The Long View Science and Cosmology

I suppose it is hard to have a broader interest than "cosmology." For some reason, I have always believed it to be a virtue to resist limiting my curiosity to things I might actually be able to understand. In any event, here are some pieces I have done about really, really big questions.

2011

Being and Time
(Martin Heidegger explains the world in terms of Death and Equipment.)

2007

An Army of Davids
(Glenn Reynolds argues for homebrewed beer and transhumanism.)

2006

Two Scientists
(Some thoughts on biographies of Albert Einstein and Marie Curie.)

2005

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox
(Stephen Jay Gould last book on natural history, in which he mends the gap between science and the humanities.)

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking
(Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book. We are not amused.)

Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of John Whiteside Parsons
(George Pendle's sober biography of an inebriated life.)

2004

Life's Solution
(Simon Conway Morris uses convergence to make evolutionary teleology respectable again.)

2001

Critique of Pure Reason
(Immanuel Kant explains everything, at length.)

2000

Gödel: A Life of Logic
(John L. Casti and Werner DePauli's brief biography of the creator of the famous Incompleteness Theorem.]

1998

Is Mathematics Constitutional?
(This is a ringng defense of mathematical Platonism against the pretensions of cognitive neuroscience. Remember, if everything you know is a product of brain structure, then neuroscience is just in your head, too)

1996

Higher Superstition
(You are not going to find a better critique of academic postmodernism than this book, at least as postmodernism relates to science. Nevertheless, I argue that science has created its enemies itself.)

Our Stolen Future
(This book argues that the human race is gradually being sterilized by subtle chemical pollutants. I would not bet on it.)

The Stopping Problem
(This is a short story illustrating Roger Penrose's critique of algorithmic artificial intelligence. I suspect it is one of the few such stories.)

After Darwin
(This essay explains how complexity theory may do in Darwinian evolutionary theory.)

The Physics of Immortality
(This is a book review of Frank Tipler's quantum mechanical proof of the existence of God.)

The Lucifer Principle
(Darwinism and the evolution of civilizations. If you think genes explain history, then you will find this book perfectly plausible. If you don't, you will think it is a parody of neo-Social Darwinism.)