Review by Kirkus Book Review
Science's missing piece. It's not every day that scientists suggest a new law of nature. But Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist, and Wong, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist, believe that we've missed something right in front of our noses. "How can it be," they ask in this mind-bending book, "that such an omnipresent, awe-inspiring facet of the cosmos is uncodified in the canon of scientific law?" Seeing through the world to its underlying laws requires noticing that seemingly disparate phenomena are actually the same. Sometimes it's the simple case that reveals the universal truth. For Newton, it was apples. For Hazen, it's minerals. The universe started out with one kind of mineral--a microscopic diamond--that was reshuffled in the heat of stars into 25 new minerals, then exploded on Earth into 6,000 different species. Melting, freezing, the shifting of tectonic plates, and the activities of life mixed and matched the minerals' elements into endless new arrangements. Most were duds; only the stable survived. In this, Hazen glimpsed an underlying logic of emerging order that applies not only to minerals but to atoms, isotopes, animals, language, computer code, even scientific knowledge itself, a form of universal evolution of which the Darwinian kind is merely a special case. While the second law of thermodynamics still holds--the increase of entropy and disorder that defines the arrow of time and marches us toward the heat death of the universe--there is simultaneously, the authors claim, a second trend of ever-increasing "functional information," "a universal imperative that has been at play since the Big Bang," that is not precluded by the known laws of physics, but can't be derived from them either. It's a provocative claim, one that blurs the line between animal and mineral. The book's prose is not especially poetic, but there are times when the facts alone exert their own poetry. When this happens in a science book, it can be transcendent. A paradigm-shifting work of scientific daring that inspires us to reconsider the emergence of life in the cosmos. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
