This is a book review of The Whole Truth: A Cosmologist's Reflections on the Search for Objective Reality by P. J. E. Peebles.
The Whole Truth: A Cosmologist's Reflections on the Search for Objective Reality*, by P. J. E. Peebles (Princeton University Press), 2022. Pp. 264, 22.7 × 14.7 cm. Price £18.99 (paperback , ISBN 978 0 691 23137 2).
Chapters 3 and 6 are more compact summaries of cosmology as found in other books by Peebles. The first two and chapter 7 are relevant summaries of the history and philosophy of physics from the point of view of a physicist; my guess is that most working physicists agree with Peebles when he concludes, in spite of or perhaps because of knowledge of other ideas among philosophers, that something like objective reality exists and it is the job of physicists to study it. As always, I am always happy when a real scientist is critical of Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts (pp. 30--32), which I see as at best a caricature of the way science actually works. In several recent reviews I've complained about authors who should know better getting basic concepts in cosmology wrong; I can recommend Peebles's clear and detailed explanation of the Hubble-Lemaître law (pp. 92--93). In my of Peebles's Cosmology's Century, I wrote that Peebles only briefly mentioned the flatness problem, although he did much to popularize it. There is an entire section (6.4) on that and closely related topics here, presenting, in my view, a much more balanced approach. Peebles himself writes: "You win some, you lose some."