viii, 358 pages ; 24 cm; Part 1: The crisis in fundamental physics. Light and life ; The logic of atomism ; The miracle of the stars ; The dream of unification ; The lessons of string theory -- Part 2: An ecology of space and time. Are the laws of physics universal? ; Did the universe evolve? ; Detective work ; The ecology of the galaxy ; Games and galaxies -- Part 3: The organization of the cosmos. What is life? ; The cosmology of an interesting universe ; The flower and the dodecahedron ; Philosophy, religion, and cosmology ; Beyond the anthropic principle -- Part 4: Einstein's legacy. Space and time in the new cosmology ; The road from Newton to Einstein ; The meaning of Einstein's theory of relativity ; The meaning of the quantum -- Part 5: Einstein's revenge. Cosmology and the quantum ; A pluralistic universe ; The world as a network of relations ; The evolution of time -- Epilogue/evolutions -- Appendix: Testing cosmological natural selection.; Cosmologist Lee Smolin offers a startling new theory of the universe that is at once elegant, comprehensive, and radically different from anything proposed before. In The Life of the Cosmos, Smolin cuts the Gordian knot of cosmology with a simple, powerful idea: "The underlying structure of our world," he writes, "is to be found in the logic of evolution." Today's physicists have overturned Newton's view of the universe, yet they continue to cling to an understanding of reality not unlike Newton's own - as a clock, an intricate mechanism, governed by laws which are mathematical and eternally true. Smolin argues that the laws of nature we observe may be in part the result of a process of natural selection which took place before the big bang. Smolin's ideas are based on recent developments in cosmology, quantum theory, relativity and string theory, yet they offer, at the same time, an unprecedented view of how these developments may fit together to form a new theory of cosmology. From this perspective, the lines between the simple and the complex, the fundamental and the emergent, and even between the biological and the physical are redrawn. The result is a framework that illuminates many intractable problems, from the paradoxes of quantum theory and the nature of space and time to the problem of constructing a final theory of physics. As he argues for this new view, Smolin introduces the reader to recent developments in a wide range of fields, from string theory and quantum gravity to evolutionary theory the structure of galaxies. He examines the philosophical roots of controversies in the foundations of physics, and shows how they may be transformed as science moves toward understanding the universe as an interrelated, self-constructed entity, within which life and complexity have a natural place, and in which "the occurrence of novelty, indeed the perpetual birth of novelty, can be understood."; 

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