Paul Davies' "The Goldilocks Enigma"

This is an excellent review of modern physics with an emphasis on "the big questions": why are we here and what does it all mean.

Davies is honest and exhaustive in his examination of what modern physics can say about the nature of the universe, the place of life and mind, and the "meaning" of it all.

He takes a minority position. Most physicists take what he calls the "absurd universe" view, i.e. "the universe is as it is, mysteriously, and it just happens to permit life. It could have been otherwise, but what we see is what we get. Had it been different, we would not be here to argue about it. The universe may or may not have a deep underlying unity, but there is no design, purpose, or point to it all -- at least none that would make sense to us."

He takes a different viewpoint, something between what he calls "the life principle" and "the self-explaining universe". While I don't agree with either of these, he puts a good effort into explaining them. They are a bit mystical for my taste.

I guess I'm in the camp he calls "none of the above". My viewpoint is that it is premature to try to "explain everything". It reminds me of the debates over the fate of the universe in the late 19th century when entropy laws were known but there was a huge enigma of how evolution which required and had evidence for a very long history of evolution on earth (hundreds of millions of years) could be compatible with a sun which based on the physics of heat allowed only a short lifespan (millions of years). Those debates were premature because nobody anticipated the discovery of the immense energy source of radioactivity.

Similarly, it is silly to discuss a "theory of everything" when over 90% of what is observed in space is fundamentally unknown, i.e. it is some combination of dark energy and dark matter, both of which are not understood.

This book is a very good review of "modern physics for the layman". It is an even better overview of "what does it all mean" and "what are the arguments at the cutting edge of physics/cosmology".

Here's a snippet that I think pretty well sums up the conclusions of the book:

"So, how come existence? At the end of the day, all the approaches I have discussed are likely to prove unsatisfactory. In fact, in reviewing them they all seem to me to be either ridiculous or hopelessly inadequate: a unique universe that just happens to permit life by a fluke; a stupdendous number of alternative parallel universes that exist for no reason; a preexisting God who is somehow self explanatory; or a self-creating, self-explaining, self-understanding universe-with-observers, entailing backward causation and teleology. Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limitations of the human intellect. I began this book by saying that religion was the first great systematic attempt to explain all of existence and that science is the next great attempt. Both religion and science draw the methodology from ancient modes of thought honed by many millennia of evolutionary and cultural pressures. Our minds are the products of genes and memes. Now we are free of Darwinian evolution and able to create our own real and virtual worlds, and our information-processing technology can take us to intellectual arenas that no human mind has ever before visited, those age-old questions of existence may evaporate away, exposed as nothing more than the befuddled musing of biological beings trapped in a mental straitjacket inherited from evolutionary happenstance. The whole parapernalia of gods and laws, time, and matter, of purpose and design, rationality and absurdity, meaning and mystery, may yet be swept away and replaced by revelations as yet undreamt of."

I agree this muddle will be swept away. But I think it will be from a newer physics with an understanding that can explain dark matter and dark energy. Rather than get carried about about "escaping" our logic and science to find this new and deeper meaning, I think we just need to keep chipping away with conventional science but with an eye to understanding the bits that we know we can't explain and find theories that encompass them as well as clean up the niggling paradoxes left by conventional theories that don't quite fit the known facts. That's how real science advances. Slowly. Not with grandstanding about whole new levels of meaning and understanding.