Reasoning poetically to tackle The Big Picture

(credit: Penguin Random House)

The title of physicist Sean Carroll’s latest book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, is proof of its ambition. This book wants to tie together, well, everything. That’s no surprise; many popular science books have wide scopes and aim to tie together disparate scientific information.

But The Big Picture is more philosophical than scientific, which is a bit of a departure for Dr. Carroll. Another of his books, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, is equally ambitious but heavy on the science. That book was largely about examining and weighing various scientific possibilities. His new book takes a step back and asks how we should be thinking about these possibilities in the first place.

But don’t be discouraged if you prefer science over philosophy: Carroll seamlessly weaves the two together. The Big Picture lives up to its title. It starts at the Big Bang, explains how time works (drawing on ideas from Carroll's previous book), passes through chemistry, biology, computer science, evolution, abiogenesis (the study of how life on Earth started), quantum mechanics, and neuroscience, all before finally arriving at a discussion of how consciousness is possible.

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