The Big Picture - 9780525954828

Caltech physicist and author of the award-winning The Particle at the End of the Universe gives a sweeping new perspective on how human purpose and meaning naturally fit into a scientific worldview.

This is Sean Carroll's most ambitious book yet: how the deep laws of nature connect to our everyday lives. He has taken us From Eternity to Here and to The Particle at the End of the Universe. Now forThe Big Picture. This is a book that will stand on the shelf alongside the great humanist thinkers from Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan to Daniel Dennett and E.O. Wilson. It is a new synthesis of science and the biggest questions humans ask about life, death, and where we are in the cosmos. 

Readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level; the emergence of causes from underlying laws; and ultimately how human values relate to scientific reality. This tour of, well, everything explains the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe, but it also shows how an avalanche of discoveries over the past few hundred years has changed the world for us and what we think really matters. As Carroll eloquently demonstrates, our lives are dwarfed by the immensity of the universe and redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.