Despite his materialist point of view on things, this book makes for a very captivating read. Even when he drags the reader into doing some math with Quantum mechanics as a background—which is where I kind of got lost in a haze—he keeps the reader's full attention. Once that chapter reaches its end, to the reader's relief, Jim hits you with String Theory and M-Theory. He states that no one knows what the M stands for, but I suspect the nerdy trekky M classifaction given to hospitable planets to be the culprit. He ends the book on The Persistent Illusion, ripping from a well-known Einstein quote.
Upon telling us that we have come full circle and we realize we know nothing more than when we began, he says this little point of wisdom.
You might be concerned that here, on page 238, we appear to have come full circle. You shouldn't feel cheated, however. If you take reality for granted without understanding why you believe in it, then you are what philosophers call a "naïve realist." Having made it this far, you are no longer naïve.
So is this review real? Is the book real? According to Jim Baggott we’ll never really know. A Beginner’s guide to Reality admits that we are stuck in Plato’s cave learning the many ways to skin Schrödinger’s cat. But we had fun learning it.
I give it a 0100 out of 1000
Edited: PC
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