Name: The Big Picture
Rating: 4.464285714285714 (14 reviews)
ISBN: 9780525954828

Sean Carroll

Sean M. Carroll

"The award-winning Caltech physicist and author of The Particle at the End of the Universe shares sweeping perspectives into how human purpose and meaning naturally fit into a scientific worldview,"--Amazon.com.

On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

The Big Picture

Timeo Williams

The Big Picture 

Dear Sean,

Thank you for sharing this wonderful synthesis of a book, connecting philosophy and science very well and with easy to understand examples for the layman.

Dimitris Papastergiou

I'd argue to not read this and read the Grand Design instead, but that wasn't the best thing ever either with a bunch of repetitive filler lines over-explaining everything and well, not really from Stephen Hawking either. But I'm gonna give this +1 more star than I gave the Grand Design simply because it was more engaging and I think I learned much more from this one and researched far more shit than the other one. Oh well.. 

 Not that THIS one was the easiest thing ever, while I was indeed searching for words and meanings on a bunch of stuff cuz English is not my native language (duh), everything was clearly explainable and understandable as easy as possible. 

This is what's inside basically:
Modern science can't yet explain everything about the universe or the human mind (duh-doy) there's a bunch of shit we do know (DUH) because of science (DUUUUHHHH). The laws of physics and a bunch of other scientific shit have given us a great deal of insight and explanations to nearly everything around us, from why the Earth orbits around the sun, to why pseudo-scientific theories, like telekinesis (yaaay Jean Grey) or teleportation *BAMF* or a bunch of other superhero stuff are just bullshit. 

But well, if we zoom out and look at the bigger picture , by applying scientific thinking we can also shed light on questions that have baffled us for ages. Like how time works, how complexity arises out of order and what the mind is made of. 

What I liked was the chapters about the theoretical Particle X, was a nice brain-scratcher and with a bunch of what-ifs, and well sure that was all imagination and shit but true to theory and understandable.

And the chapter about Aristotle was quite good and true to the source, from what I can remember about reading Aristotle back in the days of wanting to read about our people of yore. But yeah, Aristotle basically said what scientists are saying in the last couple of years, with a simple example (taken from the book) "if you put a book over a table, the book itself cannot move by itself unless there's a force that makes it move". 

That basically tells us that nothing that's stable can move on its own or create something by itself, and Aristotle's theory was that, when we push something or react to something ( the author here uses the term causality formula which is taken from a scientific term of course ) we create something out of it, which is how the world came to be. That something made someone do something so that's how evolution came to be. 

Someone had to do something, something made the homo-whateverous to stand on his feet, to go hunt to eat to shit to fuck to go out of the water and stop being amphibious or whateverious.

SO... we come to the conclusion that SOMETHING had to HAPPEN for the universe to just START. Someone HAD to make SOMETHING for the universe to be created, and well, Aristotle's theory was that THAT something/someone was simply.. yeah you guessed it... God. 

Anyway, nice book and yeah, I wrote a lot for a review. Fuck. What the hell is wrong with me. I'm going to read some Batman now to clear my head from all this nonsense.

The Big Picture On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

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