Dorion Sagan’s Cosmic Apprentice is a scientific mugging. He takes everything you think you know about science and turns it on its head, tying together classic observations and modern revelations in such a way as to make ensure that you will question everything. He scoops up the whole world of modern science, including hallucinogenic research, bacterial genomics, the significance of dust, and the nature of scientific revolutions, squeezes them for all they’re worth.

Sagan’s mission is to show that everything is simultaneously connected and questionable. He focuses his time on scientists conducting research far outside the mainstream. These people are not kooks per se, but they are definitely not your run-of-the-mill pipette-wielding chemists or biologists. They are seeking to integrate whole systems of thought, systems that range from the microscopic to the cosmologic. He quotes research from far too many people to count.

There’s also a lot of cognitive science in here as well. How do we think about discovery? About failure? About thinking itself? These are both neurological and philosophic questions. An interesting motif that recurs in the chapters, however, is the notion of the free will in a world of interconnected systems. Given that everything in the universe is the result of billions of years of motion and reaction, what makes humanity so special that it doesn’t have to obey these laws? Each one of us may believe that we are unique and autonomous, but we are subject to the same processes that govern the ocean or the ant colony. We are at the mercy of our chemicals and invading bacteria. The feature that supposedly separates us from the rest of the universe is our self-perception. The problem occurs when we try to devise a test to prove or disprove free will.

It’s these intersections of science and philosophy that make this interesting. Sagan eagerly demonstrates ability to synthesize, or at least correlate, information from very disparate fields of study. This book is like reading Bill Bryson on acid. I liked it a lot, but next time, I’ll read it much slower. It’s just a lot to take in at once. If you have the stomach and can handle the ride, though. this one is well worth it. ( )

You enter Cosmic Apprentice as you would enter a new world. It is mysterious, unpredictable and unlimited. The words they use there could be a foreign language. Come in with an open mind.

The topics Sagan covers range from dust, to methane, to sex, to science as religion, to free will, to philosophy, to psychiatry, to ecodelic drugs. But they have a(n unexpected) common underpinning: their connection to the second law of thermodynamics. And in the end, it is clear that the point of it all is that we, humans on Earth, are a process more than a thing (Buckminster Fuller said we are verbs, not nouns). Our role is to keep the energy gradients from dispersing and spreading to the dreaded, boring state of equilibrium, which means nothing at all is happening. We do that by working, eating, participating at any sort of level. Unfortunately we also do it by unexpectedly burning every carbon resource on the planet, which is problematic not only for the second law, but also for the future of the species. It takes us way beyond our punching weight in the scheme of things, causing an overheated system. And overheated systems burn out or up or both. The planet has its own immune system, and can deal us out of the scheme in an instant if we don’t behave like the guests we are here. Keeping the entropy gradients down is our mission and our role, and we fulfill it whether we know it or not, choose to or not, or avoid it or not. Free will exists because it has no choice.

Along the way, we learn some truly amazing things. Two notables:

The body is not one self but a fiction of a self built from a mass of interacting, supervening selves. A body’s capabilities are literally the result of what it incorporates; the self is not merely corporal but corporate. Life is modular; it assembles what it needs from available resources. Our immune system is not so much to keep bacteria out as to actively select which ones to subsume and incorporate for the benefits they offer. That above all is the true way of nature, evolution and the history of life. Survival goes to those (tiny) beings that offer the most benefit to their hosts. Bacteria are the longstanding champions of evolution. Helpfulness is what makes them the fittest, not necessarily their ability to outrun, outlast or fight.

The other notable is the travails of J Marvin Herndon, who put together a comprehensive, complete and most of all elegant alternate history of the planet. Actually it’s worse than that. Herndon has actually disproven the currently accepted story, and posited a much stronger, consistent one. In his theory, Earth was a gas giant like Jupiter, 300 times its current size. In the ignition of the sun, the gas envelope around Earth was blown away. Ever since, the planet has been decompressing, causing rifts, earthquakes and tectonic plate shifting as it stretches out and relaxes. The pressure of the enormous gas cloud had reduced Earth to 64% of its current size. And it continues to swell. The core of the planet is a solid furnace of uranium in nickel silicate, that generates our magnetic field from within. That’s why the sun can blow it back, but can’t blow it away. Its inconsistencies are why magnetic poles shift. Herndon has a total package that works without fail and actually makes sense, even to the layman. For his efforts, he has of course been pilloried, blasted, minimized, dismissed and ignored, much as any good Copernicus, Bruno or Darwin before him. The religion that is science is not much more welcoming than the religions of exclusive faith.

Sagan is a passionate polymath, and it’s a pleasure to see his mind in action, but the book is not a particularly easy read. He chocks it full of names you never heard of, without further explanation, and creates compound words of his own that slow you down. He delights in making people’s names into adjectives. The endnotes are rich with additional information, which is a bother, but make it worth keeping your thumb in the back of the book. We’re not all astrophysicists or biochemists, but Sagan writes as if we were, which makes it hard slogging at times. Syntax is sometimes clumsy: “Plato’s watchers thus are to be found largely only in the ranks of scientists themselves or, in academia, philosophers of science who tend to be marginalized within science.” Another I had trouble following turned out to be nine lines long when it mercifully ended. The chapter on mind altering drugs was enlightenting, but will aggravate and annoy a segment of the reading public who just say no to drugs without examining or wanting to understand their potential – and won’t expect it in a book like this.

So Cosmic Apprentice is not for everybody, but if you’re open to the challenge, it’s a great ride. ( )