Here's a book I can't recall now in the 2020s, but about subjects that still interest me. ( )

This book sounded great although I was a bit put off by the 'Key points' sections that end each chapter. However the first chapter kept making points that seemed to me incorrect - and I'm not going to accept his logic just on his own say so.... so no point going on. A shame. ( )

simplistic, child-like. closer to a proposal for a children's cartoon series than anything else.

avoid. ( )

This book sounded great although I was a bit put off by the 'Key points' sections that end each chapter. However the first chapter kept making points that seemed to me incorrect - and I'm not going to accept his logic just on his own say so.... so no point going on. A shame. ( )

This is the second book I've read in which the author tries to explain nearly everything in terms of a single principle (well, I'm still plowing through Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, so technically, this is the first of the two I've finished). Vedral wants to reduce everything to an application of Claude Shannon's information theory, but too many of his arguments and leading conclusions are riddled with flaws. Listing and addressing them all would be exhausting, but I will say that he makes leaps from logic on genetics, global warming (apparently due to waste heat and not greenhouse gases), quantum effects on macro scales, photosynthesis ("Biological plant efficiency is super-high, about 98% of the radiation that hits a leaf does get stored efficiently." Not sure what he really meant because photosynthetic efficiency is 7-8% at best and usually 1-3%.). And he got some history wrong too - Crick and Watson didn't "discover" DNA, but whatever.

Vedral is a physicist, who I understand to quite accomplished, but he writes with vagueness, invokes mysticism, and is a little too cutesy for me.

Now, the biggest kick I got out of this book was the reaction of a "philosopher" by the name of Edward Feser, who seems to firmly believe that physics and philosophy are non-overlapping magisteria (not his words, though), taking offense when Vedral waxes philosophical. Feser says "too many scientists need to 'learn the philosophy' before pontificating on the subject." Now, I found Vedral's last two chapters to be full of annoying nonsense, but Feser was upset that physicists are spouting philosophical nonsense without training in philosophical nonsense. Though, to be fair, he doesn't consider his profession one of nonsense.

Still chuckling to myself that philosophers take themselves and their "work" so seriously. Would that I could take this book seriously, but I can't. More's the pity. He had an intriguing idea.
( )