COSMIC LANDSCAPE --- STRING THEORY AND THE ILLUSION OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN
by David Susskind. Little, Brown, and Company, 2006

QUOTE = "Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
by Pierre-Simon de Laplace, who lived from 1749-1827, when he replied
to Napoleon who had asked him why his celestial mechanics had no mention of God. (pv)
    PREFACE (pix-xii)

    INTRODUCTION (p3-15)

      1) The world according to Feynman (p17-61)

      2) The "Mother" of all physics problems (p63-88)

      3) The lay of the land (p89-109)

      4) The myth of uniqueness and elegance (p111-130)

      5) Thunderbolt from heaven (p131-167)

      6) On frozen fish and boiled fish (p169-197)

      7) A rubber band-powered world (p199-227)

      8) Reincarnation (p229-260)

      9) On our own? (p261-271)

      10) The "Branes" behind Rube Goldberg's greatest machine (p273-292)

      11) A bubble bath universe (p293-324)

      12) The "black hole" war (p325-341)

        Explanation of the "Holographic Principle" and "black hole complementarity" (p339-340)

      13) Summing up (p342-)

        [1] Scientific slogans --- if big important ideas cannot be encapsulated in a short phrase or two, then their essence has not been grasped (p342-348)

        Examples from the past include:

          (1) SPACE AND TIME ARE ABSOLUTE (from Newtonian Mechanics)

          (2) SPACE AND TIME ARE RELATIVE (from Einstein and Special Relativity)

          (3) THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS AN ABSOLUTE CONSTANT (from Einstein and Special Relativity)

          (4) THE EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE = Gravity is indistinguishable from acceleration (from Einstein and General Relativity)

          (5) THE HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE = position and velocity cannot be simultaneously determined (from Quantum Mechanics)

          (6) THE BIG BANG (from cosmology)

          (7) SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, NATURAL SELECTION, THE SELFISH GENE (the best "scientific slogans" come from the theory of evolution!)

          (8) A LANDSCAPE OF POSSIBILITIES POPULATED BY A MEGAVERSE OF ACTUALITIES (The theme of this book reduced to a single thought, which is the grand organizing principle of both biology and cosmology)

        [2] Consensus? (p348-360)

        [3] Natural selection and the universe (p160-371)

        [4] The beginning of "Inflation" (p371)

        [5] Superstrings in the sky (p372-376)

    EPILOGUE (p377-380)

      I know of no equations that are more elegant than the two principles that underpin Darwin's theory, namely, (1) random mutation and (2) competition. This book is about an organizing principle that is also powerful and simple. I think it deserves to be called elegant, but there is no equation to describe it. There is only a scientific slogan, which is "A landscape of possibilities populated by a magaverse of actualities."

      And what about the biggest questions of all?

        (1) Who or what made the universe and for what reason?

        (2) Is there a purpose to it all?

      I don't pretend to know the answers. People who would look to the "Anthropic Principle" (which can be defined as "the principle that requires the laws of nature to be consistent with the existence of intelligent life") as a sign of a benevolent creator (God) have found no comfort in my analysis in this book since I believe that the Laws of Gravity, Quantum Mechanics, and A Rich Landscape together with the Laws of Large Numbers are all the absolute presuppositions that are required to explain the life-susttaining friendliness of our planet. (p380)

      On the other hand, neither does anything in this book diminish the likelihood that an intelligent agent created the universe for some purpose, which we cannot comprehend at this time in the history of cosmic evolution!

      However, the ultimate existential question still remains, namely:

        "WHY IS THERE SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING?"

      That question has no more or less of an answer than before anyone ever heard of String Theory. If there was a moment of CREATION, it is obscured from our brains (our eyes and telescopes) by the veil of explosive "INFLATION" that took place during the prehistory of the "Big Bang" (when our universe began).

      If there is a "God," She has taken great pains to make herself irrelevant. As for me, I have no need of that hypothesis!

    A WORD ON THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN THE WORDS "LANDSCAPE" AND "MEGAVERSE" (p381)

      The two concepts --- LANDSCAPE and MEGAVERSE --- should not be confused. The "Landscape" is not a real place. It is a LIST of all possible designs of hypothetical universes.

      The "Megaverse" is real! The "pocket universes" that fill it are actual existing places, not hypothetical possibilities!

    GLOSSARY (p383-388)

    NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY (p389)

    INDEX (390-403)

    ABOUT THE AUTHOR (p389)

      Leonard Susskind is widely recognized as the "Father of String Theory." He has been the Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics at Stanford University since 1978. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (inside back book cover)
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