Constants of Nature

John Barrow has an article in the June 2005 Scientific American that is an update on his book. The graphics are outstanding. There is also an article in the same issue entitled " The Morning of the Modern Mind" which is right in line with consciouness beyond science fiction I posted a month ago.

About two months ago, I was in the middle of reading John Barrow’s book, Constants of Nature, and had written the following poem about cosmology and how a physicist like Brian Greene and a philosopher like Ken Wilber might take a differing views of a Theory of Everything (TOE):

Man on a Mission

or, . . . it only sounds like Kosmos


John Barrow used Fred Hoyle
as his cosmological foil.

Took the gas from The Black Cloud
and redefined life as less endowed.

Smaller than a quantum blip
for safe passage on Noah’s ship.

Sailing off to live forever
on the Final Anthropic space endeavor.

Not human life as we know it,
but what the cosmos will permit.

It falls just short of a superstring
umM . . . Theory of Everything.

"Indeed, irrespective of the consciousness issue, in my opinion, we are nowhere close to an accurate, purely physical theory of everything. I find it remarkable how many physicists will express the view that, despite some missing details and unifying concepts, we know virtually all we need to know to describe the fully detailed physical behaviour of systems — at least in principle. Yet, there is at least one glaring omission in present physical theory. This is how small-scale quantum processes can add up, for large and complicated systems, to the almost classical behaviour of macroscopic bodies. Indeed, it is not just an omission but an actual fundamental inconsistency, sometimes referred to as the measurement paradox (or Schrödinger's cat). In my view, until this paradox is resolved we must necessarily remain very far from a physical theory of everything — whether or not such a theory exists." Roger Penrose