How do you predict something that has never happened before? That is the question heading this book. And as it so happens, there is an app formula for that. Purportedly a book about Bayes’s theorem, author William Poundstone quickly latches onto the doomsday argument and whizzes the reader through a mishmash of thought experiments and philosophical puzzles that try to answer the question how long humans will survive.

How to Predict Everything: The Formula Transforming What We Know About Life and the Universe, written by William Poundstone, published in Europe by Oneworld Publications in June 2019 (paperback, 320 pages)

Unless you are familiar with statistics and probability theory, the words Bayes and Bayesian may not mean much, even though this idea has become incredibly influential. So, Poundstone starts off with a short introduction to Bayes’s theorem. This rule-set allows you to incorporate new information and evidence when you try to establish the likelihood of a certain event. For example, when calculating what the odds are of drawing an ace from a deck of cards, Bayes’s theorem allows you to adjust your belief in the likelihood of it happening next every time you do not draw an ace (assuming, of course, that you do not shuffle cards back into the deck).

The curious fact is that we do not really know what British clergyman Thomas Bayes intended with his theorem. The manuscript describing it only came to light after his death in 1761 when fellow philosopher and mathematician Richard Price went through Bayes’s notes and sent it to the Royal Society in London, with the French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace subsequently popularising it. But widespread use had to wait until the invention of computers.

“[…] we do not really know what British clergyman Thomas Bayes intended with his theorem [as it] only came to light after his death in 1761 […]”

Reading the book’s blurb you might expect How to Predict Everything to survey the theorem’s many applications (and Poundstone mentions some), but that is not quite what it delivers (for that, see The Theory That Would Not Die). Instead, he latches onto the question of how long humanity will survive, known as the doomsday argument. So is this a book about existential threats then? Not quite either. For that, see the recently reviewed End Times which offers a popular introduction to a wide variety of ways the world might realistically end, and the people whose job it is to seriously think about that. The real focus of this book is not the question of how humanity will end, but how we might calculate the odds (appropriately, the book is published in the US under the title The Doomsday Calculation).

Poundstone has split the book into two halves. In the first part, he introduces the doomsday argument and how Bayes’s theorem sheds light on it. Two schools of thought dominate the discussion, Poundstone writes. Astrophysicist Richard J. Gott III argued that there is nothing special about this moment in time. This is known as the Copernican method, after the astronomer Copernicus who said the same about our position in space. You are more likely to be somewhere in the middle of an event than right at the beginning or the end (e.g. when you walk in on a gig at a bar). A counterargument was made by astrophysicist Brandon Carter and philosopher John Leslie. Where Gott omitted prior probabilities from his reasoning, the Leslie-Carter argument relies on the idea of self-sampling: you are a random member of your group, and you can use your position in the group (e.g. the number on a raffle ticket you just bought) to say something about it (the likely number of raffle tickets in circulation). Though Carter started thinking about the doomsday argument in these terms first, he was reticent to discuss it widely and later encouraged Leslie to promote it, resulting in the 1996 book The End of the World.

“[The] focus of this book is not the question of how humanity will end, but how we might calculate the odds.”

The remainder of the first part then describes how the academic discussion has developed. Seeing the wide range of estimates provided for humanity’s survival, many people have called the whole doomsday argument quatsch. So, Poundstone goes through twelve of the most common refutations and why he thinks these do not stand up to scrutiny. Others have taken the idea to heart and the book discusses some of the nice brainteasers and thought experiments it has given rise to. Noteworthy names here are William Wells who thinks a post-apocalyptic future is more likely than total extinction. Another is physicist Carleton Caves, who points out that Gott’s omission of prior probabilities from his argument only works for scale-invariant processes that have no characteristic duration – most real-life processes are not like that. And there is Niklas Bostrom, whose serious and unbiased work on the doomsday argument has earned him a large audience.

In the second half of the book, Poundstone shows how some of these discussions have spilt over into other fields. The doomsday argument is one example of trying to come up with probabilities for something that has never happened before, but the idea of self-sampling can be applied to other big questions. Poundstone here whizzes through ideas that some might consider too preposterous. Are we living in a simulation? Could physics experiments destroy the universe? Should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence? (“Yes!” say some.”No!” say others. A third group, including Bostrom provides a more balanced argument.) How likely is intelligent life to arise in the universe? Are we alone? You might recognise that last one as the question asked by Enrico “where-is-everybody?” Fermi. The Drake equation tries to offer an answer and one the few remaining unknowns is: “how long do extraterrestrial civilizations survive?” Which is the doomsday argument by another name.

“Poundstone here whizzes through ideas that some might consider too preposterous. Are we living in a simulation? Could physics experiments destroy the universe?”

In a discussion on speculative ideas in physics, you cannot avoid quantum mechanics, so Poundstone duly brings it up. My recent review of Something Deeply Hidden had prepared me for the many-worlds interpretation espoused by Everett, though Poundstone does a nice job here in offering really concise explanations. He also discusses cosmic fine-tuning, the idea that the universe is uniquely designed for intelligent beings, and one response which renders that idea moot: that of the existence of a multiverse. Here he is perhaps too brief. The idea of cosmic inflation and of space expanding faster than the speed of light is mentioned so casually that you might gloss over it. I raise this point as it came up when I reviewed Gould’s Universe in Creation, which made an effort to communicate just how unusual this idea is.

Overall, I thought How to Predict Everything was a fun and energetic romp through a mishmash of philosophical and cosmological ideas, though it lacks a bit in focus and structure as a consequence. My suspicion is that mileage will vary for readers: those specifically interested in Bayes’s theorem or existential threats might be left wanting more, while others might roll their eyes at the outlandishness of some of the ideas here. If you are not turned off by pondering some of the speculative scenarios mentioned earlier, then Poundstone delivers an engagingly written foray.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

How to Predict Everything / The Doomsday Calculation paperback, hardback, ebook or audiobook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Did life arise merely by accident? Many scientists feel uncomfortable with talk of goal-directedness and greater plans, as it reeks more of religion and theology than rational explanation. And with creationists lurking, the risk of “smuggling God in through the back door” under scientific pretences (as Richard Dawkins put it) is something to be wary of. Without descending into this territory, Universe in Creation might skirt dangerously close to it for some. In turns lyrical, unsettling, and, yes, speculative, this book argues that life may be written into the most basic laws of nature.

Universe in Creation: A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life, written by Roy R. Gould, published by Harvard University Press in May 2018 (hardback, 273 pages)

Roy R. Gould, a Principal Investigator and Education Analyst at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, here takes a two-pronged approach to examine the emergence of life. He follows the cosmological story from the Big Bang forward, and, since life’s origin somewhere in the middle remains impenetrable, he also follows the story of evolution today back in time.

The first part was the more unfamiliar territory for me as it put forward some ideas that I had never heard of. Not being well-versed in cosmology, it is hard to be sure how widely accepted they are. Gould starts with observations by Hubble (the astronomer, not the telescope) that every galaxy in the universe is moving away from us. An expanding universe seems odd, as “gravity should attract, not repel“, writes Gould. Similarly, if the universe started with a cosmic explosion, its light should have sped off into space and be long gone. Instead, astronomers discovered that cosmic microwave background radiation, a leftover from the Big Bang, is coming at us from all directions. So, we need a new idea, and things will get more speculative going forward: “We will put aside our observations about the universe, take a deep breath, and dive into the world of ideas” (p. 42).

See, writes Gould, the terms “Big Bang” and “expanding universe” are somewhat misleading metaphors. Rather than expanding outwards into something, the universe expands inwards. How? Einstein’s model of gravity predicts that: “the universe is continuously creating more space [because] the scale of length is shrinking [with time]” (p. 61). Space is continuously welling up between the galaxies. The universe is fractalizing. This was one of those interesting and, for me, novel ideas. Gould traces its history through the 18th-century discussions between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz (is the universe the same scale everywhere?). Through the mathematician Bernhard Riemann’s questioning of a cornerstone of geometry (is the length of a line independent of its position?). And, of course, through Albert Einstein who argued that mass distorts space and time, an idea that was confirmed with the recent discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO detector. A logical follow-up question is what happened in the beginning, allowing Gould to recount how the Big Bang theory was conceived.

“Rather than expanding outwards into something, the universe expands inwards. How? […] the universe is continuously creating more space [because] the scale of length is shrinking [with time].”

Where it gets more speculative, and for some readers perhaps questionable, is when Gould asserts that the universe has a building plan. He refers to the universe’s infrastructure: the elementary particles making up atoms, and the forces that animate them (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces). He marvels at the exact proportions in which these forces work: “nature’s specifications guarantee the stability of atoms” (p. 86), and remarks how slight tweaks of these values would have precluded the formation of even hydrogen atoms, and with it life.

“Why is the infrastructure of the universe so hospitable to life?“, asks Gould (p. 88), noting that this is known as the fine-tuning problem. One scientific perspective says this is a leading question and there is no reason: “nature does not “intend” to produce either atoms or life” (p. 88). A more speculative idea is that of the multiverse: “a vast landscape of universes, almost all of which would be stillborn” (p. 89). Our universe is the lucky exception where life flourished. But there is another perspective.

In 1983, physicist John Archibald Wheeler asked a question that Gould revisits throughout this book. In short: Is the universe set up such that intelligent life is guaranteed to arise? Gould thinks yes, and explores several highlights in the universe’s evolution in support. In its infancy, the universe was not completely uniform, it was just the right kind of lumpy for matter to coalesce into stars and galaxies. Had starting parameters been different this would not have happened, so “the universe was built from the start with a clever set of plans” (p. 109). Of the chemical elements forged in large stars that are scattered when stars explode, Gould writes: “it is truly marvellous that they are created in the abundances needed to form planets and to nurture life” (p. 118).

“Gould’s injection of meaning into events does not sit comfortably with me. Is the cosmos miraculously fine-tuned for life, or is life miraculously fine-tuned to the cosmos?”

This is where I found the book at its most unsettling. Gould’s injection of meaning into events does not sit comfortably with me. Is the cosmos miraculously fine-tuned for life, or is life miraculously fine-tuned to the cosmos? There is a subtle difference. Plus, we have no record of all the times life tried to take off and failed. This is a bit reminiscent of the bias that can arise when you exclude zeros and missing values during the statistical analysis of data sets.

The other half of the book looks at evolution today and works backwards. Without resorting to a veiled attempt at scientific creationism, Gould makes two arguments that life arises naturally from the laws of nature and is not just a happy coincidence. One, life’s ability to replicate depends on the molecular properties of its machinery (DNA and RNA) that are ultimately dictated by the fundamental properties of matter (what Gould earlier called the universe’s infrastructure).

Two, chance has a role to play, but random does not mean unpredictable. You can have a system with randomly behaving components that, as a whole, is still predictable. The molecular machinery of life has random behaviours (e.g. mutation and recombination) with a predictable outcome: genetic diversity. “Chance is the engine of diversity, and with enough diversity anything seems to be possible” (p. 183). This touches on some of the hottest topics in evolutionary biology such as convergent evolution, the predictability of evolution, and the origin of evolutionary innovations.

“Gould makes two [evolutionary] arguments that life arises naturally from the laws of nature and is not just a happy coincidence”

That last question touches on one of my favourite books: Andreas Wagner’s Arrival of the Fittest. Elsewhere, I rather verbosely summarised its central thesis as “evolution probing multidimensional spaces of possible protein sequences to rapidly come up with innovative solutions to life’s problems” (one day I will review that book properly, I promise). Gould, the science poet, outdoes me: “The landscape of evolutionary success appears to be very broad; there are many pathways of mutation that preserve function. Nature is wonderfully redundant.” (p. 201)

Compared to the cosmological argument in the first half of the book, I thought Gould makes a more appealing and sound argument here. Also as I consider it an example of life being fine-tuned to the cosmos rather than vice-versa. A final trio of chapters deals with senses and sensations, an exploration of the Mandelbrot set as an example of design without a designer, and the recent that might finally start offering resolutions to the Drake equation and the Fermi paradox. I was already savouring the taste of an argument well made at this point, so these chapters were like a dessert to me.

Gould is an enthusiastic and, at times, lyrical guide, and Universe in Creation is not hard to follow. It elicited contrasting responses, both fascinating and discomfiting me. That, surely, is the hallmark of an intellectually engaging book.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Universe in Creation hardback or ebook

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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“The Vinyl Frontier: The Story of the Voyager Golden Record“, written by Jonathan Scott, published by Bloomsbury Sigma (a Bloomsbury Publishing imprint)  in March 2019 (hardback, 288 pages)

Quick recap for those who, like me, were born too late. Voyagers 1 and 2 were two robotic probes launched by NASA in 1977 to study the outer solar system. A fortunate planetary alignment only occurring once every 175 years meant that the probes could reach Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto on a Planetary Grand Tour using gravity assist manoeuvres (or gravitational slingshots). After this, they would enter interstellar space, the first human-made objects to do so.

These were the heady days of the ’60s and’70s, when we beamed the Arecibo Message at a star cluster 25,000 light-years away, and Frank Drake kicked off the first Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) meeting by throwing the idea of the Drake equation at his peers (see e.g. The Drake Equation: Estimating the Prevalence of Extraterrestrial Life through the Ages). In short, the interest in extraterrestrial life and the possibility of communicating with them was at a high. It was in this climate that the famous astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that NASA should include a message for extraterrestrials with the Voyager probes, on the infinitesimally small change that, in a distant future, they might chance upon them.

As Scott explains, there was a precedent here, with Sagan and Drake both involved in several other messages included with earlier missions. For the Voyager probes, Sagan wanted something bigger, a calling card from humanity. As he brainstormed with friends and colleagues, the idea emerged it should incorporate art, not just hard science. Before long, the idea of a record filled with music, sounds, and human greetings emerged. Oh, and pictures. Encoding those presented a challenge in itself. Each probe would be fitted with a copy of the disc.

“[…] the Voyager Golden Records have boldly gone where no records have gone before.”

From this point, Scott takes the reader through the hectic period of a few months in which Sagan and a small group of hand-picked artists, engineers, and scientists feverishly worked on putting together a unique sound essay that would show humanity on a good day. Funding was tight, deadlines tighter, and space on the record terribly limited. Worst, NASA could torpedo it last-minute if it didn’t like the contents.

The whole exercise was rather surreal, involving a head-strong ethnomusicologist and verbose UN delegates who were to provide greetings in as many foreign languages as possible (an exercise in herding cats). There was a veritable torrent of potential musical pieces and pictures from around the world to consider, and, of course, the painstaking process of clearing copyright for each and every item that did end up on the record. And lest we forget, this was the pre-internet era. Phone calls had to be made, letters written, record stores and private collections scoured, analogue equipment invented on the spot.

All participants wrote of their experiences contributing to this project in the book Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record that was published a year after the launch. Scott credits it as being incredibly important source material in writing this book, next to interviewing those people still alive in 2017. Even so, it leaves plenty of room for him to let his imagination run riot as he writes raucously funny passages how certain phone calls or meetings must have gone, or how certain requests for help must have been received. His portrayal is loving and respectful, sometimes preferring to leave certain people at a happy moment in their story arc. Equally, he is honest and candid – as the 2017 documentary The Farthest also made clear, the contributors to this project have sometimes wildly different memories of what happened or who did what exactly, and Scott doesn’t gloss over discrepancies.

“[…] Scott lets his imagination run riot as he writes raucously funny passages how certain phone calls or meetings must have gone […]”

Why write this book more than 40 years after the facts? Partially because some errors and details of what exactly went on the record only came to light in the wake of the incredibly successful 2017 Kickstarter campaign properly reissue it. Bar an unsatisfactory 1992 CD-ROM version, and in recent years the sounds and greetings being available on the NASA Soundcloud page, there was no good version until Ozma Records released The Voyager Golden Record, sourced from the archived master. In the process, they did an extremely thorough job fact-checking and properly attributing all contributions.

And partially because, after Murmurs of Earth, nobody has really looked back on this exceptional endeavour. Unsurprisingly, the record quickly took a backseat to the phenomenal observations the Voyager probes beamed back. Scott gives a very brief overview of their main achievements, but, being a record collector foremost, he purposefully decided to focus The Vinyl Frontier on the story of the record. And this is perfectly defensible. Readers interested in the scientific story of the probes can choose from the 2015 book The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission, or, slightly older, the 2011 pop-science book Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery. For more technical details on the probes, there are NASA Voyager 1 & 2 Owners’ Workshop Manual and NASA’s Voyager Missions: Exploring the Outer Solar System and Beyond (which apparently suffers from poor quality illustrations). Also worth mentioning is the more scholarly Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft, which is part of the Outward Odyssey: A People’s History of Spaceflight series published by the University of Nebraska Press.

If there is one omission in an otherwise fine book, it is that, bar the two photos on the dustjacket, it contains no illustrations. None. When Scott describes in words some of the images that went onto the record this left me scratching my head. Surely, this will have been discussed with the publisher? However, seeing that even NASA’s JPL page shows only a selection due to copyright restrictions, I think that answers my question. But were there really no photos available of the record, or of it being produced?

The Vinyl Frontier is a loving, fun and incredibly readable tribute to a remarkable artefact. If you admire Carl Sagan or have a soft spot for space exploration, this book comes highly recommended.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Vinyl Frontier paperback, hardback or ebook

Other recommended products mentioned in this review:

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