At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking Science by Surprise

by Michael Brooks

The atom. The Big Bang. DNA. Natural selection. All ideas that have revolutionised science - and that were dismissed out of hand when they first appeared. The surprises haven't stopped: here, Michael Brooks, bestselling author of 13 Things that Don't Make Sense, investigates the new wave of unexpected insights that are shaping the future of scientific discovery. Through eleven radical new insights, Brooks takes us to the extreme frontiers of what we understand about the world. He journeys from the observations that might rewrite our history of the universe, through the novel biology behind our will to live, and on to the physiological root of consciousness. Along the way, he examines how the underrepresentation of women in clinical trials means that many of the drugs we use are less effective on women than men and more likely to have adverse effects, explores how merging humans with other species might provide a solution to the shortage of organ donors, and finds out if there is such a thing as the will to live. When we think about science, we often think of iron-clad facts. But today more than ever, our unshakeable truths have been shaken apart. As Michael Brooks reveals, the best science is about open-mindedness, imagination and a love of mind-boggling adventures at the edge of uncertainty.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Audiobook, Physics, History, Biology, The World

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Michael Edward Brooks is an English science writer, noted for explaining complex scientific research and findings to the general population. Brooks holds a PhD in Quantum Physics from the University of Sussex. He was previously an editor for New Scientist magazine, and currently works as a consultant for that magazine. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, The Times Higher Education Supplement. His first novel, Entanglement, was published in 2007. His first non-fiction book, an exploration of scientific anomalies entitled 13 Things That Don't Make Sense, was published in 2009. Brooks' next book, The Big Questions: Physics, was released in February 2010. It contains twenty 3,000-word essays addressing the most fundamental and frequently asked questions about science.

Reviews

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up after attending the New Scientist “instant expert” workshop on consciousness. Michael Brooks introduced the lecturers and such, and chaired the Q&A session, and it was mentioned one of his books mentions epigenetics. Well, that’s possibly even more my thing than a workshop on consciousness, so of course I picked it up.

It’s an overview of the parts of science where we don’t quite know what’s happening. Where the story becomes blurred and you definitely don’t teach it in GCSE Physics, because even eminent scientists aren’t sure what to believe. It makes things we take for granted — the Big Bang, hereditary diseases mostly through DNA itself — a little shakier. So Brooks’ account is understandably speculative, just giving us a look at current thought in the field — the big ideas which could change the way we look at the world.

It’s reasonably easy to read, despite the big concepts, and I quite enjoyed it. If New Scientist works for you, then this is about the same level, to my mind. It covers a lot of areas of science and goes in-depth on none, so you certainly don’t need to be an expert. If you are finding the concepts a little difficult, I would suggest reading one chapter at a time and giving yourself time to digest the ideas — I did that with a couple of chapters.

Originally posted here.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

At The Edge Of Uncertainty describes eleven discoveries (or possibilities) within eleven chapters that the scientific world knows about but does not clearly understand how or why exactly do they happen to be. They are at this point at the edge of uncertainty. Personally, I felt wonderful as long as it remains 'magic' and the answers are unclear to mankind.

The chapters are themselves very well structured: they start off with a preface to the topic in which the writer pulls you towards its introduction from simply anywhere else; then introduces you to the main precursor ideas (and/or their original discoverers or thinkers) of the topic in history; and then move on to explain the same in the sense of the scientific perception that the topic takes contemporarily. Speculations and proven facts are regular ingredients throughout the book.

The topics dealt in the book are -
Consciousness
Animal Personalities and Animal Culture
Chimeras
Epigenetics
Gender-based Medicine
Will Power
Quantum Phenomena in Biological Kingdoms
Quantum Information Theory
Alternative Creation Theories & Anomalies in the Universe
Hypercomputer
The Illusion of Time

This particular book certainly took me away to exotic topics all at once, that is not usually dealt with so easily in science (through books). The book displays no pictures, diagrams or any graphical information for that matter, whose inclusion could have been helpful at times and increased the rating of the book. Since the book is a new publication (2014), it keeps the user pretty much updated until its current time.

Readers who already have some knowledge of the topics dealt within the book, may not find it amazing, but others definitely would! Lots of names and dates have been included, to which it sometimes becomes boring (at least for me it did). I was personally mesmerized by only three (new) topics (Quantum Biology, Quantum Information Theory, Hypercomputer), since I have had come across most of the remaining topics in my earlier readings. Others were good too, they did contain information which was new to me, although sometimes I found it uninteresting. The writer does not go too deep into a topic, but being superficial should help for people who are interested in general. I personally wished the topics would have been slightly more intense.

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Zombies aren't real and they don't help in explaining consciousness, quantum computers and epigenetics are real (and cool), gender makes a difference in drug efficacy, entanglement is cool, time is not a part of physics, and the big bang theory doesn't explain everything and has some problems. All those concepts are explored in this book and probably are familiar to any regular listener of Audible's pop science books.

Science is not perfect and speculation beyond what we currently accept is worth while, but to make a book really worth my while tell me things I don't already know. This book fails at telling me things I haven't read elsewhere.

If you're not too familiar with pop science books, this book provides a good essay approach to a lot of interesting topics (with a little bit too much speculation, though), but for almost everyone else I would recommend skipping this book. (Except, the section on epigenetics did standout and the understanding about the importance of epigenetics needs to be more widely understood).

[Cav · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The beauty of human beings, though, is that we are fierce and indefatigable. We have shown ourselves determined to grapple with the universe around us until it surrenders its secrets to our inquiries..."

At the Edge of Uncertainty was an interesting book. I was not sure what to expect of it going in. It is a bit unorthodox, as the material it covers is multi-disciplinary and quite wide-ranging. Fortunately, the author did a decent job of tying it all together.

Author Michael Edward Brooks is an English science writer, noted for explaining complex scientific research and findings to the general population.

Michael Brooks:


Brooks gets the writing here off on a good foot, with a well-written intro that was fairly lively and engaging. He writes with a decent style, for the most part, and does an effective job of covering some fairly technical material in a manner that should be accessible to someone with a small degree of scientific literacy.

The formatting of the book was also well done It is broken into well-defined chapters, each covering a different corresponding subject.

Brooks drops the quote from the start of this review in the book's intro, and continues it below:

"...That is why we go to the edge of uncertainty: to quest, and question, and fight with ourselves and others until we have an answer. Then, aware that we have brushed against other questions and surprises, we stow our new discoveries safely, and dive back into the dark waters to wrestle more things into the light. We have been doing it for centuries, and we can only hope we will be doing it for centuries to come. This is, after all, the best thing humans have ever done.
This is how those mysterious and powerful brains compel us to behave: they endow us with the curiosity, the bravery and the tenacity to hunt out the truth as best we can. It’s not an easy way to live. By the end of this journey to the frontiers of human certainty and beyond, your brain will feel battered and bruised. But it will also cry out for more. Adventuring is addictive. You have been warned..."

As mentioned briefly above; the topics covered here run the gambit and cross many different scientific fields. The book talks about:
• Consciousness; The zombie hypothesis, the Human Brain Project.
• Animal Personalities and Animal Culture; Emotions, and Intelligence. Cultural transmission in animals. Humpback whale songs.
• Chimeras; Mixing species. Russia's attempt at making an ape-human chimera.
• Epigenetics; The Dutch Hunger Winter. African-Americans reduced birth weights.
• Gender-based Medicine; Sex differences in drug testing and pathology.
• Will Power; The will to live affecting lifespans. The "psychogenic" death.
• Quantum Phenomena in Biological Kingdoms; Left and Right-handed Molecules.
• Quantum Information Theory; Quantum entanglement; relativity.
• Alternative Creation Theories & Anomalies in the Universe; String theory, questions about the Big Bang and the mass of the Universe.
• Hypercomputer; quantum computing.
• The Illusion of Time; More relativity.

It should be said that a good chunk of this book; particularly the last ~third to ~half, which talks about theoretic physics is pretty technical. There's lots of talk about quantum mechanics, and you know how unwieldy that is... Brooks is likely to lose a decent chunk of readers who are not somewhat well-versed in this field. Although he did do a fairly decent job of trying to convey this material to the reader, there are inherent problems with presenting material this advanced to the layperson.


********************

At the Edge of Uncertainty was a decent read, and the author sounds like a sharp mind.
I would recommend the book to anyone reading this.
4 stars.

[Donald Plugge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't pick up this book until you have had your morning cup of Joe.

Physicist Michael Brooks talks about cutting edge science like consciousness, anomalies in the universe, quantum phenomena in biological kingdoms, the illusion of time and even will power.

My favorite section was the area on information theory where he talks to quirky characters like the cigar smokin' Vlatko Vedral who sees the universe as pure quantum information. Then you have Rolf Landauer with his view that all information is physical.

So actually, the book poses more questions than it answers. Yet the journey is intriguing.

And any book mentioning Richard Feynman has potential to be a winner.

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like his previous two books, this new book focuses on the latest and most exciting discoveries in science. And, just as with his previous book, I personally enjoy his discussions of physics more than I do his discussions of the biological sciences. In particular, he did a great job summarizing information theory. His wonderful journalistic style never fails to excite the science lover inside me.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this was wonderful. I finished it in one gulp after a bad day at work, and it was a delightful way to gain a sense of perspective: the universe is very, very big, and there's a lot of it we don't understand. Most of what we think we know is probably wrong. More specifically, the Big Bang Theory appears to be on its last legs: dark matter and dark energy are problems. There's not nearly enough lithium in the universe for the Big Bang Theory to be correct, and the Higgs vibrates at a frequency that rules out the most plausible of the varieties of inflation (all of which are implausible in the first place). Then there's the Axis of Evil, Dark Flow, and the Huge-Large Quasar group. In short, the Big Bang theory is currently being held together with duct tape, and is and prime for a Kuhnian paradigm shift. I hope I get to live to see whatever theory comes next.

The section on quantum biology in birds' navigation through magnetic fields and in leaves - -where photons of light simultaneously take all possible paths to their goal -- was fascinating. And smell! turns out we don't know how smell works, but it's likely that it's linked to quantum effects.

I didn't really get the section on computing, but that's okay. What I did get was this, "though Cantor's proof is mathematically correct, there may be no infinities at all in the real world. Rutgers University mathematician Doron Zeilberger, for instance, says there is no such thing as infinity outside of mathematics . . . . we'll get nowhere, until we start working with the idea that there is one final, largest number . . . the concept of infinity has given us false solutions to many of the problems of cosmology. According to MIT's Max Tegmark, for instance, it is assumptions of a real, physical infinity that created the situation where Alan Guth's inflation is an acceptable theory. Tegmark and others say that physics would describe the universe -- and its history -- much better if we no longer had infinity as an option in our theories" (229).

Much of it, interestingly, confirms insights from Buddhist thought -- which makes sense if you take seriously the claim of Buddhist practitioners that they've been practicing careful, scientific observation of the universe as it manifests in the human mind for thousands of years. "What we can glean from this is that the photon, or the fullerene (or you or I, if we set the experiment up right), has no independent existence. It is not a wave, or a particle. It is neither and both, in a mysterious way that depends on its interactions with its environment. Looking at the experiment, or working at a certain temperature, brings a particle into existence. other conditions make it exist as a wave. The exact nature of its existence depends on things other than itself, things to do with an exchange of information with the outside world. Things, in other words, to do with you and me, the programmers" (182). Sounds like conditions co-arising to me. Because of this, combined with entanglement, "experiments show that the experimenter's choices can indeed influence the outcome of an experiment long after the result should already have been determined" (183) (I'm thinking here of _A Tale for the Time Being_).

The chapter on gender differences in medicine was amazing: there are gender differences, and because women are underrepresented in clinical trials, the results often don't apply to them, though the drugs are prescribed as though they do. The DTP vaccine, for example, affects girls' immune systems much differently than it does boys' (Brooks does not touch on the anti-vaccine movement, and given the power and danger of that, it might have been nice to have a paragraph or two on the value of vaccines.)

There were several chapters on the mind and its connection to the body. Of *course* mind has a physical basis -- how could it not? But apparently that, like the emotions of animals, is open to debate. There was also fascinating research on the way in which bodies can be conditioned to respond absent medication. I'd heard something similar on NPR recently, about a patient who was given immunosuppressant drugs in a glass of orange juice for a period of time, then was able to achieve the same effect simply by drinking the orange juice. Pavlovian training of the immune system -- fun! Even more intriguing, talk therapy also changes the physical brain - "we are moving towards a situation where specific types of psychotherapy can be used to target particular brain circuits. As Kandel puts it, 'psychotherapy is a biological treatment, a brain therapy'" (133).

When researchers examine the blood of depressed patients, they found that "one-third of people with major depressive disorder have raised levels of inflammatory markers like cytokines in their blood. Treat certain depressed patients with the frontline drugs and their blood markers for inflammation are significantly reduced" (140). Both Tai Chi (which boosts cellular immune response by up to 50 percent) and support groups increase survival times for patients with cancer.

The chapter on epigenetics -- the inheritance of acquired traits (or, rather, "gene expressions") was a good summary of that phenomenon. It also contained one of the better explanations of the physical reality of genes: "Our genome has four types of molecule, represented by the letters A, T, C and G, the alphabet of the genome. Its words are three letters long, and grouped into paragraphs known as exons. Paragraphs are lumped together to make genes" (81).

The chapter on the social and cultural behaviors of nonhuman animals -- and the notion that they have personalities -- was a little disheartening. Brooks notes that scientists are explicitly trained to detachment, but quotes Jeffrey Masson, who argues that the most extreme cases of detachment "are suggestive of a psychiatric disorder." Clearly. Of course animals -- and even insects -- have personalities -- have no scientists every lived with dogs or cats?

Finally, time appears to be an emergent property that has no basis in the deepest realities of the universe. "This has remarkable consequences. The distortion of time -- it's known to physicists as 'time dilation' -- shatters our concept of cause and effect. First, it is possible for two people to move relative to each other through the universe in such a way that they can both see two events but cannot agree on which one of them happened first. Another casulaty is the concept of a universal 'now': one person's present moment is in another person's past, depending on how they are moving relative to one another . . . . more likely [time] doesn't exist at all, except inside your head" (241). Quantum theory and relativity can be reconciled if we ditch the notion of time. "In October 2013 a group of Italian researchers showed that this kind of universe would still have an appearance of time passing for those within it" (243). And it turns out that we're zeroing in on the biological mechanisms that create our sense of the passage of time. In a patient with a lesion in the right prefrontal cortex of his brain, a "clot in his carotid artery was restricting blood flow. His memory was fine, as was his ability to pay attention to stimuli. The only casualty was his sense of time (248).

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am enjoying this. It reminds me of the NPR show Radiolab where the hosts jump around a science topic.

This is the ultimate overdrive audio-book since it consists of 11 independent chapters that can be picked up or put down whenever. Listening to it on the treadmill.

[Dave Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pointlessly depressing DNF 35%

I only made it to 5 discoveries taking science by surprise.
You know what took me by surprise? The preponderance of depressing stuff this book bombards you with right out of the gate. and so much of it isn't even germane.
This book should be called 11 subjects the author can tie to mortality, grieving, sorrow, and futility.
Seriously W-T-F!?!
This guy Michael Brooks has incredibly bad judgement when choosing examples to make his points.
Here's one:
When talking about how environment is just as important as genes in determining human development the examples he uses are: The increased mortality of African Americans from living under an oppressive and racist system. Example #2 how Nazi atrocities in WWII led to increased birth defects in the children of the survivors, especially Schizophrenia. What, there were NO other examples that don't make me sad or want to puke? Are you to Convey that environment is as important as genes, -or- that all existence is suffering?
Had these two items been the only thing I'd shrug it off but they were just the last straw for me. He goes way into animal emotions, most notably there capacity for sadness and grieving for dead offspring. He cites examples of how a robot can be taught to feel pain and that it will eventually exhibit fear responses. and dozens of other bummer concepts and demoralizing facts.
And don't get him started on cruel and unethical human experimentation.
I need brain bleach after just a fraction of this miserable book.
What pisses me off is that I still want to know about these "discoveries", but not from this sicko.
That stuff about animal moms grieving their dead children really messed me up.

[György · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The beauty of human beings, though, is that we are fierce and indefatigable. We have shown ourselves determined to grapple with the universe around us until it surrenders its secrets to our inquiries. That is why we go to the edge of uncertainty: to quest, and question, and fight with ourselves and others until we have an answer. Then, aware that we have brushed against other questions and surprises, we stow our new discoveries safely, and dive back into the dark waters to wrestle more things into the light. We have been doing it for centuries, and we can only hope we will be doing it for centuries to come. This is, after all, the best thing humans have ever done. "

Brooks, Michael (2014-06-26). At the Edge of Uncertainty: 11 Discoveries Taking Science by Surprise (p. 10).

Walking on the edge is something exciting, bit scary, a bit encouraging, but in most of the cases will drench us with chilling feeling. A few aware how our senses are easy to be fooled by environment, by the spaceship called Earth and the cosmos we are speeding through with! What I can recall something similar to refer to are hours in the finals of my flight training when thought by flight instructor to respond after a chain of vertical maneuvers while my eyes were closed. He would disturb my senses and after that will leave the aircraft in some "wild" position. On sign, I'll open my eyes, take command and will have to transfer the aircraft into calm, stable horizontal flight. Sounds routinely, but it isn't at all! Actually, the moment you open your eyes, you are realizing that the position of the aircraft in space doesn't match at all with information your senses are sending to you. Seconds passing, the aircraft nose is up and in pitch, so high you can't even see the horizon - you loosing speed, but you don't feel so, you feel exactly the opposite, and that is that you are speeding in turn. You are searching for the artificial horizon to determine the position of the aircraft in space, and trying to find speedometer to see the rate of the speed lose,... but in same time your senses are still sending you some other messages that are directly opposing to those you see on your instruments! You feel a strong sense of positive acceleration in sharp turn, however that is not that is happening to your aircraft! You are trying to move commands with your hands, but part of your brain is preventing you in that action...hands refuse to obey. You must teach your brain to believe to instruments in order to be able to move your hands! While you are fighting your own brain, speed is falling dramatically bellow the minimum needed to send commands to the aircraft! ...and you feel the ripples of the air abandoning your wings and aircraft surfaces...no flow of air, no lift anymore...you are near to the edge now!!! You are near to fall and crash! Your are on the frontier between the death and life!
That's the place, Mr. Brooks will lead the reader! Amazing experience to walk with him along the edge of all the aspects of our existence.

[Baal Of · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a selection for my non-fiction book club. Given the subject matter, I really should have liked this at least four stars, but there were a number of things that irritated me. But first, the good bits. The scope of the book was impressive, touching on a lot of fascinating and difficult subjects including consciousness, genetic modification, epigenetics, cosmic inflation, and hypercomputing. It generated a tremendously lively discussion for our book club. The author does a pretty good job of navigating through the complex topics. I'm glad that he covered the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, and discussed why it may not exist at all.
Another section that stood out was this quote: "Only in recent years, with new bundles of Darwin's correspondence coming to light, has it become clear the Darwin's aim in writing On The Origin Of Species was to destroy all support for slavery and oppression.", which runs counter to baseless claims thrown out by Creationsists, attempting to tie evolutionary theory to fascist ideology.
However, the chapter on hypercomputing left me bewildered, and with no more understanding of what it actually is than before I started. I then went and read a chunk of the wikipedia article, and felt no more enlightened, so perhaps this is just one of those esoteric subjects than is only comprehensible to those who can actually do the math.
The author occasionally makes statements that appear to be more for dramatic effect, rather than clear scientific accuracy, stretching the claims beyond the evidence. But then this is a book that is exploring the fringes of science.

[Mohamed al-Jamri · Rating 2 out of 5]

Notes taken while reading the book:

The changing nature of science. Uncomfortable results. Boltzmann and the atom (Mach annoying). Hanged himself in 1906. Probably suffered from bipolar disorder.

The frontiers of science.

Starts with the human brain.

Calls Deppak Chopra a mystic and his woo about quantum healing a Mirage in the desert.

Consciousness and the different hypotheses to explain it. Daniel Dannet, consciousness is an illusion. The many things we don't see and don't know we don't see them. The scientific research done on this.

2012 Cambridge Declaration on Animal Consciousness.

People in coma or with brain damage.

Can machines think? Alan Turing.

Intelligent robots, with feelings and desires too?

Mapping of the rat brain (75M neurons) is almost done. Human brain (86B neurons) may be mapped in future too.

Consciousness not in cortex only; it happens all over the brain.

Animals have personalities and cultures too.

Chapter 2: The crowded pinnacle

Examples of animal cultures (learned, not genetic behavior). Several examples (bower birds, some ants, cats etc.)

Humans are not special.

Ethics of using animals in labs. Using animals with the right personalities (e.g. treatments for type A personalities should be tested on animals with the same personality).

Grief rituals in animals.

Evolution of language. The initial rejection of studying this topic.

Chapter 3: The Chimera Era

History of experimentation on animals. Animal to animal and animal to human blood transfusion in the 17th century.

Organ transplantation. Human to Human and Animal to Human.

Animal artificial insemination. Ape-human insemination. Ivanov. His research failed to breed any ape-human hybrid. Engaged in some unethical actions.

Rumors of stalin orders to creating a human-apw chimera.

Medical reasons for creating a human-animal chimera? Aren't we alread chimeras since we have so much bacteria living in our bodies? Most of the cells in our bodies are bacterial cells, but they have a human center.

Insulin producing bacteria have parts of human genomes.

Medical uses of mixing human and animal tissues. Several examples (a pig growing a human pancreas, mouse with a human liver grown from human stem cells, pig with human arteries etc).

Many laws regulating this field [and in my opinion hendering scientific advancement].

Human brain tissue in animals for Parkinson disease study. many ethical issues on this topic mixed with stem cell research too.

Public opinion plays an important part is sirecting or hindering science.

Chapter 4: The gene genei

Epigenetics. Genes and medical conditions. Low birth weight and health. Gene and environment play part.

Discovery of laws of inheritance by Gregor Mendel. Charles Darwin.

The effects of malnorishment during pregnancy. Studies on the Dutch Hunger Winter during WWII (man made famine by Nazies to punish the Dutch). The effects reach up to grandchildren. Environmental factos play an important part on activating or disabling some genes.

Soburo discoveries (folic acid, tetracyclin, ATP). Neural tube defects. Shows the importance of Epigenetics.

John Baptist Lamark. Epigenetics as showing some of Lamark's ideas were right, namely the inheritence of aquired characteristics, but without the details Lamark spoke about [Lamark as far as I remember from reading on the history of evolution did not invent this idea, it was already common in his day, what he invented was the principle of use and disuse which is wrong].

There was resistance for the introduction of this idea. [The author is not a scientist, and I don't know enough about this topic to judge it well, so I will take whatever he says with a grain of salt].

The effects of epigenetic changes can last for generations. Taking up sigar smoking at age of 11 can increase the chance of your children and their grandchild being obese age of 8. Other examples are listed as well (African American low birth weight)

Darwin and his contempt for slavery.

Chapter 5: Different for girls

Gender based medicine. X chromosome linked with stronger immunity [is this why most autoimmune disease affect females?]

Cardiovascular diseases. Women get less care and are diagnosed less often, their participation in trial population is less.

Sensation and reaction to pain. Women feel more pain and have lower threshold, contrary to popular belief.

Vaccination works different on males and females (e.g. DTB might be a disaster for female immune system). Examples. Vaccination programs in general (e.g. BCG is not just for TB, it has many non-specific affects).

Chapter 6: Will to live

Psychotherapy. Ancetod about swimming in freezing water. What effect the will to live has on survival chance.

Classical conditioning. Ivan Pavlov. Of immune system.

Effects of mind on body. Birth of psychoimmunology.

Arthur Shopehauer idea on Will.

Memory as a molecular physical thing. Showed by Novel-prize winner Eric Kandel (Austerian) who studied snail memory.

PET scan to study mind-brain changes.

The will to live. Studies on birthday and dwath, another on holidays and death. Optimism and relation to health. Warning about false optimism stuff and their negative effects.

Stress slows healing. Good friends make you live longer. High levels of cyokines in depressed people.

Psycho neuro immunology.

Chapter 7: QM in biology

Some glimpses from QM. Uncertainty.

Shrodinger's book, What is life? The search for the DNA and some guessing.

Sense of smell and mysteries around it. Lock and key vs vibrations with QM twist (photo-electric effect) hypotheses to explain smelling.

Photosynthesis and QM.

Chapter 8: Holographic principle

Information as an elementary constituent of reality.

The Black hole information paradox war betwen Hawking and Susskind. Birth of the holographic principle. [I have just read The Black Hole War book; this is a good opportunity to see how I understood it vs what the author presents here.]

QM probabilistic. The world a quantum computer? Quantum tunneling and entanglement.

Seth Lloyd and quantum computing.

Single Photon interference.

Presents Copenhagen interpretation as default truth with no mention of the others. Mentions several experiments that tried to resolve the "look partices, don't look wave" strangeness.

Second Law of Thermodynamics and QM consistent.

Chapter 9: Complicating the universe.

Story of Cosmos. Inflationary theory. Problems of inflation, Lithium percentage, Dark matter and Dark energy.

Story of George Gammov. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Prediction of Cosmic Background Radiation. Fred Hoyle steady state theory.

Turbulence problem. The Axis of Evil problem (seen in WMAP and Plank). This is against the cosmological principle. Also super massive clusters going in one way (Dark Flow?). Axis of alpha. All these are problems for the Big Bang model.

In total there are 4 problems for the cosmological principle (the universe should be uniform everywhere you look - these make it look like it has a spin) and the percentage of Lithium (L7 too little and L6 too much). +Dark matter and dark energy.

Explains Inflationary theory and the problems it solves (horizon and flatness problems). Plank 2013 results ruled out the simplest forms of the theory and only the more complicated ones remain, which already start from assuming he universe is uniform, therefore they don't explain this bit, but only push it further away.

The Higgs energy at 125.3 Gev is bad for inflation as it cuts down the remaining complicated model. Author cite Steinheart as source.

The Cyclic Model of Steinheart and Turok.

Chapter 10: Turing hypercomputer

Alan Turing death and achievements. How computers work. Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

The hypercomputer is also known as Sigma machine.

The rejection of hypercomputers and saying that turing machine are the absolute universal one possible is anthropocentric and no different from those who thought all of geometry was that in Elements (Euclid's book).

Kantor and infinities.

Our brain is beyond a turing machine.

Chapter 11: Time is an illusion

Inability to dewcribe in words the feeling of being one with the world. Explaining this scientifically with fMRI.

[Author is confused between psychological relativity and physical relativity.]

Describes special relativity and time dilation. Putting Einstein's theory in 1970s. Richard Keeting and Hayfiller. Sesium atoms.

Author claims time dilation shatters cause and effect. [how does he jump to these conclusions? Logical gap.]

"QM doesn't deal with time as real". QM has nothing to say about time. Time is not part of QM and not important for particles! For a photon moving at speed of light, time doesn't exist [what about the majority of elementary particles which have mass and therefore do not move with speed of light? he just ignores them.]

[There is no consensus about the nature of time among physicists. Autgor only presents one side of the debate.]

De Witt and Wheeler united QM and GR without taking time into consideration [this was not seen as a final solution, because time matters. Duh!]

Particles existing in two different times simultaneously?

[More confusion of psychological and physical relativity of time. At intense moments time passes slower, because your memory gives more importance to the event and records it really welll, or so I have read.]

[Brains do not create time; they measure it.]

[If time isn't real, then why does measuring it provide an evolutionary advantage?]

Epilogue

Still much unknown and many adventures to undertake. The more we learn the more insignificant we become [not completely true, he does address this partially, but not as extensively as Deutch.]

In general the book is not deep and has a lot of misc. info dropped into the topic. It is a work of scientific journalism and not science. So much trivia collected.

Raises interesting up to date questions on scientific theories.

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I picked up this book I saw that it was written by a physicist - so I expected more "hard" science topics like quantum theory and cosmology. Both of these are here, but so is information theory, genetics, experiment protocol and its discontents and others.

His shtick is that what he is writing about is still at the undecided stage - like when Einstein and the world was waiting for the eclipse data for the deflection of light measurement from Mercury. Nice idea, but I think he is reaching kind of far. I think he is just picking research he finds interesting that is a little bit out of left field. But he is still an engaging writer who can explain concepts very well.

[William Schram · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t know if these results are still surprising scientists, but I did learn a few things from the book. Some of it sounds like hogwash, but I need to expand my boundaries and modify my thinking.

I enjoyed the book. I wrote this piece on a phone so please forgive the occasional mistake. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time.

[Ryan Madman Reads & Rocks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, intriguing. Deals with a lot of subject matter I never even stopped to consider before.
I'll post a complete review at a later date.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and extraordinary book! I love this stuff.

[Brian Clegg · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my favourite popular science books is Marcus Chown’s The Universe Next Door, where he explores scientific theories just the other side of the dividing line between sanity and madness. Here Michael Brooks, who started his ‘amazing things in science’ run with the excellent 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense, now gives us ’11 discoveries taking science by surprise’ – science that can still shock us, but is just on the sane side of the dividing line.

The topics range from consciousness and chimeras to hyper computers (which go beyond the limits of Turing’s Universal Computer) and time. Where the chapters work, they work very well. I thought the chapter on the big bang and inflation, where Brooks pulls apart the fragile, held-together-by-duct-tape nature of the current theory with surgical precision was brilliant, starting from a little pen portrait of Alan Guth and then showing both how the current picture is strung together and also how various discoveries have chipped away at the solidity of the current picture. (Sadly the book was written too soon to include the BICEP2 collapse.) On the whole, the physics-based chapters worked better than the biology chapters, which seemed a little more staid and less exciting, though there was a lot to find interesting in the chimeras chapter and all had plenty of joyful nuggets of discovery.

What I was less certain about was the delivery. The cover quote says ‘He writes, above all, with attitude.’ This is true, but that attitude sometimes got in the way of accuracy, making the approach inconsistent. In the big bang chapter Brooks makes it clear that things are anything but certain, as is the nature of science. Yet it most other chapters he makes plonking statements of fact about theories that are anything but solid, where that same scepticism and honesty would have been more appropriate. So, for instance, when describing the holographic universe theory, he says ‘It turns out the table – and everything else around you – is a hologram.’ Well, no, it doesn’t. There is a theory that the information that makes up the universe could be represented in one less dimension, i.e. as a hologram. But that doesn’t make it true, and it certainly doesn’t make a table a hologram.

Later on, he tells us that time doesn’t exist, again as if this were gospel. Yet what he’s talking about is an approach that isn’t universally held among physicists, and even when it is, doesn’t mean what it sounds like. When physicists say this, they mean that it may be possible to formulate most of the key equations of physics without incorporating time. But that’s not the same as ‘time doesn’t exist’ in any normal sense. Those equations don’t incorporate Mount Everest either, but that doesn’t mean the mountain doesn’t exist.

One last concern is that in the drive to be dramatic, accuracy can be lost. Early on, he perpetuates the ‘humans are nothing special’ myth, pointing out how other animals share some of our traits. But this misses the point – it’s one thing for a bower bird to build an attractive bower, or rats to display personality. I won’t be convinced humans aren’t special until another species starts writing books, sending people to the moon and curing a wide range of diseases. Of course humans are special. Later, scientific fact is distorted to make a dramatic point. We are told ‘The atoms in your body were forged in the explosions of supernovae many hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. That makes them cosmic youngsters compared to the lithium atoms so vital to your mobile phone battery. Those atoms were created in the first three minutes of the universe’s life. There is something extraordinary about holding something so old in your hand.’ Y-e-e-s, only the most common atom in your body is hydrogen, which was created at the same time as the lithium (and much of the rest didn’t come out of supernovae, which are only required for atoms with a mass above iron).

One other howler. In the (fascinating) hypercomputing section, Brooks describes non-Euclidian geometries. He says ‘You almost certainly didn’t learn about these at school. That’s partly because they can’t be made physical in our three-dimensional universe…’ Dr Brooks clearly never worked for an airline, as they have to deal with non-Euclidian geometry all the time. Euclidean geometry makes statements like ‘parallel lines never meet’. Try drawing two parallel lines, starting from different points on the equator and heading north. You will find they meet at the pole. Similarly, in Euclidian geometry, the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. Draw a triangle on the surface of the earth and the angles add up to more than 180 degrees. Non-Euclidian geometry is very physical in our three dimensional universe.

So there are a few issues, but I don’t want to put you off because it really is an excellent read and covers some fascinating areas of science. Just don’t take those statements of ‘fact’ at face value and buckle in for a wonderful ride.

[Seema Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started a few chapters of this about a year ago and put it away. Picked it up again recently and went through it so quickly because it was quite good.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun and interesting science book looking at some of the cutting edge areas that could affect us all. Everything from the growing of human organs in animals to the new theories about the expansion of the universe. Worth checking out if you're a science fan.

[Alan Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly fascinating book that covers a lot of ground from animal consciousness and epigenetics, to consciousness, chimera experimentation, quantum physics, the holographic universe, biology, metaphysics and origin theories.

The author indicates what’s coming next in biology and epigenetics, outlining that it is now undeniable that gender plays a role in physiology and disease, and that medicine has a lot of catching up to do. “A task for the 3rd millennium.”

Referring to Shopenhauer, who identified that human stubbornness and an inability to lose face is part of the human condition that we see playing out daily, especially from those so often in front of the cameras and media. All truth passes through 3 stages:
1. It is ridiculed
2. Violently opposed
3. Accepted as self evident

The author outlines some extraordinary trends that indicate to us the power of the human mind, not least,
“The death day and birthday: an unexpected connection”

If you’re a big cheese you’re less likely to die just before your birthday because you crave attention. It is consistent in other cultures before big events were specific demographics are the centre of attention, there’s what’s called a “death dip” where people literally hang on until after the celebration! The will to stay alive is fascinating.

Moving on to the universe and it’s possible make-up and origins, the author introduces Seth Lloyd, who wrote “Programming the Universe” as he has suggested the universe is a Quantum computer.

“We have become participators in the processes of the universe... Physics gives rise to observer participancy. Observer participancy gives rise to information. Information gives rise to physics. We are in a paper, scissors, stone situation where we cannot find the logic to disentangle ourselves from the universe. It is the ultimate computer and it gave rise to us. Now we bring its computations to life. ‘Some part of our being knows this is where we came from’, Carl Sagan once said. We long to return and we can because the Cosmos is also within us. We are made of star stuff and we are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”

There is a principle that the universe is supposed to be the same everywhere. The “Dark flow anomaly” discovered in the universe by Alexander (Sasha) Kashlinsky that puts into question our assumptions about the model of the universe and the whole theory of the Big Bang 😳
He looked at super large clusters of galaxies, which - according to our theories - shouldn’t really exist. In cosmological terms, he’s a unicorn hunter and to everyone’s surprise, he found a unicorn! He and his colleagues have clocked Galaxy clusters racing at up to 1000 kms per second - far faster than our best understanding of cosmology allows. Stranger still, every cluster seems to be rushing toward a small patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.
“Galaxies, galaxy clusters and everything else in the universe should be ambling around in unremarkable ways, not speeding through the Cosmos as if late for an appointment.”

This finding suggests there is something massive beyond the visible universe pulling them in that direction. Some have suggested an entry into a sibling universe.

“Hunting astronomical unicorns is a thankless task. The discoveries have left Kashlinsky brandished as controversial.”

The Line of Alpha - suggests that the laws of physics may be different on different sides of the universe, or at different points. John Webb and colleagues have been investigating some anomalies in the equations that demonstrate what was once thought as a constant actually increases or decreases dependent on locality within the universe. This violates the laws of Physics. “What’s more, Webb’s axis of Alpha seems to line up with the direction of Kashlinksy’s Dark Flow. That makes it even harder to dismiss - to use NASA’s pronouncement on the axis of evil - a statistical fluke. If Webb is right, the axis of alpha ruins all our laws of physics as well as the universe they have helped us create.

‘Sometimes, the more we discover, the more you realise we know ... absolute shit!’

The net spin of the universe was calculated by Longo and his team, who looked at hundreds of thousands of galaxies to determine which way they spin. In most of the sky, the rotation (spin) is random. But, you can draw an imaginary line in the sky that sits 10 degrees off the axis of our own galaxies spin, look along this line and you will find more galaxies spinning one way than the other. Out of 15,000 observable galaxies, roughly 7% more are left-handed than right-handed.

The excess may be small at about 7% but Longo says that the chance that it could be a cosmic accident is something like one in a million, especially because if you look at the southern sky, you seem the same effect. “If galaxies tend to spin in a certain direction, it means that the overall universe should have a rather large net angular momentum. Since angular momentum is conserved, it seems it [the universe] must have been “born” spinning.”

This means the universe was born with a spin, and - if it has a spin - it also has an axis. And if there is one thing a universe isn’t meant to have, according to the standard story, it’s an axis!

“...If we could show that our universe still retains the initial angular momentum within its galaxies, it would be evidence that our universe exists within some larger space and it was born spinning relative to other universes,”

Problems cosmologists are encountering that challenge the standard model of the universe:

* There is too much Lithium, specifically, Lithium 6 in the universe (1000 times too much to be precise)
* 4 violations of the cosmological principle
* Dark matter (estimated to make up almost 1/4 of the universe yet we haven’t found any!! Where’s it hiding?)
* Dark energy - we have also not found the source of dark energy. All we know it that it caused the speeding up of the expansion of the universe rather than the predicted slowing down as we would expect in a cosmos exerting a gravitational pull on everything else
* Dark energy is predicted to be just under 3/4 of the universe
* Meaning, we’ve only seen about 4% of the total mass & energy that is out there in the universe
* Inflation - it was supposed to solve 2 problems cosmologists have : the horizon problem and the flatness problem.

Evidence increasingly suggests Inflation and the whole Big Bang paradigm is not correct. Or else, it then maybe points more towards a creator than an evolutionary process because of the course corrections and/or various anomalies that don’t fit with our knowledge of physics?

The Big Bang theory is starting to look less like a coherent narrative and increasingly looking like a dreamscape, a mad whirl of disconnected stories (Big Bang + Inflation + Dark Matter + Dark Energy model with a lithium and axis problem).

The model is looking more like a self recycling universe rather than the Big Bang +++ model.

“Maybe we just can’t expect to understand the universe with the tools we have available. Maybe we need another type of computer.” ... a Hyper computer. Conceived of by Alan Touring and one is finally under construction.

In a paper called ‘Machines, Logic and Quantum Physics’, David Deutsch and colleagues make the point that our knowledge of the truth about the universe depends entirely upon our knowledge of the laws of physics. And those laws come from our experimental tests. The problem with this is that our tests always take place within the sphere of the physical universe within which human beings work. That means that our picture of reality tends to be constrained by our conception of time and sits within just a few dimensions of space. We really shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that means there is nothing beyond this. After all, we have fallen into that trap before....”

There is so much to get your head around and explore from this book and the theory of quantum entanglement is increasingly taking physicist ‘beyond space and time’.

[Lia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun, engaging up to Ch 8. After that it got a bit more challenging to read.

I've already read quite a bit about history of science (Bill Bryson et el) so this style of narrative is immediately enjoyable to me. I'm also a behavioral economics fan (Thaler et el) so the irrational hangups and glorification of mathiness and 'hard certainty' to the exclusion of human bias are not new to me. At first I felt like I'm rereading the same substance over and over in different books across many disciplines and I felt sure this is indicative of contemporary trend/ attitude in science / social sciences.

Ch 8 finally got to what the author meant by uncertainty, hence the actual subject matter of the book. Now that I've finished and stepped back to think about it, it's still not that different from other books I've recently read (about uncertainty,) what's a little different for me is that it deals directly with uncertainty based on quantum theories.

The funny thing is that, the big names (Einstein, Hawkings, Turing,) the hard science sounding theory, all made me instinctively want to just glaze over and defer to the tyranny of the experts. "Sounds like they know what they are talking about and they're pretty certain about it."

I was hoping it would help me cope with the perpetual dilemma of living with complexity and uncertainty of the 21st century. As per usual, I just feel overloaded and overwhelmed with ever more information and a little more uncomfortable with how wrong it is for me to seek comforts in certainty.

[Damon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly I enjoyed this book a lot. The highlights for me were the examples and summaries of studies into the use of quantum effects in biological processes. For example, the book includes a fascinating examples of how robins use entanglement to navigate during their migration. The biology sections were generally great. I found the description of the hypercomputer difficult to follow but that's most likely my limitations rather than the book's.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is an excellent writer and the book is highly readable. However, it does not live up to the title. Many of the so-called "discoveries" are really hypotheses publicized by scientists and others that have little support in the scientific community. The term "taking" implies these discoveries are all new. Many are decades old.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book! Not only eye-opening but written in a way that's easy to understand (except for the physics, or maybe that's just me, ha!). The new frontiers of science Brooks discusses are just further proof of what an amazing and awesome place our universe is.

[Waco Glennon · Rating 3 out of 5]

A neat survey of the edges of science. I did find it a little uneven. Some of the stories felt less complete in their telling. Still, I enjoyed this and from what I can tell, this really is the cutting edge.

[Güvenç Altaş · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book is in the middle of a science book and Malcom Gladwell's popular-science book.

[Essam Abdelhakam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb

[Ed Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book speaks directly to my heart with its core idea – that there are a variety of major scientific concepts which are simply incomplete, inaccurate or fundamentally wrong. Big things too: the Big Bang, epigenetics (and thus, genetics), human consciousness, the ability to heal using the mind – a total of 11, all described with clarity, relative simplicity and engagement. The only exception, for me, was the part about quantum computing, which I understood in concept, but felt the explanation of how it might work was pretty barren. But, the other stories were just riveting, making this book a must read for anyone interested in science and where it might be taking a wrong path. The Big Bang one is remarkable – we accept the Big Bang, even though anyone with a cursory interest in cosmology knows that predicted Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up nearly all of the universe, yet we know nothing about it and have little tangible evidence for it. Same with the expanding universe, which expanded, slowed and expanded again, and at rates that are at odds with the observable universe. Shouldn’t we be questioning the whole Big Bang thing? Some are, but most aren’t. I use a similar argument when making medical decisions – physicians are so sure of their recommendations, and yet 150 years ago, the medical world knew nothing of bacteria or germs and were still bleeding people. 150 years from now, they will probably think us just as primitive, yet we speak with confidence about what we “know.” This book was both a terrific listen and a real eye-opener for me.

Grade: A-

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Has a tendency to be very dramatic and sensationalist, which works well for science communication. Western biases come through at times, although I suppose it is to be expected when much of history of science is focused on Europe/America. Conflates sex and with gender.

It’s interesting and a good read to get some broad understanding of new developments in biology and quantum physics. It’s kind of interesting to me that I recognize a lot of the studies he cited for the biology sections, sounds like my undergrad was pretty useful after all. An interesting perspective of some of the ethical dilemmas surrounding bio that I haven’t thought about too deeply before.

[Juniper · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We don’t know what is impossible. But if we can imagine it, perhaps nature has a way to realise it." (WAY behind on book reviews, but don't worry, I read still!) Fascinating book exploring the rough new edges of science today, from transgenics to hypercomputing, the irrelevance of time to the nature of consciousness. Brooks has an accessible style, weaving personal histories, peer-reviewed (non-alternative) facts, and a low-key sense of humor all together. Some chapters were more exciting for me (the epigenetics section is especially well-written), but your mileage will vary!