John D. Barrow’s “New Theories of Everything”

John D. Barrow, New Theories of Everything, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Both of the present bloggers have enjoyed Barrow’s previous works. Bailey was so enthralled with Barrow and Tipler’s 1988 book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle that he read every word of its 736 pages multiple times. Borwein (with his brother Peter) wrote a favorable review of Barrow’s 1992 book Pi in the Sky for the publication Science.

Barrow’s latest book, New Theories of Everything, does not disappoint. In this wide-ranging work, Barrow examines the notion of viewing science as the search for algorithmic compression of observed data. In other words,

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Unscientific America

Review/synopsis of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirschenbaum, Basic Books, NY, 2009:

Carl Sagan, in his 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World issued this sober warning:

We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

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