Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Oakdale Library | 576.83 CAR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | 576.83 CAR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 576.83 CAR | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 576.83 CAR | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The instant New York Times bestseller about humanity's place in the universe--and how we understand it.
"Vivid...impressive....Splendidly informative."-- The New York Times
"Succeeds spectacularly." --Science
" A tour de force. " -- Salon
Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview?
In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level -- and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique.
Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.
The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.
Author Notes
Sean Carroll was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on October 5, 1966. He received his PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard University (1993) and worked as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Currently he is a research faculty member at Caltech.
His television appearances include the The Universe on the History Channel, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman on the Science Channel and The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.
He is the author of Spacetime and Geometry, From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe (2013 winner of the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books), and The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Carroll (The Particle at the End of the Universe), a theoretical physicist at Caltech, marshals an impressive array of scientific information to convince readers that the universe and everything in it can be explained by science. He posits "poetic naturalism" as a philosophy, which for him serves as a way to figure out "the best way to talk about the world." He distinguishes his poetic form from other variants of naturalism by affirming that there is an underlying physical reality that exists independently of the human mind, and that there are "many useful ways of talking about it." His determination to counter supernatural ontologies drives the book, and Carroll acknowledges that his philosophy may seem like "an appealing idea" to some and "an absurd bunch of hooey" to others. Carroll can be repetitive, and some of his the anecdotes, such as the connection between Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, are interesting but tangential. Much of the material here will be new to many readers, but regardless of familiarity, Carroll presents a means through which people can better understand themselves, their universe, and their conceptions of a meaningful life: "It's up to us to make wise choices and shape the world to be a better place." Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman Inc. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Theoretical physicist Carroll (The Particle at the End of the Universe, 2012) thinks we need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life's meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe. This book is his attempt to do so, and it's a successful one that's true to the grand scope of its title. Divided into five sections of increasingly narrow focus, the book starts way out to explore the philosophy of science and ways of talking about our understanding of reality, which Carroll calls poetic naturalism. From there, he investigates Bayes' theorem of statistics, entropy, vacuum energy, and much more before landing back on Earth to ponder morality, ethics, and the improbability of theism. Though often highly technical, Carroll aims his writing at a general audience, barraging readers with analogies and thought experiments galore and sprinkling in weightier topics via familiar references, such as how human consciousness is explained by the movie Inside Out. Readers unaccustomed to science jargon might struggle with dissections of quantum mechanics, up quarks, and gluons, but anyone who enjoys asking big questions will find a lot to consider.--Comello, Chad Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE PHYSICAL WORLD is "largely illusory," an editorial in The New York Times announced on Nov. 25,1944. Wishful thinking on a depressing day? No. Had The Times gone mad? Not quite. It was endorsing the ideas of Sir Arthur Eddington, an eminent British astronomer and popularizer of science, who had just died. Eddington began his best-known book, "The Nature of the Physical World," by explaining that he had written it at two tables, sitting on two chairs and with two pens. The first table was the familiar kind: It was colored, substantial and relatively long-lasting. The second was what he called a "scientific table," a colorless cloud of evanescent electric charges that is "mostly emptiness." Likewise the two chairs and two pens. Only the scientific objects were really there, according to Eddington. Hence the idea that our familiar world is a deception on a grand scale. Coming to terms with science is not getting any easier. Today's popularizers face two challenges, both of which are admirably met by Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, in his new book, "The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself." First, there is more to explain than ever before, as the sciences extend their embrace to a widening range of phenomena. Fortunately, Carroll is something of a polymath. His accounts of the latest thinking about microbiology or information theory are as adroit as his exploration of the links between entropy and time or his elucidation of Bayesian statistics. The second challenge for today's explainers is that the theories are getting weirder. Einstein used to worry that, according to quantum mechanics, God seems to be playing dice with the universe. Now it appears that he has put a stage magician in charge of the casino. Stuff can be conjured out of nowhere, the latest cosmologies seem to say, and the particle that you thought was in your pocket may, in effect, also be behind someone else's ear. Carroll does not claim to clear up all the mysteries of quantum mechanics. That would be impossible. There is no doubt that the theory is broadly correct, because of the accuracy of its predictions; but there is too much disagreement about what it really means. Still, his exposition of quantum theory is vivid, and all the more impressive for managing to eschew mathematics. In place of Eddington's two tables, only one of which is real, Carroll sees a myriad of them, each legitimate in its own way. This is because phenomena may usefully be investigated at many levels. You can consider the individual atoms in a box of gas, for example, or you can instead treat the gas as a liquid and study its fluid properties. Similarly, the actions of a person may be described psychologically, in terms of his or her desires and beliefs, or in terms of physiology. Underlying all these scientific stories, there is, he insists, a rock-bottom level of description: "a quantum wave function, or a collection of particles and forces - whatever the fundamental stuff turns out to be." But Carroll rejects the sort of reductionism that says all valid descriptions can be deduced from fundamental physics. That venerable idea seems to have been a mirage. Instead, Carroll defends what he calls "poetic naturalism." "Naturalism," because there is nothing above and beyond nature. In particular, there are no gods or spooks to transcend or interfere with natural laws. So Einstein's dice are rolling themselves. "Poetic," because "there is more than one way of talking about the world." True enough, but "poetic" is a bit of a stretch. Carroll might just as well have called his position "romantic reductionism" or "fragrant physicalism," since what he's trying to convey is a stance that is hard-nosed yet soft to the touch - a kinder, gentler, more capacious science. Carroll's gentler science includes a fair bit of philosophy. His knowledge of the subject not only deepens his book's account of contemporary theories but is a boon to its historical parts. He knows better than to try to slice thinkers from the distant past into two neat piles labeled "scientist" and "philosopher." For example, rather than making the downfall of Aristotelian physics all about Galileo as usual, Carroll is careful to give some credit to John Philoponus, a theologian and grammarian of sixth-century Alexandria, and to Jean Buridan, a 14th-century rector of the University of Paris. Another welcome walk-on part goes to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, a sometime abbess who corresponded with Descartes and gave him an impressively hard time over his ideas about the mind-body problem. The last quarter of "The Big Picture" deals mostly with questions about consciousness, free will and the nature of morality. If, as Carroll has explained in the rest of his book, "the vast majority of life is gravity and electromagnetism pushing around electrons and nuclei," then how do minds fit into the picture? And what is one supposed to say about ethics? One famous thought experiment discussed by Carroll, which was invented by Frank Jackson, an Australian philosopher, concerns Mary, a scientist who studies color. Bizarrely, we are to imagine that Mary leads a wholly monochrome life, even though she is not colorblind. Her body is painted white, and she has never left her windowless house, the contents of which are all either black, white or gray. She has never directly experienced the colors of the rainbow, and yet she is an authority on optics and the physiology of color perception. Now suppose she goes outside and sees flowers for the first time. Does she thereby learn something about the world that science could never have taught her? In one sense, yes: She acquires new kinds of abilities and memories that you cannot get from books. But, Carroll argues, it does not follow that "there is more to the universe than its physical aspects." IN HIS CLOSING chapters, Carroll tackles what he calls the hardest problem of all: how to find meaning in a cosmos that is "without transcendent purpose." His answers come packaged in a format suitable for airport bookstalls: "Ten Considerations," instead of Ten Commandments, to live by. They include "What matters is what matters to people," "It takes all kinds" and "The universe is in our hands." Such pieces of advice sound reasonable enough. But if these Ten Nostrums of Highly Secular Eggheads are the answers, can the meaning of life really have been the hardest question? Carroll's Ten Considerations are rather easier to grasp than quantum entanglement, the arrow of time or regulatory RNA molecules. He notes that the way in which people's lives matter "isn't a scientific question." Indeed. But maybe it isn't an intellectual question at all. Like the colors of the rainbow, perhaps meaning in life is not something to be learned from books, even ones as splendidly informative as this. One of the main challenges for todays popularizers: Scientific theories are getting weirder. ANTHONY GOTTLIEB'S new book, "The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy," will be published in August.
Guardian Review
What the critics thought of A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baum; Jonathan Lethem's The Blot; Sean Carroll's The Big Picture Two unusual novels received mixed reviews this month. A Line Made by Walking, by Sara Baume, is about a young woman recovering from a breakdown in her grandmother's house. It is "as tender and luminous as her debut", Spill Simmer Falter Wither, according to Eithne Farry in the Mail on Sunday. For Sally Bailey in the Times, "Baume is a writer interested in loneliness and emotional retreat... [her] novel requires some deep breaths from its reader. It takes a while before you grasp quite what you've got yourself into -- that is, an intimate relationship with a creative depressive. This is partly because Baume's novel remains so plotless, as plotless as depression itself ... " Which is not necessarily depressing, as Katherine A Powers explained in the Irish Times. "Baume is a master at breathing the past into domestic spaces, of showing the presence of goneness ... a virtuoso of metaphoric description... The imaginative richness and limberness of her descriptions, their power to immerse the reader in Frankie's senses, emotions, and place on earth, is where this novel truly excels." A minor quibble was that "the art commentary seems mere academic gadgetry". In Jonathan Lethem's The Blot, a backgammon hustler with a terminal brain tumour endures a gruesome operation. Scotland on Sunday's Stuart Kelly counts himself as a fan, calling Lethem "required reading". "[He] can fire out ideas and images like no one else, but that would mean little except for the glorious timbre of the prose itself ... Elegance of word and thought still needs heart and purpose. In all its pyrotechnics, Lethem never loses humanity." But for Daniel Swift in the Spectator, "all [the] metaphors and symbols threaded throughout -- for sight and blindness, risk, dice and games -- culminate in a novel which is slightly contrived". The Daily Mail's John Harding found that it "zips along at a cracking pace -- which is perhaps contributory factor in why it never really engages the reader's emotions". And in the Observer, Lionel Shriver declared it a mixed bag: "engaging, entertaining and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell ... Lethem is a flashy stylist, and his prose is a pleasure. So try reading to about page 175, then put The Blot down while you're still having a good time." The human brain is also a subject of Sean Carroll's The Big Picture, which explores nothing less than the nature of the universe and our place in it. It was picked as a winner by both Brian Cox in the Mail on Sunday ("It's fascinating to see a real working physicist thinking these things through and trying to come to a conclusion") and Steven Pinker in the Observer ("Carroll, a philosophically sophisticated physicist, discusses consciousness without gimmicks, and deftly shows how current physics is so solid that it rules out ESP for ever.") In Science magazine, Barry Loewer described how "[it] sets out to show how various phenomena, including thought, choice, consciousness, and value, hang together with the scientific account of reality that has been developed in physics in the past 100 years. He attempts to do all this without relying on specialised jargon from philosophy and physics and succeeds spectacularly in achieving both aims." The Financial Times's Clive Cookson was irritated by the poorly linked chapters, but overall called it "an extraordinarily ambitious synthesis of science and philosophy" with "a lively and sympathetic author".
Kirkus Review
"From the perspective of a vast, seemingly indifferent cosmos," do our lives really matter? As might be expected, Carroll's (Theoretical Physics/Caltech; The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World, 2012, etc.) answer is affirmative but not simple. "We are not the reason for the existence of the universe," he writes, "but our ability for self-awareness and reflection make us special within it." Furthermore, "understanding how the world works, and what constraints that puts on who we are, is an important part of understanding how we fit into the big picture." In this fascinating book, Carroll explores "how and why, in the context of mindless evolution from the Big Bang to the present, the laws of physics brought about complex, adaptive, intelligent, responsive, evolving, caring creatures like you and me." To effectively navigate these complicated matters, he turns to an area of his own research regarding how the emergence of increasing complexity in the evolving universe relates to increasing entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Although intuitively, we associate entropy with disorganization and increased randomness, it plays a crucial role in the development of complex structures. For example, it is randomness and apparent disorganizationthe role of chance variation and mutationsthat are central to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. At each successive level of complexityfrom stars and planets to life and conscious beingsdifferent levels of descriptive language are necessary. This introduces a poetic aspect into the language used by scientists in their attempts to understand our place in the universe. The author affirms his conviction that "nothing weknow about consciousness should lead us to doubt the ordinary, naturalistic conception of the world," including the provisional nature of scientific theory. Carroll is the perfect guide on this wondrous journey of discovery. A brilliantly lucid exposition of profound philosophical and scientific issues in a language accessible to lay readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The Fundamental Nature of Reality In the old Road Runner cartoons, Wile E. Coyote would frequently find himself running off the edge of a cliff. But he wouldn't, as our experience with gravity might lead us to expect, start falling to the ground below, at least not right away. Instead, he would hover motionless, in puzzlement; it was only when he realized there was no longer any ground beneath him that he would suddenly crash downward. We are all Wile E. Coyote. Since human beings began thinking about things, we have contemplated our place in the universe, the reason why we are all here. Many possible answers have been put forward, and partisans of one view or another have occasionally disagreed with each other. But for a long time, there has been a shared view that there is some meaning, out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered and acknowledged. There is a point to all this; things happen for a reason. This conviction has served as the ground beneath our feet, as the foundation on which we've constructed all the principles by which we live our lives. Gradually, our confidence in this view has begun to erode. As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable. The old picture has been replaced by a wondrous new one-one that is breathtaking and exhilarating in many ways, challenging and vexing in others. It is a view in which the world stubbornly refuses to give us any direct answers about the bigger questions of purpose and meaning. The problem is that we haven't quite admitted to ourselves that this transition has taken place, nor fully accepted its far-reaching implications. The issues are well-known. Over the course of the last two centuries, Darwin has upended our view of life, Nietzsche's madman bemoaned the death of God, existentialists have searched for authenticity in the face of absurdity, and modern atheists have been granted a seat at society's table. And yet, many continue on as if nothing has changed; others revel in the new order, but placidly believe that adjusting our perspective is just a matter of replacing a few old homilies with a few new ones. The truth is that the ground has disappeared beneath us, and we are just beginning to work up the courage to look down. Fortunately, not everything in the air immediately plummets to its death. Wile E. Coyote would have been fine if he had been equipped with one of those ACME-brand jet packs, so that he could fly around under his own volition. It's time to get to work building our conceptual jet packs. What is the fundamental nature of reality? Philosophers call this the question of ontology-the study of the basic structure of the world, the ingredients and relationships of which the universe is ultimately composed. It can be contrasted with epistemology, which is how we obtain knowledge about the world. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of reality; we also talk about "an" ontology, referring to a specific idea about what that nature actually is. The number of approaches to ontology alive in the world today is somewhat overwhelming. There is the basic question of whether reality exists at all. A realist says, "Of course it does"; but there are also idealists, who think that capital-M Mind is all that truly exists, and the so-called real world is just a series of thoughts inside that Mind. Among realists, we have monists, who think that the world is a single thing, and dualists, who believe in two distinct realms (such as "matter" and "spirit"). Even people who agree that there is only one type of thing might disagree about whether there are fundamentally different kinds of properties (such as mental properties and physical properties) that those things can have. And even people who agree that there is only one kind of thing, and that the world is purely physical, might diverge when it comes to asking which aspects of that world are "real" versus "illusory." (Are colors real? Is consciousness? Is morality?) Whether or not you believe in God-whether you are a theist or an atheist-is part of your ontology, but far from the whole story. "Religion" is a completely different kind of thing. It is associated with certain beliefs, often including belief in God, although the definition of "God" can differ substantially within religion's broad scope. Religion can also be a cultural force, a set of institutions, a way of life, a historical legacy, a collection of practices and principles. It's much more, and much messier, than a checklist of doctrines. A counterpart to religion would be humanism, a collection of beliefs and practices that is as varied and malleable as religion is. The broader ontology typically associated with atheism is naturalism-there is only one world, the natural world, exhibiting patterns we call the "laws of nature," and which is discoverable by the methods of science and empirical investigation. There is no separate realm of the supernatural, spiritual, or divine; nor is there any cosmic teleology or transcendent purpose inherent in the nature of the universe or in human life. "Life" and "consciousness" do not denote essences distinct from matter; they are ways of talking about phenomena that emerge from the interplay of extraordinarily complex systems. Purpose and meaning in life arise through fundamentally human acts of creation, rather than being derived from anything outside ourselves. Naturalism is a philosophy of unity and patterns, describing all of reality as a seamless web. Naturalism has a long and distinguished pedigree. We find traces of it in Buddhism, in the atomists of ancient Greece and Rome, and in Confucianism. Hundreds of years after the death of Confucius, a Chinese thinker named Wang Chong was a vocal naturalist, campaigning against the belief in ghosts and spirits that had become popular in his day. But it is really only in the last few centuries that the evidence in favor of naturalism has become hard to resist. [ All of these isms can feel a bit overwhelming. Fortunately we don't need to be rigorous or comprehensive about listing the possibilities. But we do need to think hard about ontology. It's at the heart of our Wile E. Coyote problem. The last five hundred or so years of human intellectual progress have completely upended how we think about the world at a fundamental level. Our everyday experience suggests that there are large numbers of truly different kinds of stuff out there. People, spiders, rocks, oceans, tables, fire, air, stars-these all seem dramatically different from one another, deserving of independent entries in our list of basic ingredients of reality. Our "folk ontology" is pluralistic, full of myriad distinct categories. And that's not even counting notions that seem more abstract but are arguably equally "real," from numbers to our goals and dreams to our principles of right and wrong. As our knowledge grows, we have moved by fits and starts in the direction of a simpler, more unified ontology. It's an ancient impulse. In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus suggested that water is a primary principle from which all else is derived, while across the world, Hindu philosophers put forward Brahman as the single ultimate reality. The development of science has accelerated and codified the trend. Galileo observed that Jupiter has moons, implying that it is a gravitating body just like the Earth. Isaac Newton showed that the force of gravity is universal, underlying both the motion of the planets and the way that apples fall from trees. John Dalton demonstrated how different chemical compounds could be thought of as combinations of basic building blocks called atoms. Charles Darwin established the unity of life from common ancestors. James Clerk Maxwell and other physicists brought together such disparate phenomena as lightning, radiation, and magnets under the single rubric of "electromagnetism." Close analysis of starlight revealed that stars are made of the same kinds of atoms as we find here on Earth, with Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin eventually proving that they are mostly hydrogen and helium. Albert Einstein unified space and time, joining together matter and energy along the way. Particle physics has taught us that every atom in the periodic table of the elements is an arrangement of just three basic particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Every object you have ever seen or bumped into in your life is made of just those three particles. We're left with a very different view of reality from where we started. At a fundamental level, there aren't separate "living things" and "nonliving things," "things here on Earth" and "things up in the sky," "matter" and "spirit." There is just the basic stuff of reality, appearing to us in many different forms. How far will this process of unification and simplification go? It's impossible to say for sure. But we have a reasonable guess, based on our progress thus far: it will go all the way. We will ultimately understand the world as a single, unified reality, not caused or sustained or influenced by anything outside itself. That's a big deal. [ Naturalism presents a hugely grandiose claim, and we have every right to be skeptical. When we look into the eyes of another person, it doesn't seem like what we're seeing is simply a collection of atoms, some sort of immensely complicated chemical reaction. We often feel connected to the universe in some way that transcends the merely physical, whether it's a sense of awe when we contemplate the sea or sky, a trancelike reverie during meditation or prayer, or the feeling of love when we're close to someone we care about. The difference between a living being and an inanimate object seems much more profound than the way certain molecules are arranged. Just looking around, the idea that everything we see and feel can somehow be explained by impersonal laws governing the motion of matter and energy seems preposterous. It's a bit of a leap, in the face of all of our commonsense experience, to think that life can simply start up out of non-life, or that our experience of consciousness needs no more ingredients than atoms obeying the laws of physics. Of equal importance, appeals to transcendent purpose or a higher power seem to provide answers to questions to some of the pressing "Why?" questions we humans like to ask: Why this universe? Why am I here? Why anything at all? Naturalism, by contrast, simply says: those aren't the right questions to ask. It's a lot to swallow, and not a view that anyone should accept unquestioningly. Naturalism isn't an obvious, default way to think about the world. The case in its favor has built up gradually over the years, a consequence of our relentless quest to improve our understanding of how things work at a deep level, but there is still work to be done. We don't know how the universe began, or if it's the only universe. We don't know the ultimate, complete laws of physics. We don't know how life began, or how consciousness arose. And we certainly haven't agreed on the best way to live in the world as good human beings. The naturalist needs to make the case that, even without actually having these answers yet, their worldview is still by far the most likely framework in which we will eventually find them. That's what we're here to do. [ The pressing, human questions we have about our lives depend directly on our attitudes toward the universe at a deeper level. For many people, those attitudes are adopted rather informally from the surrounding culture, rather than arising out of rigorous personal reflection. Each new generation of people doesn't invent the rules of living from scratch; we inherit ideas and values that have evolved over vast stretches of time. At the moment, the dominant image of the world remains one in which human life is cosmically special and significant, something more than mere matter in motion. We need to do better at reconciling how we talk about life's meaning with what we know about the scientific image of our universe. Among people who acknowledge the scientific basis of reality, there is often a conviction-usually left implicit-that all of that philosophical stuff like freedom, morality, and purpose should ultimately be pretty easy to figure out. We're collections of atoms, and we should be nice to one another. How hard can it really be? It can be really hard. Being nice to one another is a good start, but it doesn't get us very far. What happens when different people have incompatible conceptions of niceness? Giving peace a chance sounds like a swell idea, but in the real world, there are different actors with different interests, and conflicts will inevitably arise. The absence of a supernatural guiding force doesn't mean we can't meaningfully talk about right and wrong, but it doesn't mean we instantly know one from the other, either. Meaning in life can't be reduced to simplistic mottos. In some number of years I will be dead; some memory of my time here on Earth may linger, but I won't be around to savor it. With that in mind, what kind of life is worth living? How should we balance family and career, fortune and pleasure, action and contemplation? The universe is large, and I am a tiny part of it, constructed of the same particles and forces as everything else: by itself, that tells us precisely nothing about how to answer such questions. We're going to have to be both smart and courageous as we work to get this right. 2 Poetic Naturalism One thing Star Trek never really got clear on was how transporter machines are supposed to work. Do they disassemble you one atom at a time, zip those atoms elsewhere, and then reassemble them? Or do they send only a blueprint of you, the information contained in your arrangement of atoms, and then reconstruct you from existing matter in the environment to which you are traveling? Most often the ship's crew talks as if your actual atoms travel through space, but then how do we explain "The Enemy Within"? That's the episode, you'll remember, in which a transporter malfunction causes two copies of Captain Kirk to be beamed aboard the Enterprise. It's hard to see how two copies of a person could be made out of one person-sized collection of atoms. Fortunately for viewers of the show, the two copies of Kirk weren't precisely identical. One copy was the normal (good) Kirk, and the other was evil. Even better, the evil one quickly got scratched on the face by Yeoman Rand, so it wasn't hard to tell the two apart. But what if they had been identical? We would then be faced with a puzzle about the nature of personal identity, popularized by philosopher Derek Parfit. Imagine a transporter machine that could disassemble a single individual and reconstruct multiple exact copies of them out of different atoms. Which one, if any, would be the "real" one? If there were just a single copy, most of us would have no trouble accepting them as the original person. (Using different atoms doesn't really matter; in actual human bodies, our atoms are lost and replaced all the time.) Or what if one copy were made of new atoms, while the original you remained intact-but the original suffered a tragic death a few seconds after the duplicate was made. Would the duplicate count as the same person? Excerpted from The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself by Sean Carroll All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
