The Quickening Universe: Cosmic Evolution and Human Destiny

Mallove reflects on the awesome prospect that intelligent life may play a significant role in the destiny of the universe. He speculates about well-founded cosmological theory that life may ultimately transform the universe for its own designs, just as it has already gained planet-wide control of the terrestrial biosphere. The Quickening Universe is a reflective scientific tour of the marvelously inventive cosmos that has come to life - quickened - and is now examining itself to discover meanings in its origins and destiny. This is an informed and poetic synthesis of scientific wonders that endlessly provoke our imagination: a probably infinite cosmos that emerged about 15 billion years ago from perhaps absolute nothingness; the unfathomable sense in which the laws of physics seem to "ordain" life - not a particular kind of life but organized complexity; eons of evolution that have led to beings here (and almost certainly in many other places) who can perceive beautiful laws of physics and mathematics and who have an equivalent thirst for artistic beauty; the staggering realization that the universe does not "know" its own state of being at the level of the quantum microcosm; and the supreme enigma, the grand illusion of time.