
Now, let’s be honest – at some time or another, we’ve probably all felt we had this weird thing called life, all figured out, only to be slapped down and reminded what specks of nothingness we really were in this great cosmos. Well, Brett Ashcroft Harrison not only thinks he knows the meaning of life and indeed the origins of life, he’s gone and written it all down in a book – HUMANS: From Nothing to Now. Harrison doesn’t hold back anything; this truly is the everyman’s definitive guide to the Theory of Everything. The author takes us from the tiny dot that contains everything and nothing that was the beginning of our Universe all the way through to why we are here, what our role is in the cosmos and what the future may hold for us. The point to note here is that Harrison has no pretensions to being a theoretical physicist, or a Stephen Hawking – he is actually a design engineer and yet he has created this amazing Theory of Everything, that if nothing else, is worth reading, just for the sheer balls of the author to challenge the existing scientific status quo.
I admit, Physics was never my forte at school and I found myself totally at sea with some of Brett Ashcroft Harrison’s explanations as to how the Universe was formed. I know he tried hard to put things in layman’s terms, but much of that still went straight over this reader’s head (It’s okay – I don’t understand the Big Bang Theory, either). I found the second half of the book to be more engaging on a personal level than the first. The author’s description of the purpose of humanity and the individual’s role within that purpose drew on some concepts I was familiar with and agreed with, but other aspects really challenged my thinking and made me look deeper at my own motivations, which I’m sure was the general purpose. HUMANS: From Nothing to Now is well worth the effort of reading. We should always be looking for other, plausible theories on life and this is an interesting view on Everything by one man.
