Fire in the mind

by Johnson, George

Fire in the Mind is on one level a conventional--albeit exceptionally well-executed--work of science journalism. Johnson provides an up-to-the-minute survey of the most exciting and philosophically resonant fields of modern research. This achievement alone would make his book worth reading. His accounts of particle physics, cosmology, chaos, complexity, evolutionary biology and related developments are both lyrical and lucid. They made me realize, somewhat to my consternation, how poorly I had grasped David Bohm's pilot-wave interpretation of quantum mechanics, or the links between information theory and thermodynamics. What sets Fire in the Mind apart from other science books is its profound questioning of such theories. [...] Fire in the Mind is a subversive work, all the more so because it is so subtle. Johnson's style is less polemical than poetic: he advances his position through analogy, implication, innuendo. That may be why previous reviewers of Fire in the Mind, including the