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| Book Reports Click here to return to the Main Menu BOOK REPORT: CONSILIENCE by Edward O. Wilson My mother was a devout Catholic, but she always said that if, when she got to Heaven, they didn't explain everything to her, she was going to be very disappointed; angels and puffy clouds were not going to be enough. Mom died ten years ago, age 90; if she had been able to stick around longer she could have gained Heaven here on Earth, according to Edward O. Wilson, a professor at Harvard and a leading thinker in the sciences, particularly biology. Wilson has revived an old word, consilience, for the title of his book subtitled, "The Unity of Knowledge". Consilience is the bringing together and integration of theory and knowledge across all intellectual boundaries. The book sets forth his belief that we can achieve this unification and describes where we are in that process in each area of physical and social scientific knowledge. While that is quite an ambitious and expansive notion, Wilson makes a strong case that there is a finite amount to be learned and that we are mowing toward the time when learning will be completed quite rapidly. He elaborates on this concept in each area of knowledge and then goes on to describe the impact of this on the arts, ethics and religion. Whew! Of course,there are those who disagree to varying degrees, like pepper sauce, from mild to scorching. There is one school of thought which holds that unifying all knowledge is not just difficult, but literally impossible. But these are basically logic �chopping formulations, rather than actual statements about reality. I�m pretty much of the school that, if you kick a rock, you�ll hurt your toe. So whether or not we get to know absolutely everything, we are going to continue to learn more and more about our universe and our own make-up that it will change our world profoundly. Just two rather dramatic examples: if we know everything, we can change everything �genetic engineering is the first manifestation of this-and, getting to the beginning of time. I'm not sure it entirely matters-- in any case we are getting closer and closer like Zeno`s arrow, even if we never get actually there. What interests me is, then what? If we know everything, will then things cease changing? Isn�t change, after all, just the occurrence of what we don't yet know? If there is no change, will then time stand still? These startling notions I will pursue in the future, first in a review of Julian Barbour�s, The End of Time, and eventually in the exposition of my own ideas. In the meantime, I'm hoping my mother already knows. |