The Allure of the Multiverse
Paul Halpern Basic (2024)
The term ‘multiverse’ was coined in the 1890s by philosopher and psychologist William James, to describe a cosmos without distinction between right and wrong. Decades later, the word entered physics, owing to the 1950s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Today, it is a source of controversy, says US physicist Paul Halpern. The multiverse, “with realms beyond direct detection”, seems “antithetical to the goal of testability”. But whether right or wrong, debating it is scientifically productive, Halpern maintains.
Unshrinking
Kate Manne Crown (2024)
Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studied the prevalence of six forms of implicit bias, and found that, from 2007 to 2016, fatphobia was the only one to worsen. As philosopher Kate Manne notes, fatphobia regards fatter bodies as being inferior to thinner bodies, “in terms of not only our health but also our moral, sexual and intellectual status”. She spent most of her life trying to lose weight, until finally deciding to live as she wanted to. Her personal, unshrinking call to action should be widely read.
Not the End of the World
Hannah Ritchie Little Brown Spark (2024)
During her environmental-geoscience degree, data scientist Hannah Ritchie learnt about an endless series of depressing trends in global warming, ocean acidification and more. But now, as deputy editor of the online publication Our World in Data, she finds reasons for hope, as she explains in this fundamentally optimistic book on increasing sustainability. For example, global deforestation has been declining since the 1980s. She calls herself a “misfit scientist” because her team, rather than “zooming into a problem”, learns by “zooming out”.
2020
Eric Klinenberg Bodley Head (2024)
In 2020, New York City had the highest incidence of COVID-19 cases and fatalities of all cities. A “terrible misfortune”, comments sociologist Eric Klinenberg, but a “blessing” for his research. His analytical yet moving account of the pandemic centres on the city but interweaves global evidence, drawing on virology, economics, sociology and the personal stories of seven individuals from five New York City boroughs. Its conclusion is disturbing: COVID-19 did not help the United States to “rediscover its better, more collective self”.
The Weirdness of the World
Eric Schwitzgebel Princeton Univ. Press (2024)
“The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose,” remarked biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, paraphrasing Haldane, agrees. He opens: “The world is weird — deeply, pervasively so, weird to its core”. His entertaining book of philosophy and science considers three topics: the cosmos’s fundamental structure, the place of human consciousness in it and what humans should value. But he does not claim to offer definite answers.
Competing Interests
The author declares no competing interests.