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Bergson juxtaposes intelligence, instinct, intuition and invention; this discussion is intriguing and enjoyable. He believes, like everyone, that homo sapiens is the eventual, final result of evolution. Ultimately, he wants to connect life's evolution and human consciousness, both motivated by the same élan vital — a fluid concept, he would admit. As paraphrased by philosopher Mathilde Tahar, élan vital "points to a reality that is more than matter, but only exists through matter." Bergson writes, "...It does not follow that chemistry and physics will ever give us the key to life."

In his time, science was considered infallible and inescapable. But science is always incomplete, because there is always more to know. And science can be led astray by hubris and unexamined assumptions. These problems crippled the theory of evolution. (They still do.) Thus disadvantaged, Bergson's best ideas are intuitive. He doubts that life follows a prescribed plan, but if it does, "complete execution of it may be put off to a distant future or even indefinitely." I like to think that élan vital is the plan —the programming carried in genetic molecules and expressed by life— of which only a fraction has been executed on Earth. With a material basis not explained by mere chemstry and physics, this understanding restores the enchantment of life. If we could reincarnate Bergson with today's knowledge, he might approve.

Now a new biography is published, Herald of a Restless World, by Emily Herring. His life story is vividly told, although the book is "not an introduction to his philosophy," Herring notes. Still, I learned plenty. Bergson's early preoccupation was a concept of time that he named durée. Later, he disagreed with Einstein about a way to reconcile their understandings of time. A pacifist by nature, Bergson helped to convince Woodrow Wilson to declare war on Germany in 2017. He was a mesmerizing lecturer, with a huge following in his heyday. The biography is well-researched and -written, and quite informative about philosophy and culture at a time very different from today.

In 1907, Bergson published Creative Evolution. At that time, evolution was still taught as history. The idea that life needed very complex instructions, too small to see, was only suspected. DNA was unknown. No, Bergson's élan vital was an immaterial force driving evolution, but also explaining heroism, social or technological progress, and even astronomical processes. Meanwhile, the theory of evolution required its advocates to explain things like laughter and music in terms of their survival value. Bergson was not exempt.

Rovelli's history of science, ranging from Pythagoras and Parmenides to Schrödinger and Einstein, is affirming, but slightly too optimistic for me. (Occasionally, theories need discarding.) With wide scholarship, he believes that science can prosper without religion, and he speculates about the origin and pervasiveness of religion. Overall, it's a very readable review of the history of western scientific thought. I especially enjoy the boldness and clairvoyance of some early scientists.

Admittedly, it's not my area. I have never understood exactly what "the problem of consciousness" is. May I innocently suggest that human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, ultimately, of our genetic programming. This allows us to place consciousness on a separate analytical plane from that of the human body, without denying strict materialism. For an analogy, the programming underlying Conway's Game of Life yields a rich taxonomy of scurrying and flying screen images, yet these would be he impossible to anticipate from even a complete understanding of the programming.

Actually, Nagel briefly considers this, yet he prefers a more radical view. Perhaps [conscious states] are emergent, relative to the properties of atoms or molecules. But if they are not, this view would imply that the fundamental constituents of the world, out of which everything is composed, are neither physical nor mental but something more basic. I'm too conservative for that. Still, Nagel is thought-provoking and knows his subject.

Both books acknowledge that QT is incomplete. Whereas Kay thinks the underlying philosophy is entirely nonsensical, Carroll only admits that QT is puzzling. But, as he amply demonstrates, it works! The theory of evolution has the opposite crisis. The underlying philosophy — neo-darwinian mutation and selection — is clear enough, but it doesn't work!

Kay advocates a speculative research avenue to restore clarity and logic to the subject. He starts by noticing another medium that also exhibits both wave and particle phenomena simultaneously, called hydrodynamic quantum analogues (HQA). It would be a return to the "pilot-wave" theory of DeBroglie and Bohm. I entrely support imaginative exploration of this sort, but I did not carefully follow his endorsement of this model. It reminded me of an analogy with gears and vortices of James Clak Maxwell's, when he was a student. For quantum theory, I suspect that the historical success of both wave and particle physics may have blinded us to an underlying physical reality that requires radically new concepts and vocabulary.

For history of quantum theory, Kay is excellent. He also digresses to other subjects where science went wrong, such as the phlogiston theory, where he writes, "Because fake problems are hard to solve, the way out is to drop them." I thought immedately of today's theory of evolution, where the hardest questions — how did this or that genetic program originate? — apparently have been dropped.