Essays on Balance is a collection of thirty-three essays that explores possible answers to that one guiding question: Why is the world the way it is? Split into two parts, it explores first the most fundamental questions about the workings of nature-energy, entropy, time, space, change, life, and the universe-and it investigates them in a way that both laypersons and experts will enjoy reading. In the second part, considerations about human nature are explored as they relate to the self, the collective self, virtue and vice, religion, politics, free will, good and evil, and the concept of...