First off, yes, book #45. Book #44 is in a private post, and you may, if you wish, login to see it.
Well, here I am: this weekend is Seolnal, which is the Lunar New Year. I took up the challenge to read and post about 50 books in one Lunar New Year, which is a little difficult, since it’s a shorter span of time than a Solar New year by about a week or so. So I am picking up the books I have read halfway during the last year, and finishing them; I’m pushing myself to get a little more reading done, for no other reason than I do not like to fail in a task.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not having fun or learning something.
Distinguished scientist and author Martin Rees‘ Just Six Numbers is a book that puts me in mind of Olaf Stapledon and his 1937 novel Star Maker, a book I am now aching to reread. It’s kind of a medieval dream-narrative, recast into a kind of theological SF visionary-narrative. In it, a character travels through time and space on a spiritual journey of ever-evanding perspective, watching civilizations birthed and civilizations collapse themselves through shortsighteness and bad decisions. Finally, in the end, the traveler in the novel, along with his pilgrim band of fellow souls, encounters the Star Maker, a kind of Deity that, unlike the God of the Bible, is more of an experimenter, a maker of universes, of which ours is only one, a late experiment and the subject of further refinements and experiments by the Star Maker. With infinite precision, the Star Maker creates each successive universe with precise specifications and characteristics, so that life and complexity will develop and evolve, so that stars may live and minds may develop and the universes themselves may be experienced, even if it is only briefly, only in short bursts of perception and reflection (from the multigalactic timescale perspective of the Star Maker).
(Notable here is the absolute difference between the Star Maker — really, much closer to a kind of Paley-conceived Darwinist watchmaker than anything — and the kind of God that Intelligent Design advocates seem to be talking about. Unlike the ID enthusiasts, Stapledon has at least the guts to confront and try to understand a Creator whose creations involve constant, collosally perplexing theodicy. Intelligent Design theorists would do well to consider what may follow if they win and the notion of a God creating all via evolution spreads wide and far; after all, with this given, the more basic moral theodicy suddenly would span all suffering in the universe. The Star Maker is a being of intense curiosity and interest, and though it even feels a kind of scale-befuddling love for its creations, its conception of everything is so beyond the human one that we scarcely could factor into its mind in any way better than an ant could factor into the mind of even the most observant, compassionate, enlightened human, such as a Jain who fears even to tread upon an ant. This is not a Deity most people would be comfortable with, and yet, within the novel, the picture makes perfect sense. Might it be that, even surviving the confrontation with evolution, the human conception of Yahweh cannot but be transformed radically?)
Stapledon’s novel is, essentially, an assault on the limited perspective of man, on the fragility and preciousness of life, on the loneliness of intelligent beings in the universe, and on that great darkness out there and why, perhaps, we find ourselves in the middle of it. And this is why it brings to mind the book I am reviewing here, by Sir Martin Rees.
I’ve read a number of books on cosmology and their links to these kinds of ideas, including the sneaky and (to my mind slightly despicable) Paul Davies’ The Last Three Minutes. One finds that physicists, unlike biologists, have a high degree of susceptibility to deist assumptions being founded upon the marvelous, very fine-tuned characteristics of the universe we’re living in. Rees’ 1999 text Just Six Numbers, however, is about the finest text I’ve ever read on the subject.
It discusses the deep forces of our universe, those that give it the particular shape it has now, and seems to have had all the way back to the Big Bang. Those forces, specifically, are: