(posted on my blog: davenichols.net)

Having read and loved both of physicist Lee Smolin's more recent books, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity and The Trouble With Physics, I picked up a copy of Life of the Cosmos, his first book. Life centers around Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection, a proposal which directly counters the weak anthropic cosmological arguments. While Smolin is a brilliant scientist, this first book left a lot to be desired, especially when compared to the two books he has since released. I expected this to be much more a work of philosophy of science, which it was, but the awkward structure and presentation make it a mixed bag for the reader.

Published in the late 1990s, this book was Smolin's first attempt to bring physics to a popular science audience. However, from the first few chapters, it is clear that the book's organization and argument style are cloudy at best. Smolin gives the reader a muddled set of preliminary background, a great deal of which has little to do with explaining his cosmological natural selection theory.

The meat of the book should be Part 2: An Ecology of Space and Time and Part 3: The Organization of the Cosmos. Unfortunately, the book is light on details and often drifts off-subject. I was personally left with only a basic outline of the theory Smolin offered, and would have love to see the implications of cosmological natural selection fleshed out a lot more.

Later parts of the book drift off to mostly philosophical and historical subjects and greatly abandon the arguments for the book's thesis. By the time I finished the book, it had easily been a hundred pages since any lengthy discussion of cosmological natural selection had taken place. Much of this latter history should have been included in the earlier parts of the book or left out entirely.

One area of argument that irked me a bit was Smolin's reliance on the Gaia hypothesis to provide backbone for his discussion of feedback systems. While I respect Lovelock's theory (and the work of other supporters such as Lynn Margulis), Smolin's use of Gaia in support of his own theory does nothing to improve his argument. It is entirely possible to describe the ecological relationships found on this planet without relying on Gaia to explain the processes. Not only is Gaia widely criticised by scientists of myriad disciplines, the modern versions of it are somewhat at odds with some of the aspects Smolin cites (Lovelock himself conceded early on that his initial hypothesis had serious problems, as pointed out by critics, and has backed off many of his original assertions). To be fair, I don't know what Gaia hypothesis actually proposed in the late 1990s at the time Smolin wrote this book, so I suppose this criticism may be a touch harsh.

Overall, Smolin is still a brilliant guy and despite the numerous problems with structure and content, Life is worth reading if you really dig philosophy of science and/or physics/cosmology books. If this one doesn't grab you, don't give up on Smolin as an author. His writing and presentation styles improved tremendously with Three Roads and have become outstanding with Trouble. As for this book, three stars. ( )

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

This is Smolin’s first popular science book out of three so far, and I knew it would revolve around his evolutionary theory of the cosmos: universes propagating through black hole formation via cosmological natural selection. And while this is indeed among its major subjects, the book turned out to be about much more than that.

Lee Smolin’s main objective consists of proposing hypotheses as to why our universe is “exactly right” for life that can be disproved. This is a property that would actually qualify a hypothesis as scientific, and a property popular multiverse theories and theories based on the strong anthropic principle rather lack.

Moreover, and that fascinated me even more than Smolin’s black holes proposal, he brings forward a hypothesis about the cosmos as an emergent phenomenon in which not only space and time evolve (re: relativity) but where there’s also no fixed background in the form of our laws of physics—which, instead, might have “evolved” as emergent properties of the system.

The idea behind it isn’t easily sketched, and I highly recommend reading the book. It’s well written and, a trademark of Smolin’s books, enriched with observations and hypotheses that betray a solid knowledge of philosophy and the history of science (and which makes them also a treat for those who feel more at home in the humanities). As a final remark I’d like to add that the book doesn’t suffer at all from its 1998 release, i. e., shortly before the break-through finding that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating. Indeed, this finding seems to go rather well together with Smolin’s list of predictions toward his fecund universes theory.

I'd rather not comment.

Lacking a coherent structure, this is nevertheless an enjoyable account of modern cosmology and particle physics theory. Has splendid passages on star formation, and develops Smolin's speculative cosmological natural selection theory, which purports to explain how our universe came to be so finely tuned. ( )