Book review: “The Island of Knowledge” by Marcelo Gleiser

The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning
By Marcelo Gleiser
Basic Books (June 3, 2014)

In May 2010, I attended a workshop at Perimeter Institute on “The Laws of Nature: Their Nature and Knowability,” one of the rare events that successfully mixed physicists with philosophers. My main recollection of this workshop is spending half of it being sick in the women’s restroom, which probably had less to do with the philosophers and more with me being 4 weeks pregnant. Good thing that I’m writing a blog to remind me what else happened at this workshop, for example Marcelo Gleiser’s talk “What can we know of the world?” about which I wrote back then. Audio and Video here.

The theme of Gleiser’s 2010 talk – the growth of human knowledge through scientific inquiry and the limits of that growth – are content of his most recent book “The Island of Knowledge”. He acknowledges having had the idea for this book at the 2010 PI workshop, and I can see why. Back then my thought about Gleiser’s talk was that it was all rather obvious, so obvious I wasn’t sure why he was invited to give a talk to begin with. Also, why was I not invited to give a talk, mumble grumble grr, bathroom break.

Surprisingly though, many people in attendance had arguments to pick with Gleiser following his elaborations. That gave me something to think; apparently even practicing scientists don’t all agree on the purpose of scientific inquiry, certainly not philosophers, and the question what we do science for, and what we can ultimately expect to know, make a good topic for a popular-science book.

Gleiser’s point of view about science is pragmatic and process oriented, and I agree with pretty much everything in his book, so I am clearly biased to like it. Science is a way to construct models about the world and to describe our observations. In that process, we collect knowledge about Nature but this knowledge is necessarily limited. It is limited by the precision to which we can measure, and quite possibly limited also by the laws of nature themselves because they may fundamentally prevent us from expanding our knowledge.

The limits that Gleiser discusses in “The Island of Knowledge” are the limits set by the speed of light, by quantum uncertainty, Godel’s incompleteness theorems, and the finite capacity of the human brain that ultimately limits what we can possibly understand. Expanding on these topics, Gleiser guides the reader through the historical development of the scientific method, the mathematical description of nature, cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics. He makes detours through alchemy and chemistry and ends with his thoughts on artificial intelligence and the possibility that we live in a computer simulation. Along the way, he discusses the multiverse and the quest for a theory of everything (the latter apparently topic of this previous book “A Tear at the Edge of Creation” which I haven’t read).

Since we can never know what we don’t know, we will never know whether our models are indeed complete and as good as can be, which is why the term “Theory of Everything”, when taken literally, is unscientific in itself. We can never know whether a theory is indeed a theory of everything. Gleiser is skeptic of the merits of the multiverse, which “stretch[es] the notion of testability in physics to the breaking point” and which “strictly speaking is untestable” though he explains how certain aspects of the multiverse (bubble collisions, see my recent post on this) may result in observable consequences.

Gleiser on the one hand is very much the pragmatic and practical scientist, but he does not discard philosophy as useless either, rather he argues that scientists have to be more careful about the philosophical implications of their arguments:

“[A]s our understanding of the cosmos has advanced during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, scientists – at least those with cosmological and foundational interests – have been forced to confront questions of metaphysical importance that threaten to compromise the well-fortified wall between science and philosophy. Unfortunately, this crossover has been done for the most part with carelessness and conceptual impunity, leading to much confusion and misapprehension.”

Unfortunately, Gleiser isn’t always very careful himself. While he first argues that there’s no such thing as scientific truth because “The word “true” doesn’t have much meaning if we can’t ever know what is,” he later uses expressions like “the laws of Nature aim at universality, at uncovering behaviors that are true”. And his take on Platonism seems somewhat superficial. Most readers will probably agree that “mathematics is always an approximation to reality and never reality as it is” and that Platonism is “a romantic belief system that has little to do with reality”. Alas we do not actually know that this is true. There is nothing in our observations that would contradict such an interpretation, and for all I know we can never know whether it’s true or not, so I leave it to Tegmark to waste his time on this.

Gleiser writes very well. He introduces the necessary concepts along the way, and is remarkably accurate while using a minimum of technical details. Some anecdotes from his own research and personal life are nicely integrated with the narrative and he has a knack for lyrical imagery which he uses sparsely but well timed to make his points.

The book reads much better than John Barrows 1999 book “Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits” which took on a similar theme. Barrow’s book is more complete in that it also covers economical and biological limits, and more of what scientists presently believe is impossible and why, for example timetravel, complexity and the possible future developments of science which Gleiser doesn’t touch upon. But Barrow’s book also suffers from being stuffed with all these topics. Gleiser’s book aims less at being complete, he clearly leaves out many aspects of “The Limits of science and the Search for Meaning” as the book subtitle promises, but in his selectiveness Gleiser gets across his points much better. Along the way, the reader learns quite a bit about cosmology, relativity and quantum mechanics, prior knowledge not required.

I would recommend this book to anybody who wants to know where the current boundaries of the “Island of Knowledge” are, seen from the shore of theoretical physics.

[Disclaimer: Free review copy]