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| Paul Davies |
Paul Davies came to the fore among scientists who devote time to popular science with his 1992 book The Mind of God, written in response to Stephen Hawking’s final words in his popular best-seller A Brief History of Time. In another post I talked about another of his popular books, The Eerie Silence. Here I am going to discuss two other books he has written.
The Last Three Minutes (1994): This book on popular science is a little behind the times, as it predates the standard cosmological model, but explains well the state of cosmology when the book was published, and many of the things it says are still valid. It says something very interesting: that the Big Bang theory by Lemaître (whom Davies does not name) should have been accepted long before its two surprisingly accurate predictions gave it a boost in the sixties, because there is another argument supporting it, that scientists of the 19th century should have noticed, but didn’t: If the universe were infinitely old, it would have died by now. It is evident that something that moves to a stop at a finite rate cannot have existed from all eternity. By the way, there is an error in this paragraph: Davies ignores the difference between what is eternal and everlasting, which was solved fifteen centuries ago by Boethius. And there is a major flaw when he says that the radius of the visible universe is 15 billion light-years, because he does not take into account the expansion of the universe. The correct radius is about 43 billion light-years.
The demon in the machine: A recent popular book on current research on life
sciences. Chapter 2 is interesting, describing the latest advances in the
implementation of gadgets similar to Maxwell’s demon. Chapter 3 deals with systems theory in biology,
which was the subject of my PhD thesis many years ago. It seems that current
methods are not so different from those I used then. Chapter 4, devoted to
epigenetics, is very good. Chapter 5, on the other hand, is disappointing: it’s
futurological science, and exaggerates the power of quantum computing,
described as godlike! Chapters 6 and 7 deal with the two hard problems
facing contemporary science: the origin of life and consciousness. I disagree
on both counts, which is not surprising given the difficulty of these issues. I
agree with what Davies says about the origin of life, but not with his
insistence to compare life to a computer (see below). In chapter 7, as
expected, Davies does not even begin to address the problem of consciousness,
although his initial quote from Loewenstein is significant: Regarding...
consciousness, we know as much as the Romans did: nothing. But among his disquisitions he introduces the
problem of time, and like Einstein he embraces philosophical theory B (time as a
block), which is debatable. To explain it, he formulates a curious theory, similar
to solipsism and worthy of Lewis Carroll, based on the fact that I am not the
same person today as I will be tomorrow, although they are correlated. In the
epilogue, I am surprised that a Templeton Prize winner attacks the Catholic
Church in this way: Physics as we know it developed in seventeen century Europe,
which was in thrall to Catholic Church doctrine. And then he shows he doesn’t know the Catholic
doctrine, because he speaks of it as if it had been abandoned.
I have found a few glaring mistakes in the book:
- At the beginning of Chapter 2, Davies says
that the information in human DNA (which he estimates at 2 gigabits,
although 6 is a more correct figure) is greater than the information
contained in all the books in the Library of Congress. Since the Library
of Congress contains about 32 million books, its total number of bits is about
100,000 times larger than the human genome.
- In chapter 3, Davies mistakes Bertrand Russell’s
paradox with the liar’s paradox, which is actually related to Gödel’s
theorem. He also calls Gödel’s theorem the highest product of
human intellect. Well, that’s his opinion. I’m sure many other people would make
a different choice, not necessarily scientific. He also says that even
an unbounded intellect, a god, can never know everything, but I doubt that Gödel’s theorem applies to
God. Finally, the concept of self-reproducing machines was not published
first by John von Neumann in 1966, as Davies implies. It was described by
Norbert Wiener in the edition of his work Cybernetics published in 1961. Perhaps Wiener got this
idea from von Neumann, whom in fact he cites. Davies, however, does not
cite Wiener in his book, although he should.
- In chapter 6, Davies says this: About
1 per cent of the carbon on Earth is in the form of the lighter isotope C12.
Life favors this lighter form so fossils usually possess a slight
additional abundance of it. This is wrong. Where it says C12 it should say C13, which is not lighter, but heavier.
- In this book, Davies offers a computer as a
parallel to a living being, but his comparison is not correct. He says: Living matter has
both a hardware and a software aspect - chemistry and information. But this is not true. A computer has three,
not two components: hardware, software (programs) and data. The
information is the data, rather than the software. Reducing life to
chemistry and information forgets one of the three components. And if the
parallel was a simplification, forgetting one of the elements makes it an
oversimplification. Davies (like other popularizers) confuses information
with intelligence (see this
post). And in the epilogue, he compounds this mistake by confusing
genomes (information) with the laws of biology.
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| Norbert Wiener |
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