Prospero's Books: The secret rules on which the universe runs

About this blog

In Shakespeare's The Tempest, Prospero, Duke of Milan, is ousted by his brother and exiled to an island. With the help of a friend, Prospero manages to take with him his beloved library.

Prospero, like his creator, lived in a time when boundaries between disciplines were not as rigid as they are today. Prospero's books would have dealt with the cosmos—spiritual and material, inner and outer—as a whole.

In this blog, I try to do the same. I'm not Prospero, just a student rummaging through his library and writing in the margins. Prospero's Books is a blog about seeing the world as a whole, by looking at
- signs, especially the relationships between signifiers and what they signify
- stories, especially big-picture stories, such as myths and the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Joyce
- systems, especially complex, nonlinear systems
- spirit, especially as understood by the Christian and Western esoteric traditions
Welcome! Please join the conversation.

—Kenneth W. Davis

(Note: Although I admire Peter Greenaway's film Prospero's Books, this blog is not directly about that film. )

Who, and Some of What, I Am

13 June 2007

The secret rules on which the universe runs

From physicist Paul Davies's Cosmic Jackpot (see What I've Been Reading):

The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies a hidden subtext, written in a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains the secret rules on which the universe runs. Newton, Galileo, and other early scientists treated their investigations as a religious quest. They thought that by exposing the patters woven into the processes of nature they truly were glimpsing the mind of God. Modern scientists are mostly not religious, yet they still accept that an intelligible script underlies the workings of nature, for to believe otherwise would undermine the very motivation for doing research, which is to uncover something meaningful about this world that we don't already know (4).

Posted by Kenneth W. Davis in Books, Complexity, Cosmos, Science, Signs, Spirit, Systems | Permalink

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What I've been reading

Frank Wilczek: The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces
A clearly and wittily written exposition, by a Nobel-prize-winning physicist, of the new ether, which Wilczek calls the "Grid," lying beneath all matter.
Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan: CosMos: A Co-creator's Guide to the Whole World
Laszlo's latest, a fascinating survey of new science but a bit too New-Age for my taste.
Stuart Kauffman: Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
An argument, by a leading complexity theorist, against both reductionism in science and fundamentalism in religion, and for "a new understanding of a natural divinity based on an emerging, scientifically based world view."
Harriett Hawkins: Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory
A powerful, fascinating book on the relationships between systems and stories. By page 75 I've already filled two pages with "marginal" notes.
Mary Swander: The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles
A fellow Iowan's gorgeously written account of her search for healing in the American Southwest.
Michael Frayn: The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe
The playwright and novelist on the role of human beings in the cosmos.
Philip Davis: Shakespeare Thinking
A fascinating new look at Shakespeare's language, focusing on "the almost physical effect Shakespeare has upon mind at its most primary level of excited existence."
Christopher Hodapp and Alice Von Kannon: The Templar Code For Dummies
A comprehensive, highly readable survey of the Knights Templar in history and myth.
Desmond Graham: After Shakespeare
Contemporary incarnations of Shakespeare's characters in a series of terse, gritty, lovely poems.
Paul Davies: Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life
A new take on the "anthropic principle," suggesting that "life, and ultimately consciousness, aren't just incidental byproducts of nature but central players in the evolution of the universe." The Prospero's Books 2007 Book of the Year.
David Weinberger: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Though labeled as "Business," a philosophical look at the history of classifying things, and the ways classification is being changed by information technology.
Richard Dawkins: The God Delusion
A scientist's passionate effort to demonstrate "why there almost certainly is no God," fundamentally flawed by the author's insistence on defining religious language simplistically.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh: The Elixir and the Stone: The Tradition of Magic and Alchemy
From the Holy Blood and Holy Grail authors, a fairly objective (so far; I'm 100 pages in) history of Hermeticism.
Leonard Smith: Chaos: A Very Short Introduction
I love this series, so I was excited to see this book (the 159th) added. It's good writing, and Smith helpfully draws examples from a wide range of subject areas.
William Dietrich: Napoleon's Pyramids
A historical thriller, recommended by Jay, a regular reader of this blog. Thanks, Jay!
Rainer Maria Rilke: Rilke's Book of Hours
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy's beautiful translation of one of my favorite books of poems.
Christopher Hodapp: Solomon's Builders: Freemasons, Founding Fathers and the Secrets of Washington D.C.
A witty and well-researched survey by my friend and lodge brother Chris Hodapp.
Colin McGinn: Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays
A philosopher's fascinating and clearly written review of six plays: Dream, the four great tragedies, and the Tempest.
Jeff Hoke: The Museum of Lost Wonder
A truly wonderful graphic book about life, the universe, and everything. Includes cut-out models. The Prospero's Books Book of the Year for 2006.
John Gross, ed.: After Shakespeare: An Anthology
A fascinating collection, with commentary, of "writing inspired by the world's greatest author."
Geoff Ward: Spirals: The Pattern of Existence
A survey of the spiral and its three-dimensional cousin, the helix, in art, ritual, life, the universe, and everything.
John L. Brown and Cerylle A. Moffett: The Hero's Journey: How Educators Can Transform Schools and Improve Learning
A call to educational reform, using the metaphor of Campbell's "monomyth."
Frances A. Yates: The Art of Memory
I can't believe I haven't read this before; it touches on rhetorical theory, the Western esoteric tradition, Freemasonry, and Shakespeare's theatre. And it's one of the Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century.
Jill Line: Shakespeare and the Fire of Love
A study of Shakespeare's plays as reflections of Christian Platonism.
James Gleick: Chaos: Making a New Science
I've been rereading parts of this 1987 book, which first introduced the concept of chaos to a wide reading public. It's an even better book than I remembered.
Harold J. Morowitz: The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex
A technical, but engaging, history of 28 emergences in the universe, including the Big Bang (#1), cells (#9), language (#24), and philosophy (#27).
Daniel Chanan Matt: The Essential Kabbalah
A three-hour audiobook of selections, wonderfully read by Ed Asner
Matthew Pearl: The Poe Shadow
One of the best detective stories I've read in years. Although I "read" it as an abridged six-hour audiobook while driving to Baltimore (where the story is set in the 1850s), I'm planning to read it again in unabridged print form just to savor the richness of its language.
Steve Berry: The Templar Legacy: A Novel
Though obviously written--or at least marketed--to capitalize on the DaVinci Code craze, this is a good thriller, with better character development than Brown's book.
Martin Lings: Sacred Art of Shakespeare: To Take Upon Us the Mystery of Things
An esoteric reading of Shakespeare's middle and late plays.
The Colours of Infinity: The Beauty, and Power of Fractals
A graphically beautiful collection of essays on fractals, with an included DVD of the 1995 "cult classic" film The Colours of Infinity.
Kurt Brown, editor: Verse & Universe
An astonishingly rich collection of poems about mathematics and science.
John Allen Paulos: Once Upon a Number: The Hidden Mathematical Logic of Stories
A mathematician explores the relationship between mathematics--especially statistics and probability--and narratives.
Fred Adams: Origins of Existence: How Life Emerged in the Universe
A physicist rhapsodizes (each chapter begins with a haiku) on the origins of life, from the Big Bang forward.
Rowan Williams: Writing in the Dust: After September 11
A meditation on being in New York on September 11, 2001, and the days after, by the current Archbishop of Canterbury.
Bernard Haisch: The God Theory: Universes, Zero-Point Fields, and What's Behind It All
An astrophysicist proposes an alternative to both dogmatic secular materialism and dogmatic religious fundamentalism.
Sandy Eisenberg Sasso: Naamah, Noah's Wife
A delightful children's book about the title character's efforts to save the world's plants as well as its animals.
Dava Sobel: The Planets
An entertaining history of humanity's relationship with the Solar System, "through the lens of popular culture."
Anthony Stevens: Jung: A Very Short Introduction
A highly readable introduction, part of a series I've found excellent before.
Kim Zetter: Simple Kabbalah
The best short introduction of several I've read, especially in this unabridged reading by Theodore Bikel.
Stephen Trimble: The People: Indians of the American Southwest
Recommended by my friend Jim Leehan, who works on the Navajo reservation, as background reading for our visit there.
Richard Smoley: Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy
An entertaining and engaging survey of gnostic traditions.
Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams: The View from the Center of the Universe : Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos
An astonishing effort to use myth and symbol to convey the state of current knowledge of the universe and humanity's "central" place in it.
Ervin Laszlo: Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos : The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality
A readable essay on recent discoveries of interconnectedness among systems, with responses from thinkers from varied fields.
Stephen Greenblatt: Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
A fascinating new life, drawing on a wider range of historical information than previous biographies.
Anonymous: Meditations on the Tarot
A profound modern classic of Hermetic Christianity.
Stephen Sicari: Joyce's Modernist Allegory: Ulysses and the History of the Novel
An illuminative reading of Ulysses based on Dante's concept of the "allegory of the theologians."