John D. Barrow: The Universe That Discovered Itself

(Oxford University Press)

$39.95

Review: Frances Grant*

If the swirling blue cover of this book catches your eye in the bookshop and you pick it up, are you playing your part in humankind's ultimate destiny - understanding the laws of nature - or is this just an act of random chance?

The more deeply science questions the nature of the universe, the bigger role chance plays, but does all this randomness (think of many individuals walking down a narrow street) add up to uniformity (the orderly flow of the crowd)?

Or does the complexity and uncertainty which govern nature at its most fundamental level, mean we (or rather, those at the cutting edge of theoretical physics desperately seeking a Theory of Everything) are hopelessly misled in believing humanity will one day know it all.

The Universe That Discovered Itself - an updating for the millennium of Barrow's The World Within the World - does not have the same confidence expressed by Stephen Hawking in his best-selling A Brief History of Time that humanity can know "the mind of God."

Partly a primer, rounding up the major ideas of 20th-century physics, it goes on to examine the assumption that the laws of nature are out there waiting for us to discover them.

It also runs through a brief history of the development of modern scientific thought and looks at why some cultures got further along this track than others and also at the divergence of philosophy from the scientific enterprise.

Throughout the book, Barrow often comes back to his critique - and it's a highly satisfying one for the natural sceptic - of the sociological view of science as little more than a cultural by-product.

If you like your science books "popular," be warned: this one is definitely at the dense end of the burgeoning genre's spectrum (Barrow categorises it as "semi-popular").

But although the more technical chapters take time to get the head around, the pay-off is a fascinating discussion in the final chapters of the nature, as it were, of the laws of nature themselves.

Are there such things and why should they be ultimately solvable by a human brain, Barrow asks. Why should our limits be the limits of the universe?

And what would understanding such laws really mean to us, as we stand in the science section of a bookshop, for example, at unimaginable distances from the stars and the quarks?

* Frances Grant is a Herald journalist.