(Really 3.5 stars). This book was interesting but not for the reasons that I picked it up. I think Professor Gleiser makes a compelling argument for the rarity of complex life and the naivete of hoping for a unified theory of physics. The science seems to back up his opinion that a unified field theory is a chimera that probably won't be found, and he gives a useful (if dense for me personally) crash course in particle physics. I can't pretend that I understand everything that he was talking about, but he made it as simple as he could without cutting scientific corners.

I was hoping, though, that Gleiser might pay more attention to the philosophical implications of conscious experience at the end of the book. He pays a lot of attention to how life itself can emerge from organic materials, but he doesn't pay a lot of attention to the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness. For example, it's perfectly possible to be alive but not be conscious of external phenomena. We can talk all we want about evolution and the drive to survive, but why is life inherently concerned with self-preservation and self-duplication in the first place if it's just a complex interaction of electricity, magnetism, and chemical reactions? Why wasn't there just one flicker of life that didn't continue beyond the last universal common ancestor? How does a sentient experiencer arise from a chain of amino acids? What is the difference between sentient matter and insentient matter? If life really is just a series of chemical reactions, magnetism, and electricity, then why haven't we figured out how to produce living cells out of a soup of amino acids?

I realize these questions are not the concern of Gleiser's thesis, but these were the types of questions I had after receiving the particle physics crash course in this book. Oh well, maybe I should just stick to philosophy books instead.