(Потому что наши русские читатели очень важны, мы сейчас в поисках профессионального переводчика. Мы приносим свои извинения, что на данный момент, мы можем лишь предоставить текст на английском языке.)

Theories of Everything. That is what world class scientists today consider to be the hallmark of the tenacious mind battles of which the hopped result is to elicit an understanding of what makes atoms, molecules, brains, and the whole of living complexities of life tick.

As if not enough turmoil was cluttering the ocean in which these theories are bathing in, a select group of physicists, cognitive and computer scientists are already beginning to wonder if this “path of least resistance” towards reductionism, that is, towards explaining the emergent structures of matter like DNA, organisms, minds, psychology, consciousness, by analyzing the structure and mechanistic behavior of the most simple constituents from which they emerge, is the right way to go if we want access deep down the rabbit hole.

Quantum Physics’ Standard Model (Bruce A. Schumm’s book, Deep Down Things, is a great, for the layman, introduction to this subject) gives a very good explanation about the behavior and structure of subatomic particles, while String Theory (check Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe for more), the model which tries to explain all the constituents of matter as interactions between tiny vibrating strings of energy, promises to advance even further towards detailing the phenomena and organization of even the smallest components from which all physical objects emerge from.

But is this enough? Does knowing all the voltages and intensities that express the electrical states of your computer suffice for you to understand how it works as a whole? Could you ever comprehend how a computer program works only by analyzing its machine code language consisting of blithely long strings of 0’s and 1’s. A handful of scientists doubt this is the right path towards understanding all there is.

If we want to answer the most fastidious questions that bedeviled human minds from the beginning of their existence we sure as hell wouldn’t want to mistake the crumbs for the whole bread. Ensemble Theories of Everything promise to stop the bungled attempts at explaining how reality works as a whole made by Reductionist Theories of Everything that try to usurp answers to the above questions, answers that they were never even designed to possibly be able to contrive in the first place.

Similarly to how computer programmers make sense of software by using high level programming languages, the same way we should draw inferences about the nature of reality by using the meta-levels of understanding, which the Ensemble Theories of Everything purportedly provide.

Even though not as long as Daivd Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality, Russell K. Standish’s book provides a very passable text that sprouts a myriad of new ideas designed to bring together a whole new ensemble theory. The book tries to answer the ins and outs of why anything bothers to exist at all, and, even from the beginning, draws the sardonic conclusion that the whole of what there is around us, the set of all the universes that make up the Multiverse, contains no information at all, and is in fact Nothing; it is just from the inside, as mere descriptions – bits of strings – that we are, that there seems, from our point of view, to be something.

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