Review: Fundamentals - Ten Keys to Reality

 Fundamentals is written by a Physics Nobel prize winner (Frank Wilczek), and is an elegantly written paean to science as well as philosophy, which I thoroughly enjoyed. For one thing, he starts with principles about what science is, and how as a way of knowing it’s completely different all the other ways of knowing (religion and laws being two examples he raises). I enjoyed his compartmentalized approach—laws can only make sense if we assume that humans have free will, but obviously free will isn’t compatible with what we know about physics, but they are different realms of exploration and study and we should keep them separate! I appreciate the pragmatism.

Free will is an essential concept in law and morality, while physics has been successful without it. Removing free will from law, or injecting it into physics, would make a mess of those subjects. It is totally unnecessary! Free will and physical determinism are complementary aspects of reality. (kindle loc 2693)

As far as science is concerned, his description of the fundamental particles and forces in a small table is succinct and makes it clear how compressed the laws of physics are. (Don’t worry, he goes into detail about what physicists consider “laws.”)

There’s a reasonable amount of speculation throughout the book, including the observation that electronics (computers and the like) have switching frequencies more than a billion times faster than neurochemical signals, so it only makes sense that when they get to a certain level of sophistication there would be no way for a human to keep up. Presciently, he notes that it probably wouldn’t take more than a century or two to get AI to the point where no humans can keep up other than providing direction.

The more I read the book the more I enjoyed the philosophy. For instance, he discusses living forever as being awesome, and that dying is a waste of all the learning and experience built up over a lifetime. I thoroughly agree!

Scientific understanding bears such abundant and delightful fruit that eating from its Tree of Knowledge can spoil one’s taste for other foods. Nonscientific literature can come to seem stale; nonscientific philosophy silly; nonscientific art pointless; nonscientific traditions hollow—and, of course, nonscientific religion nonsensical. (kindle loc 2753)