The Everlasting Wonder of Being: How a Cold Cosmos Kindles the Glow of Consciousness

How we went from quanta packages to the laughter of children on a summer afternoon.

In his poetic ode to the wonder of life, the physicist Richard Feynman gasped at our improbable inheritance as “atoms with consciousness” — a lovely phrase that in so few words intimates the immense superstructure of matter and meaning, the way in which the austere realities of the physical universe undergird the warm loveliness of all that makes us human: love, art, wonder, beauty, Bach. There can be no genuine...