Synopsis
Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner once wondered about "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in the formulation of the laws of nature. Is God a Mathematician? investigates why mathematics is as powerful as it is. From ancient times to the present, scientists and philosophers have marveled at how such a seemingly abstract discipline could so perfectly explain the natural world. More than that — mathematics has often made predictions, for example, about subatomic particles or cosmic phenomena that were unknown at the time, but later were proven to be true. Is mathematics ultimately invented or discovered? If, as Einstein insisted, mathematics is "a product of human thought that is independent of experience," how can it so accurately describe and even predict the world around us?
Mathematicians themselves often insist that their work has no practical effect. The British mathematician G. H. Hardy went so far as to describe his own work this way: "No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world." He was wrong. The Hardy-Weinberg law allows population geneticists to predict how genes are transmitted from one generation to the next, and Hardy's work on the theory of numbers found unexpected implications in the development of codes.
Physicist and author Mario Livio brilliantly explores mathematical ideas from Pythagoras to the present day as he shows us how intriguing questions and ingenious answers have led to ever deeper insights into our world. This fascinating book will interest anyone curious about the human mind, the scientific world, and the relationship between them.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Novelist Alan Lightman tells a story of how he turned to fiction after being trained as a physicist. Preparing to submit an astronomy paper for publication, he was checking the references -- only to discover that he had been scooped by a Japanese astrophysicist who had found the same phenomenon that Lightman had, but who had gotten into print a little faster.
Something like that happened to me once, and after I got past my disappointment I found a related subject to research. For Lightman, the incident drove him into another field entirely. Scientists, he decided, were all looking for what was already out there, and the best that he could ever do as a physicist would be to discover something before other scientists did, something that was bound to be discovered eventually anyway. In fiction, Lightman reasoned, he could create something utterly individual, a work that no one else would ever be able to create. Thus began Lightman's award-winning career as a novelist.
But Lightman's certainty that the secrets of the world are sitting out there waiting to be discovered turns out not to be a settled notion at all. What if our discoveries instead turned out to be our own creative -- and inalterably human -- inventions? That is the question that lies at the center of Mario Livio's interesting book Is God a Mathematician?