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By DWIGHT GARNER
WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?
An Existential Detective Story
By Jim Holt
309 pages. Liveright. $27.95.
A subterranean stream of death and personal tragedy trickles around the margins of Jim Holt’s new book, “Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story.”
This volume was given a blurb by Christopher Hitchens a few days before he died. Among Mr. Holt’s central interview subjects is John Updike, who would be gone within a year. Mr. Updike, as verbally charismatic as ever, compares one notion of reality to “a piece of light verse.”
Mr. Holt’s mother dies during the course of this book’s narrative. His younger brother died a few years earlier, Mr. Holt tells us, “at a party after taking too much cocaine.” The author’s beloved dog becomes suddenly ill, and Mr. Holt sits and holds it for 10 days. It too expires.
Mr. Holt doesn’t linger long over any of these events. But this intimacy with mortality lends heft and emotion to one of his penetrating book’s fundamental questions: whether the universe, like life, is anything more than a short interlude between two vast nothings.
Mr. Holt, who writes frequently about science and philosophy for The New Yorker and The New York Times, reports that he has a trick for maintaining his outward composure during unbearable moments. He mentally works through a “beautiful little theorem about prime numbers,” attributed to Fermat. He allows himself to break down only later.
Faced with the primal question that animates this book — why is there something rather than nothing? — many serious people turn to math too, or to physics, philosophy or God. They too, it sometimes seems, wish to avoid breaking down in public.
William James called this question “the darkest in all philosophy.” Sir Bernard Lovell, a British astrophysicist, said it could “tear the individual’s mind asunder.” Mr. Holt reports that “psychiatric patients have been known to be obsessed by it.”
In “Why Does the World Exist?” Mr. Holt picks up this question about being versus nothingness and runs quite a long and stylish way with it. He combines his raffish erudition with accounts of traveling to tap the minds of cosmologists, theologians, particle physicists, philosophers, mystics and others.
He believes, along with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, that “the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
Mr. Holt’s book was inspired partly by Martin Amis, who suggested in an interview that humanity is, in terms of discovering the algebra of existence, “at least five Einsteins away.”
This comment lights more than a few synapses in Mr. Holt’s mind. “Could any of those Einsteins be around today?” he wonders. “It was obviously not my place to aspire to be one of them. But if I could find one, or maybe two or three or even four of them, and then sort of arrange them in the right order ... well, that would be an excellent quest.”
An excellent quest it mostly turns out to be. It’s no spoiler to report that the author doesn’t return, like Ernest Hemingway with a marlin, with a unified theory of everything. “Why Does the World Exist?” is more about the nuances of the intellectual and moral hunt.
When Mr. Holt does venture guesses, they tend to be darkly humorous in a Woody Allen sort of way. “My own position,” he writes, seeking middle ground between the beliefs of Christians and Gnostics, is “that the universe was created by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective.”
His accounts of his visits with various intellectuals tend to provide comic relief as well. The Oxford physicist David Deutsch, for example, reminds Mr. Holt that he’d once reviewed one of Mr. Deutsch’s books negatively (“arrogant in tone and marred by leaps of logic”) in The Wall Street Journal. He generously speaks with the groveling Mr. Holt regardless.
Mr. Holt hashes through arguments about quantum physics and string theory. He lays bare the thinking of everyone from Socrates and Plato and Heidegger and Leibniz through Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. He walks away from most of his interviews muttering about the logical defect in this approach or that one.
He has that savvy intellectual shopper’s knack for quotation. Mr. Holt quotes the cosmologist Fred Hoyle, the man who coined the phrase “the Big Bang,” as finding the whole idea undignified, like “a party girl jumping out of a cake.”
At other moments Mr. Holt delivers comments that help his readers touch the void. “If you turn on your television and tune it between stations,” he writes, “about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe.”
He evokes the awe inside the search for “a point where all the arrows of explanation converge — where every why is absorbed in an ultimate because.”
“Why Does the Universe Exist?” could have used more moments that slyly build to something like awe. It’s a peripatetic book, one that only occasionally seems really soulful or much more than the sum of its parts. Watching Mr. Holt wrestle with ideas can be like watching a Boy Scout tying and then untying complicated knots. I turned the pages with interest but not onrushing eagerness.
Mr. Holt’s wit and intellect never fail him, however. He’s good company on the page, strewing offbeat words like a latter-day William F. Buckley Jr. (“inspissate,” “noosphere,” “bosky”) or dining like a present-tense A. J. Liebling.
His book is packed with accounts of meals like this one: “At the table I ordered monkfish and heritage pork and heirloom beets, and I drank a delicious bottle of a locally produced Cabernet Franc.”
He consumes splits of Champagne. He smokes cigarettes and lingers like Sartre in Paris’s cafes. Why, he complains about his interview subjects, “did everyone but me seem to find caffeinated beverages more conducive than alcohol to pondering the mystery of existence?” In Mr. Holt’s personal metaphysics, a free-range nightly debauch is yet another excellent stay against nothingness.
He is enjoying himself on earth and is in no rush to nail every mystery to the wall. “There is nothing I dislike more,” he says, “than premature intellectual closure.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/bo...html?ref=books
WHY DOES THE WORLD EXIST?
An Existential Detective Story
By Jim Holt
309 pages. Liveright. $27.95.
A subterranean stream of death and personal tragedy trickles around the margins of Jim Holt’s new book, “Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story.”
This volume was given a blurb by Christopher Hitchens a few days before he died. Among Mr. Holt’s central interview subjects is John Updike, who would be gone within a year. Mr. Updike, as verbally charismatic as ever, compares one notion of reality to “a piece of light verse.”
Mr. Holt’s mother dies during the course of this book’s narrative. His younger brother died a few years earlier, Mr. Holt tells us, “at a party after taking too much cocaine.” The author’s beloved dog becomes suddenly ill, and Mr. Holt sits and holds it for 10 days. It too expires.
Mr. Holt doesn’t linger long over any of these events. But this intimacy with mortality lends heft and emotion to one of his penetrating book’s fundamental questions: whether the universe, like life, is anything more than a short interlude between two vast nothings.
Mr. Holt, who writes frequently about science and philosophy for The New Yorker and The New York Times, reports that he has a trick for maintaining his outward composure during unbearable moments. He mentally works through a “beautiful little theorem about prime numbers,” attributed to Fermat. He allows himself to break down only later.
Faced with the primal question that animates this book — why is there something rather than nothing? — many serious people turn to math too, or to physics, philosophy or God. They too, it sometimes seems, wish to avoid breaking down in public.
William James called this question “the darkest in all philosophy.” Sir Bernard Lovell, a British astrophysicist, said it could “tear the individual’s mind asunder.” Mr. Holt reports that “psychiatric patients have been known to be obsessed by it.”
In “Why Does the World Exist?” Mr. Holt picks up this question about being versus nothingness and runs quite a long and stylish way with it. He combines his raffish erudition with accounts of traveling to tap the minds of cosmologists, theologians, particle physicists, philosophers, mystics and others.
He believes, along with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, that “the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
Mr. Holt’s book was inspired partly by Martin Amis, who suggested in an interview that humanity is, in terms of discovering the algebra of existence, “at least five Einsteins away.”
This comment lights more than a few synapses in Mr. Holt’s mind. “Could any of those Einsteins be around today?” he wonders. “It was obviously not my place to aspire to be one of them. But if I could find one, or maybe two or three or even four of them, and then sort of arrange them in the right order ... well, that would be an excellent quest.”
An excellent quest it mostly turns out to be. It’s no spoiler to report that the author doesn’t return, like Ernest Hemingway with a marlin, with a unified theory of everything. “Why Does the World Exist?” is more about the nuances of the intellectual and moral hunt.
When Mr. Holt does venture guesses, they tend to be darkly humorous in a Woody Allen sort of way. “My own position,” he writes, seeking middle ground between the beliefs of Christians and Gnostics, is “that the universe was created by a being that is 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective.”
His accounts of his visits with various intellectuals tend to provide comic relief as well. The Oxford physicist David Deutsch, for example, reminds Mr. Holt that he’d once reviewed one of Mr. Deutsch’s books negatively (“arrogant in tone and marred by leaps of logic”) in The Wall Street Journal. He generously speaks with the groveling Mr. Holt regardless.
Mr. Holt hashes through arguments about quantum physics and string theory. He lays bare the thinking of everyone from Socrates and Plato and Heidegger and Leibniz through Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins. He walks away from most of his interviews muttering about the logical defect in this approach or that one.
He has that savvy intellectual shopper’s knack for quotation. Mr. Holt quotes the cosmologist Fred Hoyle, the man who coined the phrase “the Big Bang,” as finding the whole idea undignified, like “a party girl jumping out of a cake.”
At other moments Mr. Holt delivers comments that help his readers touch the void. “If you turn on your television and tune it between stations,” he writes, “about 10 percent of that black-and-white speckled static you see is caused by photons left over from the birth of the universe.”
He evokes the awe inside the search for “a point where all the arrows of explanation converge — where every why is absorbed in an ultimate because.”
“Why Does the Universe Exist?” could have used more moments that slyly build to something like awe. It’s a peripatetic book, one that only occasionally seems really soulful or much more than the sum of its parts. Watching Mr. Holt wrestle with ideas can be like watching a Boy Scout tying and then untying complicated knots. I turned the pages with interest but not onrushing eagerness.
Mr. Holt’s wit and intellect never fail him, however. He’s good company on the page, strewing offbeat words like a latter-day William F. Buckley Jr. (“inspissate,” “noosphere,” “bosky”) or dining like a present-tense A. J. Liebling.
His book is packed with accounts of meals like this one: “At the table I ordered monkfish and heritage pork and heirloom beets, and I drank a delicious bottle of a locally produced Cabernet Franc.”
He consumes splits of Champagne. He smokes cigarettes and lingers like Sartre in Paris’s cafes. Why, he complains about his interview subjects, “did everyone but me seem to find caffeinated beverages more conducive than alcohol to pondering the mystery of existence?” In Mr. Holt’s personal metaphysics, a free-range nightly debauch is yet another excellent stay against nothingness.
He is enjoying himself on earth and is in no rush to nail every mystery to the wall. “There is nothing I dislike more,” he says, “than premature intellectual closure.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/03/bo...html?ref=books