(posted on my blog: davenichols.net)

Physicist Leonard Susskind weighed in on his support for string theory in 2005 with The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. A book with high goals and, from me personally, high expectations, Landscape falls quite flat from the very beginning and only occasionally rises to a point worth mentioning.

I was familiar with the public debate between Susskind and fellow physicist Lee Smolin (author of three books on physics, including his latest: The Trouble With Physics) over the concept known as the anthropic principle. Susskind, very much in favor of anthropic solutions, favors the weak anthropic version, which holds that our universe allows life only because of the existence of a multiverse which offers an overwhelming number of opportunities to get the "details" of physics right. However, I really expected Susskind to dig deeply into the notion of Intelligent Design as it related to religious faith in a specific Creator of the cosmos. However, rather than address this far more common meaning of "Intelligent Design" directly, Susskind spends chapter after chapter meandering through physics fundamentals and pleading with the reader to see how string theory and its multiverse predictions are not just reasonable but "solidly grounded" in research.

Having read a great deal of physics books and knowing many of the arguments for and against string theory, the anthropic principle, and cosmological intelligent design, I found Susskind's treatment and defense of his stance to be disappointing and muddled. The reader is left with a great deal of missing steps in his thinking, and like many string theorists, Susskind assumes the reader will accept that string theory and a multiverse system are facts from which to explore the issues. However, Susskind never establishes just why the reader should make these assumptions, and it leaves a lot of hollow ground hindering his argument.

Combined with the lack of any real attack on the "illusion of intelligent design", this sort of writing is a let down for me. I like Susskind and have watched many of his panel discussions where he is both thoughtful and clear. However, I've also watched a few of his seminars and, unfortunately, this book reads much more like his rambling, at times incoherent lectures than it does his focused and insightful panel debates. Three stars and only recommended for curious physics readers wanting to get Susskind's arguments first hand. ( )

Why are the laws of physics fined tuned to provide exactly the exact environment which would permit intelligent life to develop, and ask such questions? Intelligent design, or a megaverse of all possible variables, and we find ourselves in this one precisely because it does permit life to develop. Susskind is one of the founders of string theory, and this book provides his answer to the above question. "A Landscape of possibilities, populated by a megaverse of actualities." ( )

The author is not kidding when he states: "although the book is aimed at a lay audience, it is not aimed at the "lightweight" who is afraid to stretch his or her mind." This book certainly took me to the edge of my ability to picture what Mr. Susskind was talking about. There is a nice summary of the various thoughts in physics these days, particularly with regard to explaining how the universe came to be. However, I can't say that this book convinced me that there wasn't intelligence design. It seems to me (not having a physics background) that so much of what we "know" about physics - particularly on the particle level - is theoretical (devising theories of what's happening on the sub-atomic level to explain the behavior we can see). And those theories seem to be revised and changed on a pretty regular basis as new ideas are factored in. I think it is all exciting and interesting, but not definitive. As someone who believes God created the earth, I don't discount the idea that He worked according to specific laws (in fact I believe that He did work within laws that we could possibly discover). Maybe that sets me apart from other creationists. Anyway - Susskind didn't present any kind of overwhelming evidence that there was no intelligent design, at least for me. However, I'm amazed at the kinds of ideas that physicists can imagine and test using mathematical principles. Incredible. ( )

This review was also published, in a slightly enhanced & more comfortable format, at my blog between drafts.

There are, to begin with, two points that weigh strongly in The Cosmic Landscape’s favor: it’s a fascinating read, and a fairly easy one to boot. Two rather neutral points would be that Leonard Susskind doesn’t rehearse the Anthropic Principle discussion’s every nook and cranny (for such an endeavor I’d rather recommend browsing arXiv.org instead, also and especially for essays published in Universe or Multiverse?) and he also doesn’t discuss String Theory at any length.

And there’s the rub. His assumptions, fascinating and with remarkable explanatory power as they are, critically depend on String Theory being indeed a part of nature—which is far from being established and has lately come under intense scrutiny, and criticism. One such critic is Lee Smolin (or rather he’s become an outspoken critic; he’s done considerable work in String Theory himself during his career), whose The Trouble With Physics I started to read yesterday, and I might have more to say about Susskind after I’ve finished Smolin. (Who, by the way, has his own fascinating but peculiar approach to the Anthropic Principle discussion.)

But what’s really engaging about The Cosmic Landscape, at least for me, is not who’s right or wrong but how the different approaches and arguments bear out their respective premises and how they correlate with each other—or not. Science and the scientific process never fail to thrill me.