Words

That’s Just What They Would Say

The announcement we wait for every year has finally come in, and the American Dialect society has chosen their Word of the Year! That word is: “they”. It beat out other finalists such as “ammosexual.”

You might think that dubbing “they” as the Word of the Year is some sort of lifetime-achievement award, since the plucky pronoun has been part of English for quite a long time. But the prize has been given, not for the word itself, but for a particular usage that has been gaining ground for a while now: the singular “they.” We most commonly use the word to stand for the plural: “Jack and Jill went up the hill, but once there they realized they had forgotten their pail.” More and more, however, we’re seeing it used to denote one person at a time, when their sex is unknown to us: “The robber left no fingerprints, but they did leave a note to taunt the police.”

It would be somewhat more traditional, in some circumstances, to say “he or she did leave a note.” It’s a bit cumbersome, however, and to be honest, the real tradition is simply to act like women don’t exist, and say “he did leave a note.” The rise of “he or she” has reflected our gradual progress in remembering that human beings come in both male and female varieties, and our language should reflect that. (We can also try to make it reflect the full diversity of sex and gender roles, but while that’s an admirable goal, it might not be realistic in practice.)

Using “they” instead of “he or she” or just “he” is a very nice compromise. It sounds good, and it’s a word we’re already familiar with. Die-hard prescriptivists will complain that it’s simply a mistake, because when the God of English wrote the rules for our language, He (presumably) declared that “they” is only and always supposed to be plural. That view doesn’t accord with common sense, nor with the reality of the history of English. A long list of the best writers in the language, from Shakespeare and the authors of the King James Bible to Jane Austen and George Orwell, have deployed “they” as the correct pronoun to use when describing a single person whose sex is not known to us. Supporters of singular “they” are not revolutionaries twisting our language to the diabolical purposes of modern political correctness; we are just recalling a well-established and more correct way of speaking.

It’s long been argued that “he” served perfectly well as a generic singular pronoun, without any implication at all that the person being referred to is actually male. The problem with that view is that it is false. Studies have consistently shown that referring to unknown persons as “he” makes listeners envision a man much more often than a woman. To which one can scientifically reply, no duh. Pretending that “he” refers equally to men and women is just another strategy for pretending that sexism doesn’t exist — a tradition much more venerable than using “he” as a generic pronoun.

Minor fixes in our use of language aren’t going to make sexism go away. But they are steps in the right direction. I like to hope that, when the next young genius appears to revolutionize science, they will have had to deal with just a little bit less discrimination than their predecessors did.

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Cosmic Maelstrom

I was doing some end-of-the-year housecleaning on my computer, and stumbled across this poem — an unrhymed sonnet on symmetry breaking in the early universe. (Always aiming at the least common denominator, what can I say?)

I have no misconceptions about my poetic abilities, which is no doubt why it sat privately on my hard drive for so long. But it’s the holidays, so here you go.

The cosmic maelstrom boiled bright and fierce,
A thousand fields did gambol nearly free.
Momentum was exchanged so high and hot
That couplings did asymptote to nil.
Amidst the glue and bosons ‘lectroweak
There stood our pensive scalar doublet, Phi
Surveying a potential all about
Like Buridan’s ass, secured by symmetry.
A longing pulled these spineless complex fields,
To rest where energy was minimized.
But held by finite temperature effects,
The quarks and leptons bound symmetric state.
Yet nothing perfect lasts through cosmic time,
The universe expands, illusion breaks.

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Reading List

Now that The Big Picture is complete, I have more time for fun things like blogging, but I have a bunch of research to catch up on before I can return as normal. So in the meantime, here’s another teaser from the book: my list of “Further Reading” keyed to the different sections. You should have enough time to read all of these between now and publication day, May 10.

Part One, Cosmos:

  • Adams, F., & Laughlin, G. (1999). The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity. Free Press.
  • Albert, D.Z. (2003). Time and Chance. Harvard University Press.
  • Carroll, S. (2010). From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Dutton.
  • Feynman, R.P. (1967). The Character of Physical Law. M.I.T. Press.
  • Greene, B. (2004). The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. A.A. Knopf.
  • Guth, A. (1997). The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins. Addison-Wesley Pub.
  • Hawking, S.W. and Mlodinow, L. (2010). The Grand Design. Bantam.
  • Pearl, J. (2009). Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference. Cambridge University Press.
  • Penrose, R. (2005). The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. A.A. Knopf.
  • Weinberg, S. (2015). To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. HarperCollins.

Part Two, Understanding:

  • Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. HarperCollins.
  • Dennett, D.C. (2014) Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. W.W. Norton.
  • Gillett, C. and Lower, B., eds. (2001). Physicalism and Its Discontents. Cambridge University Press.
  • Kaplan, E. (2014). Does Santa Exist? A Philosophical Investigation. Dutton.
  • Rosenberg, A. (2011). The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions. W.W. Norton.
  • Sagan, C. (1995). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Random House.
  • Silver, N. (2012). The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t. Penguin Press.
  • Tavris, C. and Aronson, E. (2006). Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Part Three, Essence:

  • Aaronson, S. (2013). Quantum Computing Since Democritus. Cambridge University Press.
  • Carroll, S. (2012). The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World. Dutton.
  • Deutsch, D. (1997). The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications. Viking Adult.
  • Gefter, A. (2014). Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn: A Father, a Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing, and the Beginning of Everything. Bantam.
  • Holt, J. (2012) Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story. Liveright Publishing.
  • Musser, G. (2015). Spooky Action at a Distance: The Phenomenon That Reimagines Space and Time–and What It Means for Black Holes, the Big Bang, and Theories of Everything. Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Randall, L. (2011). Knocking on Heaven’s Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World. Ecco.
  • Wallace, D. (2014). The Emergent Multiverse: Quantum Theory According to the Everett Interpretation. Oxford University Press.
  • Wilczek, F. (2015). A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design. Penguin Press.

Part Four, Complexity:

  • Bak, P. (1996). How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. Copernicus.
  • Cohen, E. (2012). Cells to Civilizations: The Principles of Change that Shape Life. Princeton University Press.
  • Coyne, J. (2009). Why Evolution is True. Viking.
  • Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design. W.W. Norton.
  • Dennett, D.C. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Simon & Schuster.
  • Hidalgo, C. (2015). Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. Basic Books.
  • Hoffman, P. (2012). Life’s Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos. Basic Books.
  • Krugman, P. (1996). The Self-Organizing Economy. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Lane, N. (2015). The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life. W.W. Norton.
  • Mitchell, M. (2009). Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford University Press.
  • Pross, A. (2012). What Is Life? How Chemistry Becomes Biology. Oxford University Press.
  • Rutherford, A. (2013). Creation: How Science is Reinventing Life Itself. Current.
  • Shubin, N. (2008). Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body. Pantheon.

Part Five, Thinking:

  • Alter, T. and Howell, R.J. (2009). A Dialogue on Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
  • Chalmers, D.J. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.
  • Churchland, P.S. (2013). Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain. W.W. Norton.
  • Damasio, A. (2010). Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon.
  • Dennett, D.C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Little Brown & Co.
  • Eagleman, D. (2011). Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Pantheon.
  • Flanagan, O. (2003). The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them. Basic Books.
  • Gazzaniga, M.S. (2011). Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. Ecco.
  • Hankins, P. (2015). The Shadow of Consciousness.
  • Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrah, Straus and Giroux.
  • Tononi, G. (2012). Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul. Pantheon.

Part Six, Caring:

  • de Waal, F. (2013). The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. W.W. Norton.
  • Epstein, G.M. (2009). Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe. William Morrow.
  • Flanagan, O. (2007). The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. The MIT Press.
  • Gottschall, J. (2012). The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  • Greene, J. (2013). Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Penguin Press.
  • Johnson, C. (2014). A Better Life: 100 Atheists Speak Out on Joy & Meaning in a World Without God. Cosmic Teapot.
  • Kitcher, P. (2011). The Ethical Project. Harvard University Press.
  • Lehman, J. and Shemmer, Y. (2012). Constructivism in Practical Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
  • May, T. (2015). A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe. University of Chicago Press.
  • Ruti, M. (2014). The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living. Columbia University Press.
  • Wilson, E.O. (2014). The Meaning of Human Existence. Liveright.

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The Big Picture: Table of Contents

Greetings, surface-dwellers! I have finally emerged from the secret underground laboratory where I have been polishing the manuscript for The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. We pushed up the publication date to May 10, so you’ll get it in plenty of time for your summer beach reading. Evidence that it exists, all 145,000 glorious words:

TBP-pages

As will happen in the writing process, the organization of the book has changed since I first mentioned it. Here is the final table of contents. As you might gather, I went with an organization of many short chapters. Hopefully that will help give the book the feeling of a light and enjoyable read.

THE BIG PICTURE: ON THE ORIGINS OF LIFE, MEANING, AND THE UNIVERSE ITSELF

    0. Prologue

* Part One: Cosmos

  • 1. The Fundamental Nature of Reality
  • 2. Poetic Naturalism
  • 3. The World Moves By Itself
  • 4. What Determines What Will Happen Next?
  • 5. Reasons Why
  • 6. Our Universe
  • 7. Time’s Arrow
  • 8. Memories and Causes

* Part Two: Understanding

  • 9. Learning About the World
  • 10. Updating Our Knowledge
  • 11. Is It Okay to Doubt Everything?
  • 12. Reality Emerges
  • 13. What Exists, and What Is Illusion?
  • 14. Planets of Belief
  • 15. Accepting Uncertainty
  • 16. What Can We Know About the Universe Without Looking at It?
  • 17. Who Am I?
  • 18. Abducting God

* Part Three: Essence

  • 19. How Much We Know
  • 20. The Quantum Realm
  • 21. Interpreting Quantum Mechanics
  • 22. The Core Theory
  • 23. The Stuff of Which We Are Made
  • 24. The Effective Theory of the Everyday World
  • 25. Why Does the Universe Exist?
  • 26. Body and Soul
  • 27. Death Is the End

* Part Four: Complexity

  • 28. The Universe in a Cup of Coffee
  • 29. Light and Life
  • 30. Funneling Energy
  • 31. Spontaneous Organization
  • 32. The Origin and Purpose of Life
  • 33. Evolution’s Bootstraps
  • 34. Searching Through the Landscape
  • 35. Emergent Purpose
  • 36. Are We the Point?

* Part Five: Thinking

  • 37. Crawling Into Consciousness
  • 38. The Babbling Brain
  • 39. What Thinks?
  • 40. The Hard Problem
  • 41. Zombies and Stories
  • 42. Are Photons Conscious?
  • 43. What Acts on What?
  • 44. Freedom to Choose

* Part Six: Caring

  • 45. Three Billion Heartbeats
  • 46. What Is and What Ought to Be
  • 47. Rules and Consequences
  • 48. Constructing Goodness
  • 49. Listening to the World
  • 50. Existential Therapy
  • Appendix: The Equation Underlying You and Me
  • Acknowledgments
  • Further Reading
  • References
  • Index

A lot of ground gets covered. In Part One we set the stage, seeing how discoveries in science have revealed a universe that runs under unbreakable, impersonal laws of nature. In Part Two we think about how to conceptualize such a universe: how to learn about it (Bayesian inference, abduction) and how to talk about it (emergence and overlapping theoretical vocabularies). In Part Three we get down and dirty with quantum mechanics, the Core Theory, and effective field theories. In Part Four we start down the road of connecting to our macroscopic world, seeing how complexity and life can arise due to the arrow of time. In Part Five we think about the leading challenge to a physicalist worldview: the existence of consciousness. And in Part Six we recognize that the universe isn’t going to tell us how to behave, and acknowledge that the creation of meaning and purpose is ultimately our job.

Now back to being a scientist with me. I have drafts of four different papers on my computer that need to be kicked out and onto the arxiv!

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The Big Picture

Once again I have not really been the world’s most conscientious blogger, have I? Sometimes other responsibilities have to take precedence — such as looming book deadlines. And I’m working on a new book, and that deadline is definitely looming!

Sean Carroll: The Big Picture

And here it is. The title is The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. It’s scheduled to be published on May 17, 2016; you can pre-order it at Amazon and elsewhere right now.

An alternative subtitle was What Is, and What Matters. It’s a cheerfully grandiose (I’m supposed to say “ambitious”) attempt to connect our everyday lives to the underlying laws of nature. That’s a lot of ground to cover: I need to explain (what I take to be) the right way to think about the fundamental nature of reality, what the laws of physics actually are, sketch some cosmology and connect to the arrow of time, explore why there is something rather than nothing, show how interesting complex structures can arise in an undirected universe, talk about the meaning of consciousness and how it can be purely physical, and finally trying to understand meaning and morality in a universe devoid of transcendent purpose. I’m getting tired just thinking about it.

From another perspective, the book is an explication of, and argument for, naturalism — and in particular, a flavor I label Poetic Naturalism. The “Poetic” simply means that there are many ways of talking about the world, and any one that is both (1) useful, and (2) compatible with the underlying fundamental reality, deserves a place at the table. Some of those ways of talking will simply be emergent descriptions of physics and higher levels, but some will also be matters of judgment and meaning.

As of right now the book is organized into seven parts, each with several short chapters. All that is subject to change, of course. But this will give you the general idea.

* Part One: Being and Stories

How we think about the fundamental nature of reality. Poetic Naturalism: there is only one world, but there are many ways of talking about it. Suggestions of naturalism: the world moves by itself, time progresses by moments rather than toward a goal. What really exists.

* Part Two: Knowledge and Belief

Telling different stories about the same underlying truth. Acquiring and updating reliable beliefs. Knowledge of our actual world is never perfect. Constructing consistent planets of belief, guarding against our biases.

* Part Three: Time and Cosmos

The structure and development of our universe. Time’s arrow and cosmic history. The emergence of memories, causes, and reasons. Why is there a universe at all, and is it best explained by something outside itself?

* Part Four: Essence and Possibility

Drawing the boundary between known and unknown. The quantum nature of deep reality: observation, entanglement, uncertainty. Vibrating fields and the Core Theory underlying everyday life. What we can say with confidence about life and the soul.

* Part Five: Complexity and Evolution

Why complex structures naturally arise as the universe moves from order to disorder. Self-organization and incremental progress. The origin of life, and its physical purpose. The anthropic principle, environmental selection, and our role in the universe.

* Part Six: Thinking and Feeling

The mind, the brain, and the body. What consciousness is, and how it might have come to be. Contemplating other times and possible worlds. The emergence of inner experiences from non-conscious matter. How free will is compatible with physics.

* Part Seven: Caring and Mattering

Why we can’t derive ought from is, even if “is” is all there is. And why we nevertheless care about ourselves and others, and why that matters. Constructing meaning and morality in our universe. Confronting the finitude of life, deciding what stories we want to tell along the way.

Hope that whets the appetite a bit. Now back to work with me.

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Einstein’s Papers Online

If any scientist in recent memory deserves to have every one of their words captured and distributed widely, it’s Albert Einstein. Surprisingly, many of his writings have been hard to get a hold of, especially in English; he wrote an awful lot, and mostly in German. The Einstein Papers Project has been working heroically to correct that, and today marks a major step forward: the release of the Digital Einstein Papers, an open resource that puts the master’s words just a click away.

As Dennis Overbye reports in the NYT, the Einstein Papers Project has so far released 14 of a projected 30 volumes of thick, leather-bound collections of Einstein’s works, as well as companion English translations in paperback. That’s less than half, but it does cover the years 1903-1917 when Einstein was turning physics on its head. You can read On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, where special relativity was introduced in full, or the very short (3 pages!) follow-up Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?, where he derived the relation that we would now write as E = mc2. Interestingly, most of Einstein’s earliest papers were on statistical mechanics and the foundations of thermodynamics.

Ten years later he is putting the final touches on general relativity, whose centennial we will be celebrating next year. This masterwork took longer to develop, and Einstein crept up on its final formulation gradually, so you see the development spread out over a number of papers, achieving its ultimate form in The Field Equations of Gravitation in 1915.

What a compelling writer Einstein was! (Not all great scientists are.) Here is the opening of one foundational paper from 1914, The Formal Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity:

In recent years I have worked, in part together with my friend Grossman, on a generalization of the theory of relativity. During these investigations, a kaleidoscopic mixture of postulates from physics and mathematics has been introduced and used as heuristical tools; as a consequence it is not easy to see through and characterize the theory from a formal mathematical point of view, that is, only based on these papers. The primary objective of the present paper is to close this gap. In particular, it has been possible to obtain the equations of the gravitational field in a purely covariance-theoretical manner (section D). I also tried to give simple derivations of the basic laws of absolute differential calculus — in part, they are probably new ones (section B) — in order to allow the reader to get a complete grasp of the theory without having to read other, purely mathematical tracts. As an illustration of the mathematical methods, I derived the (Eulerian) equations of hydrodynamics and the field equations of the electrodynamics of moving bodies (section C). Section E shows that Newton’s theory of gravitation follows from the general theory as an approximation. The most elementary features of the present theory are also derived inasfar as they are characteristic of a Newtonian (static) gravitational field (curvature of light rays, shift of spectral lines).

While Einstein certainly did have help from Grossman and others, to a large extent the theory of general relativity was all his own. It stands in stark contrast to quantum mechanics or almost all modern theories, which have grown up through the collaborative effort of many smart people. We may never again in physics see a paragraph of such sweep and majesty — “Here is my revolutionary theory of the dynamics of space and time, along with a helpful introduction to its mathematical underpinnings, as well as derivations of all the previous laws of physics within this powerful new framework.”

Thanks to everyone at the Einstein Papers project for undertaking this enormous task.

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Unsolicited Advice: Becoming a Science Communicator

Everyone who does science inevitably has “communicating” as part of their job description, even if they’re only communicating with their students and professional colleagues. But many people start down a trajectory of becoming a research scientist, only to discover that it’s the communicating that they are most passionate about. And some of those people might want to take the dramatic step of earning a living doing such communication, whether it’s traditional journalism or something more new-media focused.

So: how does one make the transition from researcher to professional science communicator? Heck if I know. I do a lot of communicating, but it’s not my primary job. You’d be better off looking at this thread from Ed Yong, where he coaxed an impressive number of science writers into telling their origin stories. But lack of expertise has never stopped me from offering advice!

First piece of advice: don’t make the tragic mistake of looking at science communication as a comfortable safety net if academia doesn’t work out. Not only is it an extremely demanding career, but it’s one that is at least as hard as research in terms of actually finding reliable employment — and the career trajectories are far more chancy and unpredictable. There is no tenure for science communicators, and there’s not even a structured path of the form student → postdoc → faculty. Academia’s “up or out” system can be soul-crushing, but so can the “not today, but who knows? Maybe tomorrow!” path to success of the professional writer. It’s great to aspire to being Neil deGrasse Tyson or Mary Roach, but most science communicators don’t reach that level of success, just as most scientists don’t become Marie Curie or Albert Einstein.

Having said all that, here are some tips that might be worth sharing. …

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Discovering Tesseracts

I still haven’t seen Interstellar yet, but here’s a great interview with Kip Thorne about the movie-making process and what he thinks of the final product. (For a very different view, see Phil Plait [update: now partly recanted].)

tesseract One of the things Kip talks about is that the film refers to the concept of a tesseract, which he thought was fun. A tesseract is a four-dimensional version of a cube; you can’t draw it faithfully in two dimensions, but with a little imagination you can get the idea from the picture on the right. Kip mentions that he first heard of the concept of a tesseract in George Gamow’s classic book One, Two, Three… Infinity. Which made me feel momentarily proud, because I remember reading about it there, too — and only later did I find out that many (presumably less sophisticated) people heard of it in Madeleine L’Engle’s equally classic book, A Wrinkle in Time.

But then I caught myself, because (1) it’s stupid to think that reading about something for the first time in a science book rather than a science fantasy is anything to be proud of, and (2) in reality I suspect I first heard about it in Robert Heinlein’s (classic!) short story, “–And He Built a Crooked House.” Which is just as fantastical as L’Engle’s book.

So — where did you first hear the word “tesseract”? A great excuse for a poll! Feel free to elaborate in the comments.

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How to Communicate on the Internet

Let’s say you want to communicate an idea X.

You would do well to simply say “X.”

Also acceptable is “X. Really, just X.”

A slightly riskier strategy, in cases where miscomprehension is especially likely, would be something like “X. This sounds a bit like A, and B, and C, but I’m not saying those. Honestly, just X.” Many people will inevitably start arguing against A, B, and C.

Under no circumstances should you say “You might think Y, but actually X.”

Equally bad, perhaps worse: “Y. Which reminds me of X, which is what I really want to say.”

For examples see the comment sections of the last couple of posts, or indeed any comment section anywhere on the internet.

It is possible these ideas may be of wider applicability in communication situations other than the internet.

(You may think this is just grumping but actually it is science!)

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Does Santa Exist?

There’s a claim out there — one that is about 95% true, as it turns out — that if you pick a Wikipedia article at random, then click on the first (non-trivial) link, and keep clicking on the first link of each subsequent article, you will end up at Philosophy. More specifically, you will end up at a loop that runs through Reality, Existence, Awareness, Consciousness, and Quality (philosophy), as well as Philosophy itself. It’s not hard to see why. These are the Big Issues, concerning the fundamental nature of the universe at a deep level. Almost any inquiry, when pressed to ever-greater levels of precision and abstraction, will get you there.

Does Santa Exist? Take, for example, the straightforward-sounding question “Does Santa Exist?” You might be tempted to say “No” and move on. (Or you might be tempted to say “Yes” and move on, I don’t know — a wide spectrum of folks seem to frequent this blog.) But even to give such a common-sensical answer is to presume some kind of theory of existence (ontology), not to mention a theory of knowledge (epistemology). So we’re allowed to ask “How do you know?” and “What do you really mean by exist?”

These are the questions that underlie an entertaining and thought-provoking new book by Eric Kaplan, called Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation. Eric has a resume to be proud of: he is a writer on The Big Bang Theory, and has previously written for Futurama and other shows, but he is also a philosopher, currently finishing his Ph.D. from Berkeley. In the new book, he uses the Santa question as a launching point for a rewarding tour through some knotty philosophical issues. He considers not only a traditional attack on the question, using Logic and the beloved principles of reason, but sideways approaches based on Mysticism as well. (“The Buddha ought to be able to answer our questions about the universe for like ten minutes, and then tell us how to be free of suffering.”) His favorite, though, is the approach based on Comedy, which is able to embrace contradiction in a way that other approaches can’t quite bring themselves to do.

Most people tend to have a pre-existing take on the Santa question. Hence, the book trailer for Does Santa Exist? employs a uniquely appropriate method: Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. Watch and interact, and you will find the answers you seek.

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