Heralded for its readability and scholarship, The Fire In The Equations offers a fascinating discussion of scientific discoveries and their impact on our beliefs. The book's title is derived from Dr. Stephen Hawking's pondering. "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" Originally published in 1995, it provides an excursion through new theories of quantum physics and cosmology, ranging from the nature of time, the Big Bang, the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics, laws of nature and their possible relation to God, chaos theory, black holes, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, particle physics, Darwin's theory of evolution and the role of God in all these equations, it even raises such questions as "how God might answer prayers" from the point of view of physics. While she gives no absolute answers, Kitty Ferguson takes the reader through a world of paradoxes and improbabilities, explaining how it is possible to believe both in a pre-determined universe and in free will as a theory of human behaviour. She concludes that what we know about science doesn't necessarily make God inevitable, but doesn't rule God out either.

Reviews

"Ferguson is by turns whimsical, poetic, reverent, theological and authentically speculative in her study, which could be used as a wonderful text for any group or classroom wanting to think in a deeply interdisciplinary way about the body, the soul, the spirit and their relation to the laws of the universe."