Published by the Harvard Faculty and Fellows, as a tribute both to the writer and his stunning accomplish- ment of joining two traditionally conceived as strictly unconnected fields, science and religion, GODʻSʻ PLANET is a Harvard Astro-physicistʻs exposition of "intelligent life," in scientific terms and how it is endowed by human consciousness reflecting upon itself, as such, by faith, another form of the intelligent lifeʻs self. The writerʻs deeply abiding Mennonite rich faith carries an integrity of his scientific faith and knowing to a stunninngly SIMPLE, ERUDITE, ELEGANT, LUCID, and COMPREHENSIVE UNDERSTANDING OF
E=MC square. Gingerich does not engage Christian faith, but the concept and act of faith itself, which he claims is a part of the intelligent life in E=Mc square. Rarely does one see a book published by the Harvard Faculty and Fellows, as though both are making personal statements of its excellence of scholarship and literary facility -- the tone never rises to a plea, never descends to an argument, for it is a rational exposition throughout. Outstanding is the simplicity both of the scientific and religious expositions by reason so that even the faith of the equation is not naked in spirit from its body. Gingrich, we learn, was born in a place called Goshen, a Mennonite town in Iowa, went to school in Indiana, and graduated from Harvard, retained by Harvard for teaching and retired from Harvard, at which time he was asked to deliver an address on the formidable double ranging subject as one to a little known group, consisting of Christians testifying as Scientists and Scientists testifying as Christians in little known Gordon College, Mass., deep in the New England woods along weedy byways perhaps. Everything about the groupʻs enterprise is small, simple, direct, and integrity laden, like a school of scientific scholars who carry their reasoning by questions from the smallest particles to the evolving future ascribed, because the product is intelligent and living, to an Intelligence that the mathematician Roger Penrose phrases as a question "Is the Universe Conscious" in THE EMPEROR HAS A NEW MIND. The tenor of the writing of this astoundingly lucid, choicely worded, simple account
is like that of the better known Amish and Quakers -- profoundly quiet. Gingerich is a retired Professor of Astrophysics and the History of Science. In this book, he is a man of abiding faith in the search for public knowledge in science and the recognition, by home rule that is the personal spirit of life, in faith in what Gingerich calls GOD and many others call Spirit. This book is a modern version of John Bunyanʻs Pilgrimʻs Progress; but it is not an allegory. It is a genuine scientific discourse, in writing, on the Spirit part of the Body that is, with the quarks and atoms of natural bodies that visibly and less than visibly but knowably whirl in space/time, a veritable body that does the same out of the Consciousness that Roger Penrose
suggests out of his displays, in his calculations and by cubes, the mathematical reason and beyond reason parts of the Existing Intelligent Life equation that Gingerich expounds in simple sentences..

This book is a Classic. It is iconoclastic. Yet you would never hear a pin drop. It is profound. ( )