"Something Deeply Hidden" by Sean Carroll (2019)

The book urges---science teaches--to go through life shedding prejudice, seeking a more convenient basis for one's representations, and deconstructing emergent phenomena into their constituent parts. Science (at least on fast forward and with Sean Carroll's voice at 1.25x) reads as a suspense story, which happens to be true, where "true" stands for "critically appraised."

Truth is not a necessary ingredient for entertainment; a certain amount of internal consistency is. One could imagine public support a theory (or a political candidate) on the false equivalence stemming from the sentiment evoked by good entertainment, a sense of poetry, a sense of mystery, the immensity of the starring phenomena, and a granting of trust.

The cast of the book's characters includes free will, volition attributed to a system that one can predict only imperfectly; Everett's many worlds, which ferry animate and inanimate observers along deterministic timelines; particles that do not really exist, in a space that is an emergent (pixelated?) at best; the initially modest entropy; and time, which can only be recovered from the readings of a clock hidden on each page of an indubitably real manuscript scattered all over the floor.

The surprise chapter 8, in the dialogue form, is a fantastic interlude, bound to be imitated, even by the classics.