The subtitle of The Romance of Reality gives a sense of its scope and premise: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. A key goal, writes the author, Bobby Azarian, is to argue against the view that life is an unlikely accident that may have emerged only once on one tiny speck in a vast universe, and that it is certain to disappear as the universe’s free energy dissipates in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. He argues that while such a conclusion had for several generations seemed to be the destination to which clear-headed scientific exploration had brought mankind, it is turning out to conflict with more recent scientific thinking. The ideas behind Romance, he says, have been emerging as scientists probe questions about interpreting quantum mechanics, making sense of space and gravity, and explaining consciousness. We would be scientifically justified, he argues, in thinking of intelligent life as an essentially inevitable property of our universe, and in believing that the universe is destined to be filled with sentience.

Building on Carl Sagan’s metaphor of intelligent life as a way for the universe to see and understand itself, Azarian urges us to see the stages through which the universe has evolved, to the point at which we humans can look out at the cosmos and reconstruct its history, as akin to the way that an individual emerges from dreamless sleep into wakefulness and awareness of the world around them. The universe cooled after the Big Bang, went through transitions toward star formation, “cooked up” heavier atoms in later stages of stars’ life cycles, assembled molecular precursors of organic molecules on billions of planets, gave birth to strands of self-replicating proteins, then further evolved unicellular, then eukaryotic, and........

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