Product Description
If the cosmos is vast, says astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan, it is by no means silent. Nature, he writes, "delights in continuously sending us her notes of music." Like some far-off orchestra, it tantalizes us with fragments of a symphony, but the melody linking the bits and snatches of song is missing. The task of science is to unravel the secrets of that hidden melody, so that we can listen to the composition in all its glory.
In The Secret Melody, Trinh Xuan Thuan examines our many attempts to capture the music of nature and hear the cosmic fugue. First, as prelude, he describes the many other cosmologies that preceded the modern Big Bang theory of creation--the magical universe of cavemen, the ancient Chinese idea of the universe (which Thuan compares to a gigantic bureaucracy), the mathematical universe introduced by Pythagoras, and the heliocentric universe of Copernicus--and he explores the work of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and other early scientists. He then describes in a clear, vivid, and poetic language our current understanding of the cosmos, painting a sharp picture of how modern astronomers study the universe, the equipment they use, the most prominent scientists, and the major discoveries. A mind-boggling portrait of the cosmos emerges in these pages. We read, for instance, of the incredible size of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which is some 90,000 light-years in diameter, with several hundred billion stars orbiting its center. More amazing, we discover we live in a universe where stars, like human beings, are born, live, and die, leaving behind such strange and exotic objects as neutron stars and black holes; where time may expand and space may contract; and where billions of galaxies have sprung from a tiny primordial speck that was infinitely smaller than a hydrogen atom in a gigantic explosion, the Big Bang. And, of course, any examination of the origin and nature of the universe inevitably raises philosophical and religious questions, and Thuan examines these issues as well, presenting a provocative case for the anthropic principle (which argues that the universe has been fine-tuned to an extreme precision to produce living creatures with consciousness and intelligence) and illuminating the place of God in a Big Bang cosmology.
Here then is an intriguing look at modern cosmology, blending up-to-the-minute descriptions of the forefront of astronomy with thoughtful reflections on science's possible impact on philosophical and religious belief. With many beautiful and informative illustrations, The Secret Melody is an enthralling look at our endless efforts to understand the cosmos and to hear the music of the stars.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 2 reviews)

Tendentious, but interesting and well-written

I was very fond of this book until the end. As has been pointed out in the reviews, the author has a narrative talent absent from most science writing for the layman. He is also an aesthete with polymathic talents and interests. But herein lies the problem with the book. One of those interests is theology. One would have thought that most professional scientists would have learned by now to leave God out of the equation, since the question or even the meaning of the question, "Does God exist?" is scientifically unanswerable. Carl Sagan, to whom one reviewer compares Thuan is acutely aware of this fact in all his writings. Thuan doesn't exactly "believe" or have "faith" that God exists, but he concludes with a "scientist's bet" that something so complex and beautiful could not have arisen from chance. His reasons for doing so are thus really aesthetic, not scientific. He chooses to ignore that this world is not all art and beauty, but also massacres, bloodshed and mayhem: Wars and rumors of wars. His secret melody is really "the music of the spheres" a very poetic and understandable notion that originated in Ancient Greece(perhaps with Pythagoras), and which some relatively modern scientists, such as Kepler, were obsessed with, reformed to fit the discoveries of modern science.-Ultimately, Thuan, like Einstein, cannot bring himself to believe that our world evolved by chance. His argument is basically, though he denies it, a first cause argument heavily disguised. The orderliness of our world is caused by the secret melody. But what caused that? And what was the cause of what caused that? etc etc etc And what, by the way, is the evidence for a "secret melody" or "music of the spheres" to begin with beside man's mystical aesthetic experience. These are ideas scientists eschewed long ago as, well, not scientific. There is an invidious whitewash of the darker side of human nature in all of this which one would think one glance at the last hundred years of human history would warrant at least some taking account of. But to Thuan, as to Browning, "God's in his Heaven an all's right with the world." At times, considering the things men have done to each other, one is glad to be informed that in a few million years our Sun will expand and burn any humanity left to a crisp, thus ending the atrocities (as well as the beauty Thuan is so enraptured with of course)that man has perpetrated and created.-Ultimately, Thuan cannot bring himself to consider honestly what the great British scientist and philosopher J.B.S. Haldane pointed out: that not only is the universe stranger than we imagine. It's stranger than we CAN imagine.-Thuan takes the anthropic view, that the universe was created for the beauty enjoyed by us. This is terribly unscientific and egotistical. As Bertrand Russell pointed out, we are told that evolution from the earthworm to man constitutes "progress." But nobody has asked the earthworm his opinion on the subject.
March 10, 2001

Wonderful Cosmology

The author, T.X. Thuan--with the mind of a scientist and the heart of a poet--has been called the 'Carl Sagan of France" for his lucid science writing. No wonder this book is such a beautiful overview of contemporary cosmology! Unmarred by the weak writing style, materialist reductionism, or scientific arrogance that plagues other, more popular authors (Gribbin, Davies, Smolin), this book presents an eye-opening tour of contemporary scientific cosmology that is a real pleasure to read. This popular work is written with clarity, charm and erudition, along the lines Timothy Ferris' works. He suggests there is an underlying divinity--the "Melody" of the title--not a wind-up deity but instead an emergent wholeness. Materialists will read every line in a book and, not finding the plot any where, conclude that there is none. But its only a secret because you have to listen. This is a marvelous book and I loved reading it. And afterwards, you'll look forward to his new book, too!
September 22, 2000

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