Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order

A study of the human drive to create order and reason is set in New Mexico and notes the parallel beliefs of the ancient Anasazi people, the Tewa Native Americans, the Penitentes, and the scientists of the Santa Fe Institute. 10,000 first printing.

New York Times science writer Johnson (In the Palaces of Memory) presents an extraordinary look at vanguard areas of scientific research where information science, molecular biology, cosmology and subatomic physics converge. Remarkably, much of this work is being done at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (home to the wartime project that built the first atomic bombs) and an affiliated think tank, the Santa Fe Institute. These investigators are at the forefront both of chaos theory, seeking hints of order in seemingly random phenomena, and of the new science of complexity, which studies how the universe could arise from pure nothingness in accordance with fundamental rules that apply to cells or galaxies. One team of biochemists runs computer simulations designed to show that life evolved through self-organizing processes rather than by Darwinian selection. Other scientists posit information as a basic building block of the universe, like energy and matter. If science is an artful construction, Johnson suggests, we should not scoff at traditional faiths. In that spirit, he visits three other New Mexican locales: an adobe chapel in Chimayo, reputed site of miraculous cures; the Tewa Indians' ritual dances to bring plentiful crops and insure good hunting; and the secretive Hermanos Penitentes, a Catholic lay brotherhood whose members practice self-flagellation. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Brilliantly illuminates the complex, deceptive relationship that exists between the physical universe and our perception of it.

Fundamental to science is a belief that reality can be understood through observation, experimentation, and measurement. Could it be, however, that humans can grasp just the parts of reality that can be experienced by our limited sensory and cognitive equipment and that what we call science describes a cultural rather than a physical reality? These are heady questions but not necessarily esoteric. Through their traditional myths and religions, the Native American and Spanish populations of the remote areas around Santa Fe have addressed similarly abstract possibilities. Today, scientists at the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory also envision a universe where physical reality transcends any human efforts to explain or describe it. The new theories go by exotic names?chaos, complexity, the physics of information, and others. Johnson, a New York Times science writer, captures the radical excitement of a scientific revolution but also looks backward to Southwestern cultures that have long intuited these deeper realities. With grace and insight, he evokes a vivid sense of place and depicts both the rigors and wonders of a modern scientific quest, giving all readers something to ponder. Highly recommended.?Gregg Sapp, Univ. of Miami Lib.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Johnson, science writer for the New York Times and author of In the Palaces of Memory (1991), excels at making esoteric scientific theories comprehensible, a feat he elevates to new heights in this invigorating analysis of the interface between faith and science. Johnson uses the glorious and fabled landscape of New Mexico, his home state, as a template for his eloquent and probing discussion of how our hunger for order in a seemingly arbitrary world is at the heart of religion, cosmology, and quantum physics. New Mexico is the perfect setting for this explication because such diverse peoples as the Tewa Indians and the Hermanos Penitentes consider it holy, and the physicists at Los Alamos value it as a place where secrets can be kept and risks taken. As Johnson explains each group's belief system (drawing some unexpected and gratifying connections), we see that faith plays as great a role in physics as it does in religion. People in each tradition believe they're revealing preexisting truths, but Johnson suggests that spirituality and theoretical science are actually "conceptual lenses," beautiful abstractions our imaginative and pattern-oriented minds construct in pursuit of meaning. Donna Seaman