Important Things

"What was life? No one knew.It was undoubtedly aware of itself,so soon as it was life;but it did not know what it was."Thomas MannThe Magic Mountain (1924) In June 2024, while working my way through Thomas Mann's seemingly interminable novel The Magic Mountain (a project started six weeks earlier), I encountered his multipage discourse on "life." It left me astonished. One hundred years earlier, in 1924, Mann eloquently presented the fundamental questions about life that we are confronting 100 years later: the enormity of the chasm between life and inanimate matter, the mysteries of the cell, the nature of consciousness, the source of matter, the origin of life, as well as the question "What is Life? ". (For context, Irwin Schrödinger's revolutionary small book, "What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell" appeared in 1944.) This got me thinking that I did not do the matter justice in my book Important Things We Don't Know or in the addendum Imaginings. In addition, I had written quite a bit about these issues in my last Wanderings book, Disappointments. So, I decided to adapt the relevant essays from Disappointments, add new material and produce a second addendum, organized around some of the more striking excerpts from Mann's dissertation. This is the result, now updated and expanded.

These essays are on topics reflecting the intersection of science and humankind. They concern time, consciousness, beauty, probability, and understanding. They supplement and compliment my book Important Things We Don't Know: About Nearly Everything and are presented here as an accompaniment to that book. But, this volume can stand on its own. For several years, I periodically updated Important Things. But, I decided to leave the last edition as the last. Nonetheless, I keep reading and thinking. So, I have been writing short essays on scientific subjects and including them in my Wanderings books. There are now enough that I thought it worth making them (updated and revised-in some cases, very substantially), along with some new ones, separately available as an addendum to the original book. This is the second edition, revised and updated.