(Liveright, $28)
When seeking an answer to life’s most profound question, it only makes sense to look for Einsteins, said Amanda Gefter in New Scientist. Inspired by Martin Amis’s observation that we’re about five such geniuses away from explaining the universe’s existence, writer Jim Holt begins his “humorous yet deeply profound journey” by trying to assemble living candidates. Mathematician Roger Penrose, physicist Steven Weinberg, novelist John Updike, and others all entertained a question Holt borrowed from the 18th-century philosopher G.W. Leibniz: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Not that a simple answer could be drawn from any of them. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum told Holt the question is a waste of time because our world doesn’t need explaining. “If, as Aristotle remarked, philosophy begins with wonder,” Holt writes, “then it ends with Grünbaum.”
Quite obviously, “what Holt is asking is unanswerable,” said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. Still, it’s a significant development when—while watching a French TV show in which a priest, a physicist, and a Buddhist monk debate Leibniz’s question—Holt recognizes the possibility that the universe never had a beginning. Still, he’s left unsettled by the idea that even such a universe contains an internal logic and perhaps, therefore, the key to why it exists. Unfortunately, neither physics nor mathematics nor religion can yet describe what that internal logic might be. As Nobel physicist Weinberg tells Holt, “It’s not just that we don’t have the observational data—we don’t even have the theory.”
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“So we are stuck,” said Kathryn Schulz in New York magazine. With ordinary answers out of the running, Holt derives great fun from entertaining the extraordinary ones. “This is a book that gets us to take seriously, at least for a few pages, the proposition that the universe was brought into being by the abstract idea of Goodness.” Holt even toys with Martin Heidegger’s contention that there’s a verb implicit in the word “nothing” and thus perhaps it inevitably “nothed itself,” creating Being. In the end, the author begins testing theories on feeling—whether they sound right. Which really is all we have to go by. Chucking the illusion of certainty, Holt has written a book that “does what real science writing should: It helps us feel the fullness of the problem” and wonder.
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September 7 editorial cartoonsCartoons Sunday’s political cartoons include stressing about Powerball, and a busy FBI schedule
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”