a book

The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself

Name: The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
Rating: 5 (10 reviews)
Author: Sean M Carroll
ISBN: 9781780746074

Sean M Carroll · 2016 · 399 pages

‘Fascinating’ – Brian Cox, Mail on Sunday Books of the Year Where are we? Who are we? Do our beliefs, hopes and dreams hold any significance out there in the void? Can human purpose and meaning ever fit into a scientific worldview? Award-winning author Sean Carroll brings his extraordinary intellect to bear on the realms of knowledge, the laws of nature and the most profound questions about life, death and our place in it all. From Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness and the universe itself, Carroll combines cosmos-sprawling science and profound thought in a quest to explain our world. Destined to sit alongside the works of our greatest thinkers, The Big Picture demonstrates that while our lives may be forever dwarfed by the immensity of the universe, they can be redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.

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recommended by 10 people

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Andrej Karpathy
“I love Sean Carroll, but I can't bring myself to finish this book. This is not some kind of cool science book. It's a little too much too long too high-level philosophy, re-iterating the same things over and over again, and just overall meh. Someone else less familiar with physics might like it. EDIT: I accidentally read this book again forgetting that I already had. I have to start by saying that I actually love Sean Carroll and adore his presentation/teaching ability. That said, I had to skip over a bunch of it because the book is primarily a work of philosophy and history, and a concatenation of the first 2 paragraphs of popular science articles on topics of physics. The part I actually loved was the Appendix, where he discusses the Core Theory in quite a lot of detail. If that 2 page explanation was expanded into the length of this book it would be an easy 5/5.”
Elon Musk
“Highly recommend anything by Sean Carroll https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/status/728599116456984577”↗
Dan Heisman
“The most "tour de force" fun book I ever read was Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Hofstadter but the most tour-de-force "non-fun" book was The Big Picture by Sean Carroll Both deep stuff & highly recommended.”↗
Liv Boeree
“Favourite reads of 2018: Fiction: Three Body Problem (trilogy) Non Fiction: The Big Picture Blog Post:”↗
K Ken Nakamura
“I finished "The BIG Picture" by @seanmcarroll It is a great book, must read for everyone. I have 2 comments: 1) In P134, the author implied that even History can be considered a science, which was quite surprise for me. (to be continued)”↗
Scott Young
David Sinclair
Brian Greene
Dan Hooper
Scott Farquhar