The Island of Knowledge

by Marcelo Gleiser

Paperback, 2015

Status

Available

Call number

501

Genres

Collections

Science, Philosophy

Publication

PublicAffairs (2015), Edition: 1, 367 pages

Description

"Do all questions have answers? How much can we know about the world? Is there such a thing as an ultimate truth? To be human is to want to know, to understand our origins and the meaning of our lives. In The Island of Knowledge, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, the main tool we use to find answers, is fundamentally limited. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we are often faced with the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know. Limits to our knowledge of the world arise both from our tools of exploration and from the nature of physical reality: the speed of light, the uncertainty principle, the second law of thermodynamics, the incompleteness theorem, and our own limitations as an intelligent species. Our view of physical reality depends fundamentally on who we are and on how we interact with the cosmos"--… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member fpagan

Physicist Gleiser draws upon the history of his subject, especially quantum mechanics, (and a little astronomy, philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and neuroscience), to make a case for the position that not everything about the universe can be known. He opposes the multiverse concept, the

anthropic principle, supernatural "explanations", mathematical platonism (where he badly fails to distinguish between abstraction and supernaturalism), and the idea that conscious machines are possible. Occasionally aggravating but generally very absorbing.

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LibraryThing member steve02476

I liked this book a lot. He covers the history of astronomy, physics, and math and shows how our knowledge expands but also the awareness of our ignorance expands, and in fact it looks like there are many questions that may never be scientifically explored because they may be outside the boundaries

of what we can ever observe. There were a few chapters about quantum physics that I didn't really "get" but then I have never been able to grasp the quantum world although I've read many explanations targeted at lay people. Other than those chapters I felt like everything made sense to me. Very beautiful and inspiring writing from a scientific but not scientistic viewpoint.

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LibraryThing member A.Godhelm

Ostensibly and at its best a dive into epistemology and the limits of frontier science, but all too often just another mediocre recap of the history of scientific developments.
If you're interested enough to be pursuing this book you are almost certainly already familiar with the majority of

content it's seen fit to recapitulate. A book like The Golem (What You Should Know About Science) though more dated serves the purpose of questioning the limits of science much better by a series of case studies of less well known hypotheses and how they played out in academia; a "how the sausage is made" type insight into the practical problems of knowing.
What seems to be the ultimate point of this book is some epistemological pondering and some second rate philosophical arguments about platonic idealism when it comes to the question of scientific models approximating something that's fundamentally real or not (our author thinks not).

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