Barrow, John

• The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (with Frank Tipler)

  • Only the most ambitious reader in the sciences should try to tackle this book in its entirety, as it is extremely complex, both mathematically and philosophically. With that said, this is still a very enjoyable book for the average layperson, as many of the fascinating issues surrounding the Anthropic Principle are explained in great detail in easily accessible language (for the most part). The first 4-5 chapters of this book, dealing with the history of this idea and some early developments, is the best. Later on, the authors spend quite a bit of time proving a variety of propositions using mathematics and logic. While most of this is dry and boring, I found that a lot of the book can be enjoyably skimmed (I only need to see numerical coincidences derived a few times to accept their existence, not forty). Since I cover some of these issues in my Introductory Astronomy classes, I was able to mine a lot of valuable material out of here, and this book makes a nice logical extension to several other good books by Gribbin, Sagan, Asimov, et al.

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