General Books - Page 5

The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Routledge Classics)

Karl Popper

Amazon Price: $14.93 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Routledge Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $11.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Logic & Language
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Very interesting 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I have to ask myself, "What is the basis for my scientific knowledge?" On a daily basis, as I am a chemist. I have often been struck by arguments for "induction" as lacking credibility, because how can one argue of probabilities with an unknown sample size? Popper argues that a proposing scientific hypothesis is an inductive act, but it is a creative act not a logical one, but that scientific knowledge is dedective.

I agree with him. The nature of science is such that one must put for statements about how the world works and test them. A scientist should always try to find a way of proving himself or herself wrong. If the predictions of the test are shown to be false, then the hypothesis must be false. That is the basis of scientific knowledge. The rest, the best theories we have are just "working models" and we can never justify why they work. They're simply our best working models now.


I don't find Popper's argument disheartening. Popper points out that we don't have to justify our search for explanations of the world, because they may do us benefit (if we happened to live in a world with stable physical laws, for instance).

I think many scientists would fundamentally agree that the laws of nature can never really be proven. They can't, but they speak volumes about what is relevant to us as a species (which is why Popper's argument that "induction" is creative is so interesting). All Popper asks of a scientific hypothesis is that it can, in principle, be demonstrated false by experience.

This is by far one of the most interesting and (I feel) important books I've ever read.

Editorial Review:

When first published in 1959, this book revolutionized contemporary thinking about science and knowledge. It remains the one of the most widely read books about science to come out of the twentieth century.

Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

Lisa Randall

Amazon Price: $11.65 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Amazon Marketplace: 87 new & used starting at $3.57

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Astronomy -> Cosmology
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 151 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Groundbreaking Physics in Beautiful Prose 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Professor Randall of Harvard has written a truly monumental book for physics and for those interested in science. She has brilliantly bridged the knowledge gap between the scientist and the layperson. With this book, she dispels forever the ridiculous notion that women are somehow less equipped to do science at the highest level. As a theoretical physicist, her work is perhaps the most quoted in recent history - proof that her discoveries, which opens up fresh new thinking, are among the most significant in the history of science.

Warped Passages is a book that showcases Professor Randall's skills as a "model builder" in theoretical physics. Using the logic of model building, she deftly wove a tale of how past discoveries finally led to her out-of-the-box insight to use the fifth dimension to explain some of the more vexing modern day problems in physics. She demonstrated for us that with warped space, we may not even see a fifth dimension of infinite size.

The book is full of creative analogies to help us understand what the human mind is not equipped to grasp - extra dimensions. It is written simply, elegantly and clearly. Even if you find the more esoteric concepts difficult to understand at a deeper level as I do, she has included at the end of each chapter bullets of key concepts that anyone can understand. After reading the book, you will find yourself able to discuss at dinner parties the more important discoveries in physics such as general relativity, quantum mechanics and extra dimensions with the confidence of a trained physicist. You will also want to learn more about the latest advances in physics. Whether you have a Ph.D. in physics or are someone with a passing interest in science, you will find this book useful, interesting, informative and exhilarating. You will be infected by her obvious enthusiasm in physics and mathematics. Professor Randall has done a great service for the advancement of science and the recruit of students into physics. As a bonus, you will see glimpses of her humanity, humor and wit.

This is an exciting time in the history of physics. With this book, you will see why Professor Randall is the chief architect of what makes it exciting.

Editorial Review:

The universe has many secrets. It may hide additional dimensions of space other than the familier three we recognize. There might even be another universe adjacent to ours, invisible and unattainable . . . for now.

Warped Passages is a brilliantly readable and altogether exhilarating journey that tracks the arc of discovery from early twentieth-century physics to the razor's edge of modern scientific theory. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall provides astonishing scientific possibilities that, until recently, were restricted to the realm of science fiction. Unraveling the twisted threads of the most current debates on relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity, she explores some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature—taking us into the warped, hidden dimensions underpinning the universe we live in, demystifying the science of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond our own.

Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything

Ervin Laszlo

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Inner Traditions Amazon Marketplace: 53 new & used starting at $7.00

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> Quantum Theory
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Presents the unifying world-concept long sought by scientists, mystics, and sages: an Integral Theory of Everything

• Explains how modern science has rediscovered the Akashic Field of perennial philosophy

• New edition updates ongoing scientific studies, presents new research inspired by the first edition, and includes new case studies and a section on animal telepathy

Mystics and sages have long maintained that there exists an interconnecting cosmic field at the roots of reality that conserves and conveys information, a field known as the Akashic record. Recent discoveries in vacuum physics show that this Akashic Field is real and has its equivalent in science’s zero-point field that underlies space itself. This field consists of a subtle sea of fluctuating energies from which all things arise: atoms and galaxies, stars and planets, living beings, and even consciousness. This zero-point Akashic Field is the constant and enduring memory of the universe. It holds the record of all that has happened on Earth and in the cosmos and relates it to all that is yet to happen.

In Science and the Akashic Field, philosopher and scientist Ervin Laszlo conveys the essential element of this information field in language that is accessible and clear. From the world of science he confirms our deepest intuitions of the oneness of creation in the Integral Theory of Everything. We discover that, as philosopher William James stated, “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics

Gary Zukav

Amazon Price: $10.95 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: HarperOne Amazon Marketplace: 85 new & used starting at $2.47

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Eastern -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> Eastern -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 114 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Voodoo Physics 1 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Talk about gluten for punishment I read this twice. I swear the person that wrote this does not have a TV which expels his lace of contemporary physics let alone any depth. There are references to the "New Physics" is that like "New Age"?

90% of the matter must be missing from this book. Or how else can he take physics out of context and make such fantastic leaps to religions that he knows little of. He even twists the religion around to serve some unknown purpose.

Many people say they did not understand physics until this book; Surprises, you still do not. You now know what Zukav wished physics was. Take anti-mater for instants that does not mean the opposite of mater. And the relationship between particles has no correlation with the relationship of dogs and cats.

At least get it straight before mixing it up. Try reading some of these:
"The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski". The book available everywhere as are the DVD's.

The Upanishads by Eknath Easwaran (Editor), Michael N. Nagler (Photographer)

Or just about any mainstream material on physics and religion.

Then if you still want to mix worlds into one read someone saner:
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism by Fritjof Capra.

Editorial Review:

With its unique combination of depth, clarity, and humor that has enchanted millions, this beloved classic by bestselling author Gary Zukav opens the fascinating world of quantum physics to readers with no mathematical or technical background. "Wu Li" is the Chinese phrase for physics. It means "patterns of organic energy," but it also means "nonsense," "my way," "I clutch my ideas," and "enlightenment." These captivating ideas frame Zukav's evocative exploration of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Delightfully easy to read, The Dancing Wu Li Masters illuminates the compelling powers at the core of all we know.

The Physics of Superheroes

James Kakalios

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Gotham Amazon Marketplace: 76 new & used starting at $0.15

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Comics & Graphic Novels -> Graphic Novels -> General
Subjects -> Comics & Graphic Novels -> Graphic Novels -> General AAS
Subjects -> Comics & Graphic Novels -> History & Price Guides

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Physics of Superheroesapplies the reality of physics to the fantasy of comic books. James Kakalios explores the scientific plausibility of the powers and feats of the most famous superheroes—and discovers that in many cases the comic writers got their science surprisingly right. Along the way he provides an engaging and witty commentary while introducing the lay reader to both classic and cutting-edge concepts in physics, including:

• What Superman’s strength can tell us about the Newtonian physics of force, mass, and acceleration
• How Iceman’s and Storm’s powers illustrate the principles of thermal dynamics
• The physics behind the death of Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy
• Why physics professors gone bad are the most dangerous evil geniuses! BACKCOVER: Praise for The Physics of Superheroes

“Surprisingly enough, according to Kakalios, comic books get their physics right more often than you’d think.”
—The Boston Globe

“Writing with tongue firmly planted in cheek, Kakalios looks at classic comics with a physicist’s eye. . . . Outstanding.”
—The Orlando Sentinel

“Kakalios, a University of Minnesota physicist and unrepentant comics nerd, offers up jovial, largely equation-free deconstructions of Ant-Man’s shrinking ability, the centripetal acceleration of Spider-Man’s swing, and the strength of his silk web.”
—Discover

“Wildly entertaining, yet scientifically accurate… Comprises a fairly solid introductory education in physics, sweetened with a history lesson in classic comic book superheroes.”
—Metro

“Offers a droll but sincere look at what Superman and Spider-Man can teach about physics. . . . Entertaining. . . . His explanations are lucid and smooth.”
—Science magazine

The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Was Reborn

Louisa Gilder

Amazon Price: $18.15 List Price: $27.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Knopf Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $16.39

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> Quantum Theory
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A brilliantly original and richly illuminating exploration of entanglement, the seemingly telepathic communication between two separated particles—one of the fundamental concepts of quantum physics.

In 1935, in what would become the most cited of all of his papers, Albert Einstein showed that quantum mechanics predicted such a correlation, which he dubbed “spooky action at a distance.” In that same year, Erwin Schrödinger christened this spooky correlation “entanglement.” Yet its existence wasn’t firmly established until 1964, in a groundbreaking paper by the Irish physicist John Bell. What happened during those years and what has happened since to refine the understanding of this phenomenon is the fascinating story told here.

We move from a coffee shop in Zurich, where Einstein and Max von Laue discuss the madness of quantum theory, to a bar in Brazil, as David Bohm and Richard Feynman chat over cervejas. We travel to the campuses of American universities—from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Berkeley to the Princeton of Einstein and Bohm to Bell’s Stanford sabbatical—and we visit centers of European physics: Copenhagen, home to Bohr’s famous institute, and Munich, where Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli picnic on cheese and heady discussions of electron orbits.

Drawing on the papers, letters, and memoirs of the twentieth century’s greatest physicists, Louisa Gilder both humanizes and dramatizes the story by employing their own words in imagined face-to-face dialogues. Here are Bohr and Einstein clashing, and Heisenberg and Pauli deciding which mysteries to pursue. We see Schrödinger and Louis de Broglie pave the way for Bell, whose work is here given a long-overdue revisiting. And with his characteristic matter-of-fact eloquence, Richard Feynman challenges his contemporaries to make something of this entanglement.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton Science Library)

Richard P. Feynman

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Princeton University Press Amazon Marketplace: 47 new & used starting at $7.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Computer Science -> Circuitry -> Electrodynamics
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> Light
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> Nuclear Physics

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A Fantastic Theory 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Even though these lectures are more than 20 years old, Feynman did an incredible job of explaining a fundamental concept in Physics. I can see now why he received the Nobel prize for his work in this area. I would call him the Carl Sagan of Physics, except that Mr. Sagan's popularity came later in time. QED is so bizarre and incredible, yet so accurate and powerful a theory that it boggles the mind! Mr. Feynman's explanation is so complete and articulate that anyone can understand it. This theory explains the physical underpinnings of most of our daily experience, the interactions of photons with matter, yet it is a complete surprise!

Editorial Review:

Celebrated for his brilliantly quirky insights into the physical world, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman also possessed an extraordinary talent for explaining difficult concepts to the general public. Here Feynman provides a classic and definitive introduction to QED (namely quantum electrodynamics), that part of quantum field theory describing the interactions of light with charged particles. Using everyday language, spatial concepts, visualizations, and his renowned "Feynman diagrams" instead of advanced mathematics, Feynman clearly and humorously communicates both the substance and spirit of QED to the layperson. A. Zee's new introduction places both Feynman's book and his seminal contribution to QED in historical context and further highlights Feynman's uniquely appealing and illuminating style.

Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius

Hans C. Ohanian

Amazon Price: $15.20 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton Amazon Marketplace: 60 new & used starting at $12.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Scientists
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Fresh insights into aspects of Einstein we don't usually consider: his mistakes and the role they played in the discovery of his theories.

Although Einstein was the greatest genius of the 20th century, many of his ground-breaking discoveries were blighted by mistakes, ranging from serious misconceptions in physics to blatant errors in mathematics. For instance, Einstein's first theoretical proof of the famous formula E = mc² was incomplete and only approximately valid; he struggled with this problem for many years, but he never found a complete proof (better mathematicians did). In this provocative forensic biography, Hans Ohanian dissects this and other mistakes and places them in the context of Einstein's turbulent life and times. Einstein was often navigating in a fog of irrational and mystical inspirations, but his profound intuition about physics permitted him to reach his goal despite—and sometimes because of-the mistakes he made along the way. Einstein's uncanny ability to use his mistakes subconsciously as stepping-stones toward his revolutionary theories was one hallmark of his genius. 25 illustrations.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character

Richard Phillips Feynman, Richard P. Feynman

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: W. W. Norton & Company Amazon Marketplace: 75 new & used starting at $4.45

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> People, A-Z -> ( F ) -> Feynman, Richard
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Scientists
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Essays -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Feynman...The Scientific Entertainer 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

In this sequel to "surely you must be joking Mr. Feynman," Richard Feynman once again uses his cunningness and his scientific genius to entertain. This book starts off with a brief history of him and his scientific career. Then it goes on to his wife's death. This is a very sad excerpt of the story and in this part, he communicates with you the sorrow he goes through, showing he does truly love his wife. During this portion you realize that although he is a brilliant man and is nearly untouchable in the scientific realm, he is still down to earth and goes through every thing that we do. Also in this book is the main feature, the Challenger investigation. The Challenger exploded shortly after leaving the ground and NASA wanted to know why. They pull in a group of the top scientists, mathematicians and some other random people that don't have names. Their job is to see what went wrong with the Challenger in an effort to stop this mistake from being repeated. Feynman and the others work in Washington D.C. over six months. He finally figured out and proved, with simply a glass of ice water and a part off of the Challenger, what the problem was. He used his ingenious brain and his sense of humor to establish his point and to show NASA their miniscule piece that was causing such a major problem. This book is incredibly funny and is not such a book that has large vocabulary and crazy concepts never heard by normal human ears. It is an easy read and a fun read.

Editorial Review:

The best-selling sequel to "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"--funny, poignant, instructive. One of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman possessed an unquenchable thirst for adventure and an unparalleled ability to tell the stories of his life. "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" is Feynman's last literary legacy, which he prepared as he struggled with cancer. Among its many tales--some funny, others intensely moving--we meet Feynman's first wife, Arlene, who taught him of love's irreducible mystery as she lay dying in a hospital bed while he worked nearby on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. We are also given a fascinating narrative of the investigation of the space shuttle Challenger's explosion in 1986, and we relive the moment when Feynman revealed the disaster's cause by an elegant experiment: dropping a ring of rubber into a glass of cold water and pulling it out, misshapen. A New York Times bestseller.

The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (25th Anniversary Edition)

Fritjof Capra

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Shambhala Publications, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 91 new & used starting at $4.77

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Philosophy -> General AAS
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Professional Science -> Physics -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 74 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Convincing, but for all the wrong reasons . . . 1 out of 5 stars.
19 of 25 people found this review helpful.

It is widely recognized, at least by those outside of science, that scientists are notorious bunglers when it comes to philosophical matters. So it is not surprising, though hardly excusable, that Capra's book displays a level of incompetence that should be immediately obvious to anyone with even a cursory background in logic or philosophy. As a matter of fact, it would be surprising if such an unqualified admirer of Taoism, whose writings Capra notes approvingly are "full of passages reflecting the Taoist's contempt of reasoning" (p. 113), should display much in the way of sound reasoning. While I was not especially sympathetic to Capra's thesis even before I read the book, I at least had high hopes for a compelling argument for his case, but that was wishful thinking. The thesis is that the worldviews of Eastern mysticism provide the best framework for understanding modern physics, and that all the advances in physics in the 20th century unanimously confirm these worldviews. However, the picture that emerges is rather one of the utter incompatibility of Eastern mysticism with physics of any kind, classical or modern.

In order to fully appreciate the force of this book, it is important to keep in mind not only the results of physics, but also the scientific endeavor itself. That endeavor consists of an incredibly strenuous exertion of the human rational faculties to uncover truths about reality that we do not know ahead of time, and to systematize the results of investigation into rigorous theories explaining the phenomena. In contrast to this, according to Capra, "all concepts about reality formed by the human mind are void" (p. 97); "the human intellect can never comprehend the Tao" (p. 113); "whenever you want to achieve anything, you should start with its opposite" (p. 115); "words can never express the ultimate truth" (p. 122); "to believe that our abstract concepts of separate 'things' and 'events' are realities of nature is an illusion" (p. 131); the particles of modern physics "are merely idealizations which are useful from a practical point of view, but have no fundamental significance" (p. 137); "all the concepts we use to describe nature . . . are not features of reality, as we tend to believe, but creations of the mind" (p. 161); "the idea of a constant 'self' undergoing successive experiences is an illusion" (p. 212); "all phenomena in the world are nothing but the illusory manifestation of the mind and have no reality on their own . . . what appears to be external does not exist in reality" (p. 277); "ultimately, there are no parts at all in this interconnected web" (p. 330); "there is no absolute truth in science" (p. 337). This collection of quotes does indeed give an excellent picture of the foundation that Eastern mysticism has to offer for science, but is it even possible to think that this view of the world constitutes fertile soil for the scientific enterprise?

A striking feature of many of Capra's central arguments is the profound gulf between his premises and his conclusions, which would be simply laughable if it were not for the fact that so many people stand to be badly led astray. For instance, Capra leaps from Einstein's famous equation E=mc^2 to the most astounding claim in the whole book, that "modern physicists . . . deny the existence of any material substance" (p. 204). Can this be serious? This is the logical equivalent of saying that "magnetism has been discovered to be an aspect of an electromagnetic field, therefore magnetism doesn't exist" or "scientists have discovered that houses are made of wood, therefore houses don't exist". One of Capra's favorite mantras is that modern physics has discovered that material particles "are not distinct entities" (p. 209). Even if we accept for the sake of the argument his repeated confusion of existence and measurability, it is difficult to see how the fact that particles interact, influence each other, and in some cases are even indistinguishable, means that they are not distinct entities.

If it were not enough to repeatedly outrage every principle of sound reasoning, Capra is equally adept at mangling the most profound discoveries of 20th century physics. He dwells at length on Einstein's General Relativity, arguing that it proves that "geometry is not inherent in nature but is imposed upon it by the mind" (p. 162). In actual fact, General Relativity is the scientific rock upon which all the floundering ships in the fleet of subjectivism are dashed. From Einstein we have learned that the true structure of space and time is actually so incredibly foreign to our everyday intuitions that it is not even possible to understand it without the formidable apparatus of non-Euclidean geometry. Capra goes on in the same chapter to give an example that "shows that we can always determine whether a surface is curved or not, just by making geometrical measurements of its surface, and by comparing the results with those predicted by Euclidean geometry. If there is a discrepancy, the surface is curved; and the larger the discrepancy is - for a given size of figures - the stronger the curvature" (p. 176). But what is it that is curved or not? Something created by our mind? Why are we doing an experiment at all if the geometry of space is nothing but a creation of the mind? But a mind sunk in the quagmires of Eastern mysticism cannot readily recognize such an obvious point. In all of science there is nothing more "objective" than Einstein's General Relativity, a fact of which Einstein himself was well aware.

But this discussion brings up another important point. I would like to know, if it is true that in modern physics "cause and effect lose their meaning" (p. 81) how, even in principle, anyone could ever do a scientific experiment in atomic physics. If the answer is that cause and effect are just illusions of the sensory world, then the question remains, how can we ever do a scientific experiment? Whence comes this illusion, and how can it possibly be trusted to be reliable? If the answer is that cause and effect are indeed principles of macroscopic and sensory reality, but that they are not a part of the unseen "ultimate reality" which underlies all the rest, then I ask, from whence arises this lawfulness in sensory reality? How do we build up from the constituents of a reality where cause and effect are meaningless to an observable world where they are no longer meaningless? This constitutes as insurmountable a leap for logic as it does for science.

As the book drags on, Capra continues to weary us with his absurdities. On p. 288 he claims that fundamental constants are "arbitrary parameters". What does this even mean? Is Planck's constant arbitrary? I would like to see Capra replace it with something else. On p. 334 he says that "scientists do not deal with truth (in the sense of a precise correspondence between the description and the described phenomena); they deal with limited and approximate descriptions of reality." This is certainly contradicted by the staggering precision achieved in modern physics, both in theories and experiments, but such a consideration would most likely not intimidate a mind infatuated with contradictions. Such was certainly not the mind of Johannes Kepler, who spent several years of his life working to account for barely a one tenth of one degree of angle disparity between the orbit of Mars and theory, convinced that the human mind, created in the image of a rational God, could precisely learn the truth about the rational creation of that God. How foreign such a mindset must really be to Eastern mystical thought. Would Kepler have undergone such Herculean intellectual exertions had he shared Capra's conviction that he could attain only limited and approximate knowledge, or would he simply have shrugged his shoulders and decided that Ptolemaic astronomy was "close enough"?

But it is least of all to history that we should look for confirmation of Capra's thesis. In the early chapters he blames Aristotle and Christianity for the ensuing "lack of interest in the material world" (p. 22). But what cultures ever displayed a more profound and studious disregard for the material world than the Eastern mystical traditions? And why would they hold in high regard something that is at best a creation of the human mind and at worst a deceptive illusion? On p. 198-199 Capra considers the idea of an oscillating and organic universe, and goes on to say that "the scale of this ancient myth is indeed staggering: it has taken the human mind more than two thousand years to come up again with a similar concept." But on the contrary, it took the human mind so many thousands of years to overcome organismic and oscillatory theories of the universe. These theories were ubiquitous in all the great ancient cultures, from the Egyptian to the Babylonian to the Indian to the Chinese to the Mayan to the Greek, and it was exactly this conception that so effectively stifled the optimistic and rational view of nature that is indispensable for science.

In conclusion, Capra has done a masterful job of presenting the relevance of Eastern mysticism to modern physics, but even a passing consideration readily reveals that this relevance is only the thorough incompatibility of Eastern mysticism with science of any kind. As Western culture steadily abandons rationality and the human ability to know truth, the philosophies of Eastern mysticism do indeed continue to gain credence and ascendance, but to exactly the same extent we will surely witness the decline of science.

Editorial Review:

After a quarter of a century in print, Capra's groundbreaking work still challenges and inspires. This updated edition of The Tao of Physics includes a new preface and afterword in which the author reviews the developments of the twenty-five years since the book's first publication, discusses criticisms the book has received, and examines future possibilities for a new scientific world.