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Title: Chaos and Harmony: Perspectives on Scientific Revolutions of the 20th Century by Xuan Thuan Trinh, Axel Reisinger, Trinh Xuan Thuan ISBN: 0-19-512917-2 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: 10 October, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.71 (7 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: hard to decipher
Comment: As a reviewer below notes, this book is neoplatonism obscured by much well described science.
On page 332, the author writes-- "Our abitlity to do science and decipher the cosmic code suggests an intimate connection between the world of the mind and that of Platonic forms. The universe has produced human beings capable of understanding it. The loop is now closed. I believe that it did not happen by accident. ... The universe does have a meaning, and it is man who, by understanding it, bestows that meaning on it."
One must cover a lot of territory between the Foreword which only barely hints at the hidden Platonism and page 332. Such deciphering becomes extremely tedious...
Rating: 3
Summary: General Information
Comment: Without getting into specifics you read Chaos, Symetry and Harmony. A good description of all modern theories and how they tie to Chaos without concrete reasoning. Yes Stock Market behaves like Chaos so what do you do with that, i could not get the answer. I would call it more like a summary of modern physics
Rating: 4
Summary: Good popular science, but not really philosophy
Comment: Just so you get an idea of Dr. Thuan's philosophical viewpoint, he is a neo-Platonist (in the sense that he believes in a self-existing reality where mathematics "resides") and he believes that the universe was designed. He also thinks that determinism is bad. If you agree with any or all of these perspectives, you probably won't find any new reasons to support your viewpoint. If you disagree, you will probably find little here to convince you otherwise. This is not a philosophically original work.
But Dr. Thuan does offer an engagingly written (if brief) account of much of the history of modern physics--big bang cosmology, electromagnetism, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, strong and weak nuclear forces, particle physics--as well as some fun topics like black holes and wormholes, and he teases the reader with short accounts of potential research areas such as superstring theory and supersymmetry. His treatment is nice since we get not only the results of modern physics, but also some sense as to how we got them in the first place, which is often missing in works of popular science.
My only complaints (other than the possibly misleading title) are:
* I wish he would have been a little more careful to distinguish the behavior of chaotic systems from the operation of "chaos theory" in Chapter 3.
* In Chapter 6 I wish he would have given more rigorous reasons than his personal incredulity for doubting that natural selection can account for the diversity of life. At least he could have gotten a biologist's perspective--he quoted quite often from physicists and mathematicians, so presumably it wouldn't have been very hard to get a relevant comment from a biologist.
* I found his comments on the "evils" of determinism in Chapter 7 to be distracting and beside the point, but perhaps others will see merit in them.
Overall, it's a good read if you want to get a general sense of some of the more important advances in physics, but if it's philosophy you're looking for, you could do better elsewhere.
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Title: The Monk and the Philosopher : A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life by Jean Francois Revel, Matthieu Ricard ISBN: 0805211039 Publisher: Schocken Books Pub. Date: 15 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Quantum and the Lotus : A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet by Trinh Xuan Thuan, Matthieu Ricard ISBN: 0609608541 Publisher: Crown Pub. Date: 04 December, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying: The Spiritual Classic & International Bestseller; Revised and Updated Edition by Sogyal Rinpoche, Patrick D. Gaffney, Andrew Harvey ISBN: 0062508342 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 22 April, 1994 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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