervorhebt, was auch gut begründet wird. Der Inhalt des Buches ist aus meiner Sicht hervorragend und sollte an jeder Schule auf der Welt vorgestellt werden! Mit seinem "poetic naturalism" beschriebt der Autor nicht weniger als die Grundlagen des Universums, die Rolle des Menschen darin, und wie der Mensch mit seinen Mitteln (Mathematik, effektive Theorien auf verschiedenen Ebenen) das Universum beschreiben und erkennen kann. Dabei werden scheinbar konkurrierende Theorien in Physik, Chemie, Biologie, Soziologie, Psychologie als gleichwertige unterschiedliche Sichtweisen erklärt. Der Autor warnt jedoch davor, diese Sichtweisen zu vermischen: Entweder beschreibt man die Atome eines Systems (z.B. mit der Core-Theory aller...

Germany on Jan 06, 2018

The Sprawl: I'm a big fan of Sean Carroll: his From Eternity To Here is one of my favourite popular physics books, and his talks and lectures as one of our most vocal public naturalists are always worth catching. I'm also an atheist, a naturalist, an opponent of religious irrationality and am very interested in cosmology and particle physics, so I was very much looking forward to this book. Unfortunately, Carroll writes best when he's focusing on a single subject, like time or the story of the Higgs Boson, and his remit here is far too wide, even for a book as hefty as this. Subjects range from free-will, consciousness and morality to truth, the standard model of particle physics, and Everettian quantum mechanics and, given this, certain topics upon which he could have written for fifty or sixty pages without scratching the surface are considered and discarded in two or three large paragraphs.
It's an ambitious book, and its central, guiding worldview is 'poetic naturalism', an ill-defined concept which, for me, hews a little to close to the relativistic view of truth so common among postmodernists and the humanities in general. As far as I can tell, 'poetic naturalism' allows that the...

United Kingdom on Oct 08, 2016

Steve: I am a big Sean Carroll fan and have all his books and seen his you tube videos many times. He has great way of getting to the nub of the issue in a logical and scientific way and making sense out of our world. I preordered this book and was very excited to get the notification from amazon that it was there and read it as soon as i could. This book goes in a much more surprisingly philosophical direction than his previous books. While I am more interested in hard science it was a nice read and still had enough science to keep my attention. My main interest though is really how the world works as it does in a more scientific way. Why exactly does entropy mean that we cannot remember the future? Is time one dimensional? I hope that such matters can be more deeply addressed as far as possible in future books. But even Sean of course cannot have all the answers. One example in his book I would doubt is the example of someone who grew up never seeing red. I would doubt that in such a case a fully formed adult brain would be capable of perceiving red as such since the neural connections were not made when the brain had the necessary plasticity. They would be probably be effectively...

Germany on Sep 10, 2016