This is a trippy, wild and ultimately enjoyable ride of a book, one that makes a mockery of Goodreads star system, as I could have easily given it 2 stars or 5 stars - it's a collection of ideas thrown out surrounded by anecdote and with passion, and often without systematisation or thorough refutation of critics.

Reading it, I kept being reminded of the writings of medieval scholars like Giordano Bruno - it has that feel of heady mix of philosophy and science that defies any attempts to keep religion apart, and is driven by a passion to look at the world through a different lens.

All of this is one way to say I have no idea if Lanza is a genius or a madman, the-only-one-who-sees or the-one-who-cant-see-the-obvious - but I think if you are trying to work that out, then you are denying yourself a treat. The book demands you consider the impossible, and in doing so, you can step to Lanza's side for a moment, and glimpse this pulsating world as he sees it, inextricably entertwined with our conciousness, not for us, but by us. It's a fascinating shift to make.

The book's thesis is actually pretty simple - it's padded out with outrage about the direction of modern theoretical physics and wonderfully written if frequently-too-perfect-to-be-true anecdotes about Lanza's life. (The stories are important, they are both illustrative and representative of how Lanza draws his worldview from all inputs around him, refusing the typical 'objectivity' or isolation of science.) Anyway, his thesis: that the reason physics tells us that the world doesn't exist until observed is because, well, it doesn't exist until observed, by a never-defined 'consciousness', which may be one or many. Until then, it simply remains a series of possibilities, which is to say, it doesn't exist. Lanza views existence as created through interaction, without a conscious being to interact with, there is simply nothing there.

Lanza spends a fair bit of time explaining the evidence for this in quantum physics, and is not above criticising the greats in doing so, but really his basic contention is that Science has found this so unbelievable that it has gone to enormous lengths to come up with alternate suggestions, ones which preserve an 'objectively existing' universe.

I kinda loved reading the book, and not really because I think Lanza is right. I distrust any grand theory, and this is absolutely in that category. The evidence is also a little thinner than the enthusiasm, although Lanza's strongest ground is that physics is actually pretty crazy, and no-one's theories really make much sense outside mathematical modelling. But I loved the book simply for Lanza's courage to seek a worldview in a holistic sense, barging through philosophy, religion and the basic tenets of capital-S-science to do so, and even drawing simply on the way the world feels on a still morning near a lake. I am highly skeptical these days of the lines, the rules, that are drawn around science, as if it exists in a vacuum from the world we live in, as if peer review eliminates human bias and perception, and as if religious/philosophical ideas can be isolated somehow from paleontology or evolutionary biology, or even theoretical physics. By denying the assumptions, the worldviews, the concern over implications of this, we denude science, make it weaker, than if we acknowledged that our understanding of the world has many inputs, and they all impact each other.

In short, I admire the Brunos, the Abelards, the al-Farghanis not because they challenged 'religion' but because they argued for the right to draw on all the tools at their disposal to understand the world and how it worked. There are moments when Lanza, drawing on biology and physics, and in demanding that taken together, they insist we look at the world through a different lens, invokes this spirit of pushing orthodoxy back so we can *see* differently. That's a kind of science we could use a little more of, even if I'd like it with a little more detail and a little less skimming over the contradictory bits