The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design by Leonard Susskind

  (out of 5 stars)

Physicist Leonard Susskind weighed in on his support for string theory in 2005 with The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. A book with high goals and, from me personally, high expectations, Landscape falls quite flat from the very beginning and only occasionally rises to a point worth mentioning.

I was familiar with the public debate between Susskind and fellow physicist Lee Smolin (author of three books on physics, including his latest: The Trouble With Physics) over the concept known as the anthropic principle. Susskind, very much in favor of anthropic solutions, favors the weak anthropic version, which holds that our universe allows life only because of the existence of a multiverse which offers an overwhelming number of opportunities to get the "details" of physics right. However, I really expected Susskind to dig deeply into the notion of Intelligent Design as it related to religious faith in a specific Creator of the cosmos. However, rather than address this far more common meaning of "Intelligent Design" directly, Susskind spends chapter after chapter meandering through physics fundamentals and pleading with the reader to see how string theory and its multiverse predictions are not just reasonable but "solidly grounded" in research.

Having read a great deal of physics books and knowing many of the arguments for and against string theory, the anthropic principle, and cosmological intelligent design, I found Susskind's treatment and defense of his stance to be disappointing and muddled. The reader is left with a great deal of missing steps in his thinking, and like many string theorists, Susskind assumes the reader will accept that string theory and a multiverse system are facts from which to explore the issues. However, Susskind never establishes just why the reader should make these assumptions, and it leaves a lot of hollow ground hindering his argument.

Combined with the lack of any real attack on the "illusion of intelligent design", this sort of writing is a let down for me. I like Susskind and have watched many of his panel discussions where he is both thoughtful and clear. However, I've also watched a few of his seminars and, unfortunately, this book reads much more like his rambling, at times incoherent lectures than it does his focused and insightful panel debates. Three stars and only recommended for curious physics readers wanting to get Susskind's arguments first hand.