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# | cover | title | author | isbn | isbn13 | asin | num pages | avg rating | num ratings | date pub | date pub (ed.) | rating | my rating | review | notes | recommender | comments | votes | read count | date started | date read |
date purchased | owned | purchase location | condition | format | ||
| 9781107074064
| 4.00
| 12
| Nov 01, 2014
| Nov 30, 2014
As you can see from my reviews of his last two books, I am a fan of Lee Smolin, so it pains me to say that this one was a major disappointment. It pai
As you can see from my reviews of his last two books, I am a fan of Lee Smolin, so it pains me to say that this one was a major disappointment. It pains me even more to explain why, but having started I suppose I have to continue. The book lists two authors on the cover, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin, and it has an unusual structure. It starts with a co-written introduction of about 20 pages; then there is a section of about 350 pages, written by Unger; after that, a section of about 150 pages, written by Smolin; and finally a cowritten section of about 20 pages, where the authors list their disagreements. Given my stated admiration for Smolin, you will already see one obvious reason for my unhappiness, namely that he isn't getting enough screen time. Unfortunately, this is far from being the worst problem. The central themes of the book, as the title suggests, are ambitious. The two authors, who can reasonably claim to be leading experts on philosophy and physics respectively, argue that science has lost its way in confronting the fundamental issues in cosmology. They give reasons to believe that the methods which have worked so well in understanding parts of the universe break down when applied to the universe as a whole, and outline a new way of approaching these ideas. The central notion is what they call "the reality of time". Contrary to what we have been taught since Einstein's introduction of relativity at the beginning of the last century, Unger and Smolin tell us that it does, in fact, make sense to think about an absolute, real time which applies all over the universe and defines a global notion of simultaneity. Accepting this revolutionary proposition opens the door to all kinds of interesting consequences. In particular, it means that one can discuss the possibility that physical laws may themselves be part of the universe and not fixed, that there may have been other universes before this one, and that quantum mechanics could just be an emergent consequence of a deeper theory. Many people will no doubt think that the above sounds fascinating, and if so I agree with them: it is fascinating, and even if it's wrong it asks so many interesting questions that it's absolutely worth reading. The problem is that most of it appeared in Smolin's last book, Time Reborn, which was published less than two years before The Singular Universe. There is a huge overlap between the two books, and where they differ it is usually not to the later one's advantage. In particular, and I'm afraid I have to be blunt here, I thoroughly disliked Unger's section, which as noted occupies a good two-thirds of the text. Unger is widely reputed to be a very smart guy, so I assume that what he is trying to do stylistically is set up a fugue-like pattern in which various leitmotifs constantly recur in different combinations. But this is a hard act to pull off at the best of times, and he doesn't succeed: it comes across as interminably repetitious and dull, and one often suspects that he lacks a deep understanding of the physical concepts he refers to. Well before the end, I was groaning with frustration and counting the pages until I got to Smolin. Smolin's section is indeed much better, and he is his usual lucid, provocative self. But again, the greater part seems to be recycled, and it reads as though it had been written very quickly. One of the most obvious indications of this is a staggering piece of carelessness: the references, which, atypically for this kind of book, are given as numbers in square brackets, do not match up with the bibliography, and it can be quite difficult to track things down. This is simply unforgivable in a publisher like Cambridge University Press. Worse, the new material which has been included is often rather weak. What could have been an exciting account of how Smolin and his collaborators have started investigating the notion of mutable physical laws is presented in a form so compressed and cryptic that it more resembles a set of rough notes than proper chapter text, and I was anything but convinced by the attempt to explain how mathematical concepts could be part of the normal, physical universe. Yes, postulating a separate Platonic universe which they inhabit does seem to get into nasty metaphysical territory; but, at least as far as I can see, the converse proposition, that mathematical concepts are time-bound, creates at least as many metaphysical problems, just different ones. Are we supposed to put a temporal operator before a statement like "2+2=4"? And if not, in what sense are the concepts temporal? Unusually for Smolin, it came across as no more than hand-waving. The one part I unreservedly liked was an up-to-date summary of Smolin's "cosmic evolution" scenario, which boldly postulates that black holes create new universes and that the apparent fine-tuning of our own universe is actually optimized for black hole production; there was some nice stuff on possible experimental tests. But it's not enough to justify a 550 page book. Well, I don't really know what went wrong here, though it's easy to speculate. Bottom line: don't read this, read Time Reborn instead. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Feb 10, 2015
| Feb 17, 2015
Feb 10, 2015
| Hardcover
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| 1
| Aug 09, 2009
| Aug 09, 2009
I thought I would never need a shelf called 'ya', but this book convinced me I was wrong.
| Notes are private!
| none
| Jan 25, 2015
| Jan 25, 2015
Jan 25, 2015
| ebook
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| 9780452287860
| 4.05
| 262
| 2005
| Sep 26, 2006
Casting around for a good way to explain what an excellent book this is, I realize that I can say it very concisely: in an approachable but still quit Casting around for a good way to explain what an excellent book this is, I realize that I can say it very concisely: in an approachable but still quite responsible manner, it tells you everything you need to know about the Standard Model of Particle Physics to be able to understand the equation on the famous CERN T-shirt. Well, that was my best shot. If you aren't convinced now, you never will be. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Dec 28, 2014
| Dec 29, 2014
Dec 28, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9781420926996
| 3.87
| 9,225
| 1748
| Jan 01, 2006
I had seen so many references to Hume's Enquiry that I almost thought I had read it; but, when I actually got around to opening the book, I found as u
I had seen so many references to Hume's Enquiry that I almost thought I had read it; but, when I actually got around to opening the book, I found as usual that things were not quite as I had imagined. I was not surprised by his relentless scepticism, or by his insistence on basing all reasoning on empirical evidence. These qualities, after all, have become proverbial. I was, however, surprised to find that I hadn't correctly grasped the essence of his argument concerning the nature of knowledge. In case you are as poorly informed as I was, let me summarise it here. Hume's position is wonderfully simple. He asks what grounds we have for supposing that multiple repetitions of an experiment justify us in inferring a necessary law. If we note, on many occasions, that hot objects burn our hands when we touch them, what logical reason do we have for assuming that we should not touch the next candle flame we happen to see? The answer is that we have no logical grounds at all for making such an inference. Of course, as a matter of observed fact, we do assume, after a small number of trials, that touching hot objects will hurt us. Hume says this is nothing to do with logic; we are simply designed in such a way that we cannot help being influenced by our experience to adopt such rules. As he points out, many other living creatures do the same. It is impossible to believe that a dog or a horse is performing any kind of logical deduction when they learn to avoid touching naked flames. They simply acquire the habit of behaving in this way. The most economical explanation of what we see is that human beings are doing the same thing. A mountain of discussion has accumulated since Hume published his book, and it would be presumptuous of me to give my opinions when so many extremely clever people have already done so. I am, however, struck by something I have noticed in the course of my professional career. I have worked in Artificial Intelligence and related subjects since the early 80s, and during that period the field has suffered a profound change. In 1980, most AI research was related to logic. People assumed that the notion of intelligence was in some essential way based on the notion of deduction. Making machines intelligent was a question of making them capable of performing the right kinds of logical inferences. This tempting approach was, unfortunately, a resounding failure. Somewhere towards the end of the last century, a different way of looking at things started to become fashionable, and quickly gained ground. Instead of thinking about logic, people began more and more to think about probability. They collected data and extracted various kinds of statistical regularities. The new AI systems made no attempt to think logically; their decisions were based on associations acquired from their experience. At first, the AI community was scornful, but it was soon found that "data-driven" systems worked quite well. They made stupid mistakes sometimes; but so did the logic-based systems, and the mechanical logicians tended to make more stupid mistakes. They could reason, but they had no common sense. Today, data-driven systems have taken over the field, and the approach has been shown to work well for many problems which had once been considered impossible challenges. Particularly striking successes have been notched up in machine translation, speech recognition, computer vision, and allied fields. If David Hume came back today, I have no idea whether he'd be offered a chair at a philosophy department. But I'm fairly sure that Google would be interested in hiring him. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Nov 08, 2014
| Nov 13, 2014
Nov 14, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780198245360
| 3.97
| 343
| 1751
| Jun 12, 1975
Reviewed in two halves: Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals I thought this edition was quite nice, a Reviewed in two halves: Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals I thought this edition was quite nice, and if you appreciate footnotes in Latin and Greek you will no doubt like it even more than I did. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Nov 08, 2014
| Nov 19, 2014
Nov 08, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780316563253
| 3.93
| 68
| Mar 30, 1978
| May 30, 1988
I spent Monday and much of Tuesday suffering from toothache, but luckily my dentist gave me an immediate appointment and amoxicillin is very effective
I spent Monday and much of Tuesday suffering from toothache, but luckily my dentist gave me an immediate appointment and amoxicillin is very effective. As soon as I started to feel better, it occurred to me to wonder just why toothache is so painful. Okay, it's dangerous, but there are many other conditions that are much worse, up to and including 100% fatal, and hurt much less. Why should that be? I looked around a bit on the web without finding anything useful. So here's a theory that I'd like to run by you. From the point of view of evolutionary psychology, a natural question is what selection advantage there might be to having toothache be so painful. And in fact there is a plausible candidate! Toothache, I argue, is unusual in the following respect: a) it is fairly dangerous, and b) it is often easily treatable by simply removing the offending tooth. People have known how to remove teeth for a long time, plausibly far longer than recorded history. Given these facts, it seems to me that there might well be a positive selection pressure towards experiencing toothache as very painful. The wusses like me will moan and complain about how horrible it is until the people around them can't take any more, and just have to do something to stop it. In contrast, some of the strong, silent types who clench their manly jaws and block out the pain will get blood poisoning and die. Even if this only happens to a modest proportion of the strong, silent types, it's pretty clear which strategy is going to win. Is there any prediction made by the theory which would allow us to test it? Again, to my surprise, the answer is yes. Hardly any animals except humans are smart enough to be able to remove teeth (in fact, I am not sure any animals are that smart), so there should be no corresponding selection pressure. Hence other animals should not experience toothache as being equally painful. Is this true? I'm not sure. A little googling confirms that humans are far from being the only species that suffers from toothache - for example, it's claimed to be a common problem for elderly dogs. But I have spent a reasonable amount of time in the company of elderly dogs, and I've never seen one display the symptoms that in a human would suggest a toothache. Dogs are pretty good at conveying emotion, so I would thought it'd be noticeable. On the other hand, maybe I'm just not enough of a dog person to pick up the cues. I know even less about horses. Does anyone in the amazing Goodreads hive mind have more information? ...more | Notes are private!
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| not set
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Nov 05, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780340055366
| 3.71
| 21
| Jan 01, 1970
| May 01, 1973
Reading Jesse Kraai's novel
a couple of weeks ago, I was once again reminded of the dreadful state that school math teaching has somehow got its
Reading Jesse Kraai's novel
a couple of weeks ago, I was once again reminded of the dreadful state that school math teaching has somehow got itself into. Lisa, a gifted young Aspie chessplayer, is failing most of her classes. Her mentor decides that she should at least be able to handle math, and takes her off to visit a research mathematician he knows. "I need to know how to do the ninety degree triangle theorem," says Lisa sullenly. "What's that?" asks the mathematician, surprised. After a while, he figures out that Lisa means Pythagoras's theorem. She has a bunch of exercises she's supposed to complete, but they make no sense to her. The mathematician isn't interested in teaching her the rules for passing the test; instead, he shows her how you prove Pythagoras's theorem. This is a novel experience for Lisa, who has never seen a mathematical proof. Kraai, unfortunately, isn't making it up. A mathematician friend, who's an expert on geometry, says the situation is beyond belief. After complex negotiations involving mergers between various more or less incompatible courses, US geometry textbooks present an absurd parody of the subject: some of them include as many as a hundred "axioms", while Euclid's original treatment only used five axioms and five postulates. Obviously, this vast superfluity of so-called axioms would not be necessary if kids were taught to prove theorems, but the idea of proof has gone out of style. If you're curious to see how things used to be done, you might want to check out Teach Yourself Calculus, a book I read when I was a geeky pre-teen in the early 70s. It was the closest thing I'd yet seen to a real math text; I absolutely loved it, and I can still remember the content quite well. Instead of forcing you to learn the dumb rules that are driving Lisa and her generation crazy, the author starts off by explaining fundamental principles: rates of change, limits, differentiation, the notion of an integral. He proves everything from first principles, assuming just basic algebra and trig, so you can see where all the mysterious formulas come from. By the time I'd got to the end, I could solve simple differential equations, and I understood what I was doing. I hadn't just picked up some useful skills; I could start to see what math was actually about. Well, these things are always cyclic, and no doubt some cutting-edge educational theorist is at this moment telling people that logical proof is the way to go. It'll probably be back on the syllabus by the time today's pre-teens are sending their own kids to school. But if you're a geeky pre-teen who wants to find out now what real math looks like, do yourself a favor and buy a used copy of Teach Yourself Calculus from biblio.com. It could be the best $2 you ever spend. ...more | Notes are private!
| My
| not set
| Mar 1970
Sep 25, 2014
| Hardcover
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| 9780544272996
| 4.14
| 16,620
| Sep 02, 2014
| Sep 02, 2014
Q: What would happen if every geek in the world received a copy of What If tomorrow morning? A: Actually, less than you'd think. First, a little backgro Q: What would happen if every geek in the world received a copy of What If tomorrow morning? A: Actually, less than you'd think. First, a little background about this book. If you're a geek, it's unputdownable, a word that, if you think carefully, means "cannot be put down". (You may not be aware of this fact, since the word is nearly always misused). So the geek who receives it is going to carry on reading through breakfast, through lunch, while he's supposed to be working, and on through dinner, ignoring the non-geek guests who have come to visit. He'll interrupt conversations every now and then to ask things like "Could you build a bridge across the Atlantic out of Lego bricks?" or "How close would you need to be to a supernova to be killed by the neutrino flux?". He'll finish just as the last guest leaves. There is a common myth, most likely spread by geeks, that what they do is somehow pretty important to Western civilization. If you're easily impressed by this kind of propaganda, you might expect that markets will crash as geek traders neglect their buy signals, nuclear experiments will explode as geek scientists look away from their control panels, and terrorists will strike with impunity as geek intelligence analysts fail to turn up for work. All that sounds pretty bad. But let's stop and consider for a moment. Is any of the above geek behavior novel or unpredictable? Hardly. Geeks are always doing this kind of thing, and society has learned to work around them. Important as they may be in the long run, there's always some dependable non-geek person ready to step in just in case the geek in question has stayed up all night playing Halo or watching a Star Wars marathon. The non-geek will cover for them until the geek has got over their fifteen hour internet speed-chess session and is ready to do whatever it is they're actually being paid to do. So delivering a copy of What If to every geek in the world will only really have two important effects. It will make a great many geeks very happy, and (assuming of course that the copies are paid for) it will turn Randall Munroe into a billionaire. And who could possibly have anything against that? ...more | Notes are private!
| 1
| Sep 15, 2014
| Sep 16, 2014
Sep 15, 2014
| Hardcover
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| 9780241003442
| 4.19
| 108
| Jan 01, 2014
| Mar 01, 2014
I've finished volume one and now I'm dying to find out what happens next. Talk about a cliffhanger ending! __________________________________ I must con I've finished volume one and now I'm dying to find out what happens next. Talk about a cliffhanger ending! __________________________________ I must confess that I didn't enjoy the second volume quite as much as the first, but that mainly shows how high the bar was; this is still the best introduction to quantum mechanics I have ever seen, and if you have some mathematical background (linear algebra, calculus) I can't recommend it too highly. It requires some effort to read, but it's definitely worth it. The overall plan is extremely well thought out. Most books on quantum mechanics start off by introducing the quantum versions of position and momentum, so that they can get to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle as quickly as possible. After reading Susskind and Friedman, I am sure this is a mistake. The problem is that we know what position and momentum mean in classical physics, so it's impossible to read about their quantum analogs without thinking that they're basically the same thing. They aren't: quantum mechanics is much weirder and much more interesting, but you don't immediately notice. Instead of taking this tired old road, Susskind chooses a completely different starting-point, the concept of spin. Spin is a truly quantum mechanical concept, which is so different from classical angular momentum that there is no possibility of confusing them. If you've read any quantum mechanics at all, you'll know that spin can be either "up" or "down". But how can this make sense, when you stop and think about it? Surely we need three independent directions, corresponding to the x, y and z axes, rather than two directions which, to make things even more counter-intuitive, are oriented along the same axis? But it does make sense. We start by considering a device that measures an electron's spin. We orient it vertically, and it only ever gives two possible readings: +1, or "up", and -1, or "down". Now we rotate it 90 degrees, so that the two readings instead mean "left" and "right". If the electron was previously in the "up" state, a naive guess might be that we'll now get a zero reading. Wrong! There is no zero reading; we'll get "left" or "right" with equal probability; so "up" must be a combination of "left" and "right", where the two components are in some sense given equal weight. Similarly, when we orient the apparatus along the third axis, we find that "left" and "right" are combinations of "in" and "out". In fact, each of the "up"/"down", "left"/"right" and "in"/"out" pairs can be expressed in terms of any of the others, and there is a simple mathematical way to write down the relationships using matrix algebra and complex numbers. It all works, and you can see why! I was hooked. Forget that stupid cat, which only appears here as the subject of a couple of ironic jokes. This is the right way to do it. ...more | Notes are private!
| Anyone
| Oct 26, 2014
| Nov 2014
Sep 11, 2014
| Hardcover
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| 9780226051963
| 3.88
| 16
| Jan 01, 2013
| Aug 16, 2013
I've spent a fair chunk of my life living in academia, and one thing academics do is go to conferences. I am deplorably familiar with the conference l
I've spent a fair chunk of my life living in academia, and one thing academics do is go to conferences. I am deplorably familiar with the conference life so well described in David Lodge's Small World: you spend a few days hanging out with odd people you don't have a great deal in common with, eating indigestible meals and drinking horrible coffee, and, in between, listening to papers which in most cases are poorly written, badly presented, and give you an irresistible urge to catch up on the sleep you didn't get the night before. It couldn't be more obvious that you're wasting your time and your university's money. And yet, by some magic process that I'm still unable to explain, you fly home, get over your jetlag, and discover to your surprise that you've learned a great deal. Somehow, while you were snoozing through all those dull talks, you've picked up a heap of useful information which will over the next year influence your own research, point you towards interesting things that you'd never thought of reading, and very likely get quoted in your own papers -- which, needless to say, are infinitely superior to all the nonsense that's just been inflicted on you. Reading Pigliucci and Boudry (hereafter P&B) felt rather like attending a virtual conference on the philosophy of pseudo-science, a subject which I'd barely even suspected might exist until I stumbled across their book. The editors have collected together 23 chapters, each about 20 pages long, where a variety of people have been invited to contribute their thoughts on the question of how to distinguish between science and pseudo-science. Given the format, it was inevitable that there would be overlap and repetition, and that some of the papers would be appallingly soporific. And yet, the magic effect has worked again. I don't know how it's happened, but I'm suddenly fascinated by this odd little corner of philosophy. Even more mysteriously, I seem to know a certain amount about it. Why would anyone even want to study such a thing? Isn't it obvious? I mean, uh, scientists are these guys in white coats who use mathematical formulas and put things in test tubes, and pseudo-scientists are crazies who believe in creationism and UFOs and astrology and shit. Right? Well, actually, no. First of all, I was startled to learn that the default position among philosophers of science is that you can't give unambiguous criteria for distinguishing between science and pseudo-science. An influential paper written in 1983 by a guy called Laudan, whom I'd never heard of, had convinced most people that the question isn't even interesting; P&B's book is a reaction to the accepted orthodoxy, intended to reopen the debate. I was even more startled to learn why Laudan had written his paper. There had been a high-profile 1981 case, McLean v Arkansas, which sought to overturn a ruling that so-called "Creation Science" would be taught in Arkansas schools. In order to win the case, the petitioners were obliged to convince the judge that "Creation Science" was not in fact science at all, but religion in disguise, the teaching of which would violate laws on the separation of church and state. The petitioners won, but some philosophers of science were unhappy with their tactics. Laudan argued that "Creation Science" is in fact science, because it makes falsifiable predictions -- a property which many philosophers, following Popper, took as the hallmark of what constitutes science. There's no reasonable doubt about the falsifiability, since virtually all of the predictions made by Creationism have indeed been falsified. So, at least on this argument, it's not pseudo-science, just bad science. But there's no law against teaching bad science, which is why the lawyers in McLean v Arkansas took the line they did. Laudan thought that the expediencies of the case had violated sound philosophical principles. He argued, to many people's satisfaction, that you can't give general grounds for distinguishing between pseudo-science and science; you can only distinguish, on a case-by-case basis, between good science and bad science. In P&B, many, though by no means all, of the contributors argue against Laudan, but it's amazing how slippery the reasoning is. Yes, there's no doubt that some belief systems can safely be labelled pseudo-science. Unless you are willing to hypothesize ubiquitous, all-powerful conspiracies capable of distorting or suppressing any inconvenient fact, there's no way Young Earth Creationism or astrology can possibly be correct. Similarly, if you are at all familiar with the evidence, it is impossible to believe that Newtonian physics and neo-Darwinian evolution are not at least good approximations to what is actually happening in the world. In clear cases of the first kind, the people supporting the "pseudo-scientific" theories are transparently dishonest or deluded, and in clear cases of the second kind it is equally evident that the "scientific" theories are being proposed by honest, hard-working researchers who have a mountain of facts to support their claims. But, unfortunately, the devil is in the detail, and there are so many examples which inconveniently fall in between these two extremes. Nowadays, most people with a scientific world-view consider evolution as a proven fact; but, when you look at the history, it turns out that it was classified as pseudo-science for quite a long time. In the opposite direction, there were several decades when majority opinion considered Freudian psychology as scientific, but most of the people in P&B who refer to it put it in the pseudo-science bin. There is an uneasy reluctance to talk about string theory; it's mentioned as "borderline" a couple of times, and as "science" a couple of times, but no one feels keen to discuss the fact that it fails Popper's test, by not making any obviously falsifiable predictions. One very nice contribution by Schackel considers the ethics of belief, another subject I'd never even heard of. When we say "one ought to believe X", what exactly do we mean? Are we just saying that the weight of the evidence strongly supports X, or are we also taking into account the moral and ethical implications of believing or disbelieving X? Shackel elegantly argues that you can't, in fact, leave morals and ethics out of it; there's no such thing as "objective analysis of the facts". And scientists, as Kuhn has taught us, are very far from immune. They're all driven by their convictions; they have hunches and guesses they want to check out, and they're prepared to write off a certain amount of contrary evidence as misleading noise in the data. But how far can you push this process? Is there a clear line separating the brilliant scientist who doggedly follows his intuition where it leads him, and the crank who won't give up even when the facts are staring him in the face? You want to say that there is, but it's terribly hard to explain where the line goes. Those damn philosophers! When I started the book, I thought I had some answers, and now all I have is a bunch of questions. If you enjoy straightforward, entertaining stuff that leaves you feeling you understand things better, then don't read it. You have been warned. _________________________________ Having now read The Genesis Flood and briefly discussed the issues with one of the editors of this book, I am very doubtful about Laudan's argument that creationism makes falsifiable claims, and is thus bad science rather than pseudoscience. The authors of The Genesis Flood state clearly, many times, that they do not consider it possible for science to say anything definitive about the past, because they believe that the laws of nature were different then; the only way we can gain any certain knowledge of the past is through reliable eyewitness testimony. In the case of the Flood, they go on to say, the only witnesses were Noah, his immediate family, and God, and the only reliable testimony we have is the contents of the Book of Genesis. So there is no way we can falsify a creationist claim. If it turns out that the claim is wildly at odds with our present scientific knowledge, they respond by saying that the laws of nature were different then, so the argument doesn't apply. Which does of course beg the question of why the greater part of The Genesis Flood consists of attempts to try and justify their account in terms of modern-day science - but that is another story. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Sep 29, 2014
| Oct 21, 2014
Sep 07, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780914894025
| 2.67
| 6
| Jan 01, 1976
| Jun 01, 1976
Computers have become so depressingly good at chess that it's nice to see a machine getting it completely wrong every now and then. There was a fine e
Computers have become so depressingly good at chess that it's nice to see a machine getting it completely wrong every now and then. There was a fine example last night in the game between Carlsen (world #1) and Aronian (world #3) at the Sinquefield Cup in Saint Louis. After 51 moves, the players reached the following position, where Carlsen has just moved his king to b4. The computers providing instant commentary on the various chess sites assessed the position as winning for White. He's three pawns up, right? But every strong human spectator quickly saw that Carlsen had blown it, and that the game was now a dead draw. Black just needs to keep his king in front of the h-pawns and his rook attacking the a-pawn from the side, preventing White from activating his rook. If White, as he is doing here, moves his king to protect the a-pawn, Black checks from the side until the White king heads off toward the kingside; then he goes back his first plan of attacking the a-pawn from the side. White's king has nowhere to hide from the sideways checks, since his pawns are all on the edge. Carlsen, stubborn as ever, made Aronian play on for another 33 moves, presumably hoping that he would get sleepy and make an elementary mistake; but nothing happened, and they eventually shook hands. The computers continued to insist the whole time that White was winning. [The Chessbase site has now posted a detailed analysis of the drawing manoeuver here.] ________________________________ Another interesting Chessbase article about chess and computers. As the author says, there is a widespread belief that the incredible advances in the strength of chess engines are solely due to faster hardware. He found an ingenious and dramatic way to test this hypothesis; he took a state-of-the-art program from 2014 and used it to play a short match against a state-of-the-art program from 2006. In order to make the test as tough as possible, he ran the new program on a smartphone and the old one on a fast multicore desktop machine. The difference in processing speed between the two hardware platforms was a factor of 50 in favor of the desktop - but the new program, running on the vastly slower smartphone, trounced the old one 5-1. Impressive! Evidently, it's not just the hardware. ...more | Notes are private!
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| not set
| Jan 1980
Sep 06, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780141976228
| 4.02
| 361
| Jan 01, 2013
| Feb 25, 2014
Of Mice and Men and Generalized Conjugate Momenta They had been walking down the road since daybreak, but now the sun was high enough in the sky that i Of Mice and Men and Generalized Conjugate Momenta They had been walking down the road since daybreak, but now the sun was high enough in the sky that it was starting to get hot, and they were pleased to see the little creek. They stopped and drank some water and splashed some more on their faces. Suddenly, Lenny looked at his friend. "George," he said, "there's somethin' I gotta ask you. Why-- why're we here?" George smiled. "Well," he said. "You know I don't hold with all that church talk. It jest seems to me like we're here to help each other. So, I help you and you--" "No!" said Lenny impatiently. "That's not what I meant! I wanna know why're we here. One minute we was in this, whadja call it, this social-realist novel, and now we're talkin' about physics all day. How come, George?" George shook his head. "You ain't as dumb as you look, Lenny," he said affectionately. "Not much gets past you, do it? Well, here's what I think happened. You got these two guys, Lenny Susskind and George Hrabovsky, and they're fixin' to write a physics text, and they notice their names're just like ours. So they hire us to do a little introduction to each chapter for them. It's honest work, no harm in that. And I think they may've had another reason too. You see, their book comes out of this course that Susskind gave down at Stanford University's night school. He's takin' all the science he's learned and teachin' it to his fellow citizens and helpin' put some of that back into the community. And I think he's hirin' us to say how maybe that's somethin' ol' John Steinbeck woulda liked, and he's showin' his respect to California's great national poet." Lenny seemed to have stopped listening, and his face had that scrunched-up look it had when there was something he didn't understand. "Well, George," he said, "I still don't get it. If we ain't on the farm no more, then how come we still got Curley here?" "Look Lenny," said George, "now you're jest plain mixed-up. That ain't no Curley, that's curly delta! It's like what they call a differential operator. See, what's special 'bout this book is the math. I've seen a slew of pop physics books, and either they got no math or they got too much. To my way of lookin' at things, a physics book with no math don't make no sense. It's like tryin' to bake bread without flour. And you got writers, like ol' Roger Penrose, that throw in too much math. He puts in the equations like he's hangin' them on a Christmas tree, and after a few chapters your eyes skim right past 'em. But these guys do it jest right. They give you an equation when you need an equation, and you look at every x and dot till you understand it." Lenny thought carefully. "Okay, George," he said after a while. "So if Curley ain't here, then I guess Curley's wife ain't here neither?" George smiled. "I knew you'd get it!" he said. "Curley's wife ain't in this story no more than what Curley is. See, what Susskind and Hrabovsky're doin' is real smart. They're explainin' classical mechanics, but they're doin' it in a special way. They start with Newton, and then they do Lagrange and Hamilton, and by the time they get to Poisson Brackets they've almost got you doin' quantum mechanics without you knowin' it. They slide in stuff about symmetries and conservation laws and gauge fields like they was the most natural things in the world, and you jest start thinkin' that way too. I ain't never understood none of that before, but now it seems like plain common sense." Lenny was still deep in thought. "I see, George," he said hesitantly. "So then-- then if Curley's wife ain't here, then I don't need to get shot at the end?" George laughed out loud. "You dope!" he said. "'Course you ain't gonna get shot! Why, everyone's sayin' already that this book's a little masterpiece. There's a whole generation of students what're gonna bless the day they found it and put their copy up on the shelf next to the Feynman." He paused and spat reflectively on the ground. "No, Lenny," he said, "no one's gonna shoot you nor me nor Professor Susskind neither. Leastways, not unless they read The Cosmic Landscape." ...more | Notes are private!
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This recent book has annoyed a good number of people; I started off feeling that way, but by the end I was simply bemused. Curtis White, a 60-somethin
This recent book has annoyed a good number of people; I started off feeling that way, but by the end I was simply bemused. Curtis White, a 60-something professor of English, decides to write a critique of modern science despite knowing absolutely nothing about it. He reads a few pop science bestsellers, then wades right in and spends a couple of hundred pages telling the scientists how they've got everything wrong; his main targets are the New Atheists (Dawkins's The God Delusion, Hitchen's God is Not Great, Krauss's A Universe from Nothing) and some popular writers on neuroscience, of whom the most visible is the disgraced Jonah Lehrer. He has numerous complaints, but the one he keeps coming back to is that modern science, to its great loss, has ignored the tradition of post-Kantian German philosophy, which he claims has been destroyed by analytical philosophy. Well, I hardly know where to start, but here are a couple of the more obvious points that occurred to me. First of all, White seems like an intelligent and cultured man, so why on Earth does he think he can gain even a superficial understanding of what science is about from this absurd reading-list? A scientist might just as well write a critique of literature after having completed Harry Potter, Twilight and the first half of Macbeth. Two of the authors that White takes most to task (Hitchens and Lehrer) aren't even scientists. Second, if White ever does get around to reading some real science, he will find that the central discoveries of 20th century physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, were made by Germans who were very familiar with the philosophical tradition he keeps referring to and integrally based their work on it. A book that might be helpful to consult in this context is Weyl's Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science ; another more recent one is Philosophie de la science contemporaine , by Omnès. It would be easy to go on, but why bother? Professor White, you can do better than this. C- ...more | Notes are private!
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In the comment thread to the review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell which I posted a couple of days ago, much of the discussion has turned on the conc
In the comment thread to the review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell which I posted a couple of days ago, much of the discussion has turned on the concept of martyrdom. Dennett argues that religion is a self-reproducing pattern of behavior (a "meme"), and that a martyr is someone who has been taken over by a meme to the point where he is willing to sacrifice his life for his beliefs. Maybe irrational for the martyr, but perfectly rational from the meme's point of view: the history of religion shows that martyrdom is an effective way for religions to spread. Dennett draws a sharp distinction between science, which he says is rational and fact-based, and religion, which isn't. It seemed to me at the time that this wasn't so clear; even if a given scientific theory may be rational and fact-based, the scientific world-view itself is as arbitrary as a religious one. I happen to approve of rational, fact-based belief systems, but any attempt I make to justify them will presuppose rationality and facts, so my arguments don't add anything. It's as good, or bad, as a religious person justifying their own world-view by telling me it's the Word of God. But there are some objective differences between science and religion, just viewed as behavioral patterns, and one of these is martyrdom. There are very few people in history whom one could reasonably call martyrs to rationality. Socrates looks like a clear example; but who else is there? Of course, we immediately thought of Galileo. The fact of the matter, though, is that Galileo wasn't martyred. He was threatened by the Inquisition, and he backed down. Why? This is perhaps the central issue in Brecht's play. Brecht does not presents Galileo as a particularly admirable human being. He fraudulently passes off the telescope as his own invention in order to improve his financial position, he ruins his daughter's life by his thoughtless behavior towards her fiancé, and, finally, he exhibits simple cowardice when confronted by the enraged Pope Urban VIII. Even as a scientist, he is by no means above reproach: in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, his most important work, the central plank of his argument to demonstrate the movement of the Earth rests on an explanation of the tides which is simply wrong. Feyerabend, in Against Method, takes pleasure in making him look like a bungler and near-charlatan, and annoyed many scientists by witnessing against him when the Vatican reopened the case in the late 20th century. But despite all this, Galileo has become one of the most respected people in the history of science, and his influence on its subsequent development is incalculable. In Brecht's version of the story, Galileo doesn't know why he behaves the way he does. His student, learning of the important work on dynamics that he has completed during the last years of his life, wants him to say that he carried out a clever strategic retreat, but Galileo is having none of it. There was no plan; he was just afraid of being tortured. He sounds bitter and sincere. I would be interested to see Dennett's take: from his perspective, the moral of the story is perhaps that memes for rational thought do not spread in the same way as memes for religious conviction. I'm still not sure why that would be, but thinking about this play may help me understand it better. Thank you, Herr Brecht. ...more | Notes are private!
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As people who read books on evolutionary theory will know, mice sometimes exhibit bizarre behavior, fearlessly walking into the waiting jaws of cats.
As people who read books on evolutionary theory will know, mice sometimes exhibit bizarre behavior, fearlessly walking into the waiting jaws of cats. They do this because they have been infected by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which can only reproduce in a cat's digestive tract; the mouse's behavior is thus adaptive, not for the mouse, but rather for the parasite. Dennett uses this as his starting point when discussing the nature of religion. Maybe religions are like T. gondii: they are self-reproducing patterns of human behavior ("memes"), which take over their hosts and make them carry out acts whose main purpose is to further spread the meme. To Dennett, the religious martyr is like a mouse whose brain has been modified by T. gondii. If you are yourself religious, the above may leave you feeling angry and disappointed with the author. This is perhaps not the best reaction, since Dennett (I think, anyway) is genuinely trying to understand the nature of religion without judging it. To him, the meme theory is the only one that makes scientific sense, and throughout the book he stresses that it in no way implies that religion-memes would necessarily harm their hosts. As he says, our bodies contain trillions of non-human cells, many of which are essential to our survival. Religions may be deadly parasites like T. gondii; but they could equally well be as vital to human well-being as our intestinal flora, without which we would be unable to digest our food. And although a Christian will probably be unhappy to hear Christianity called a mind-virus, she may be more willing to stick that label on Scientology or one of the Pacific cargo cults. As long as it isn't a religion you feel any personal affinity with, it does rather seem to make sense; once you're prepared to agree with that, you may reluctantly admit that the distaste and anger you feel when the reasoning is applied to your own religion could just be the meme defending itself. Evidently, an adaptation which discouraged believers from even considering arguments against their religion would be fitness-increasing. Dennett's basic thesis seems perfectly reasonable to me as a starting point for further investigation, but I was disappointed that the greater part of the book was extremely speculative; as evolutionary theorists like to say, it mostly consisted of "just-so stories". Yes, religious ceremonies may have evolved because they improved fidelity of meme-copying, and religions may initially have increased the fitness of the populations that practiced them by helping people make difficult decisions or making them more receptive to medicinal hypnosis; but it seemed to me that these ideas created almost as many difficulties as they resolved, and were not well-supported by empirical data. On the other hand, Dennett is a philosopher, not a scientist, and his business is more to ask questions than to answer them. If he's managed to get people thinking about these issues, maybe he's done all that can be reasonably expected of him. I could end here, but there is one point I kept thinking about that I just have to mention. Dennett discusses religion from a scientific point of view, and cannot avoid the obvious question: maybe science is just another religion? He claims that it isn't, since science is based on empirical analysis of data while religion is not, but I was not entirely satisfied with his response. A scientist's attachment to any particular theory may not be religious; but what about the scientific world-view itself? Why, exactly, should we use facts and rational debate to resolve disagreements? I've just been reading through the Dialogues of Plato, which (at least in my view) constitute one of the important founding documents for the modern scientific outlook. Socrates, a highly sympathetic character, takes nothing for granted and questions everything. He duly dies for his beliefs, and it is hard not to think of him as a kind of martyr to rationality. Why, exactly, is he different in kind from other religious martyrs, except that he is supporting the belief system that I personally happen to like? Aaaargh, Dennett's somehow got me playing his game... I think I've been infected by the religion-as-meme meme! Didn't he say something about welcoming a response? These philosophers are so damn tricky... ___________________________________ It's hard to stop thinking about this book. If Dennett is on the right track, I wondered what other memes there might be that propagated in ways similar to those for religions; to me, the ones that seem to fit best are language, music and poetry. They're all things that spread well and demand extremely faithful copying: as Dennett says, pretty much a sine qua non for a successful meme. But how are these different patterns related? How did the meme-copying adaptation arise, and what memes was it originally being used to transmit? Is it possible that all of these memes started off as the same thing, and only split apart later? It would be nice to come up with some way to find empirical data... ...more | Notes are private!
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Celebrity Death Match Special: Gravity versus Gravity [SANDRA BULLOCK sits listlessly in front of the instrument panel in the Soyuz spacecraft. Slowly, Celebrity Death Match Special: Gravity versus Gravity [SANDRA BULLOCK sits listlessly in front of the instrument panel in the Soyuz spacecraft. Slowly, she adjusts a setting, leans back in her chair and closes her eyes.] BULLOCK: It's hopeless. I mean, how am I supposed to write a book about gravity? I can remember a bit of what I did in my undergraduate courses. Plus what I read in Scientific American. Who'd ever take me seriously? [Tears pour down her perfect cheekbones. Enter THE GHOST OF GEORGE CLOONEY.] CLOONEY: Hey, hey, hey! That's no way to talk. Trust me, you know plenty. Just write it down and they'll love it. BULLOCK: I wish. I don't understand relativity properly and I'm supposed to explain quantum gravity. How's that going to look? I mean, I can't even remember how to derive the formula for the Riemann-- CLOONEY: Baby, you're overthinking it. Put in some stuff to make them laugh, some historical anecdotes-- BULLOCK: Like, Einstein's teacher said he'd never amount to anything? Puh-lease. CLOONEY: Yeah, why not? It's good material. Lots of people don't know that. Newton and the apple. Everyone likes the apple story. BULLOCK: And what about the math? CLOONEY: Come on, you're writing a pop science book. Anything mathematical comes up, don't go into details. Just tell 'em it's complicated. No problem. BULLOCK: But look, I can't-- CLOONEY: Stop thinking tensor calculus. Read my lips: space is like a rubber sheet. I want to hear you say that. BULLOCK: I-- CLOONEY: Say it. BULLOCK: [Defeated] Space is like a rubber sheet. CLOONEY: You got it, baby. Trust me, it's all gonna be fine. [BULLOCK opens her eyes. CLOONEY has disappeared.] BULLOCK: Oh thank God, it was just a dream! [She glances at the incomprehensible Russian labels on the panel, then confidently presses two buttons] This'll be a piece of cake. I'm going home. Match point: Gravity ...more | Notes are private!
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| Dec 03, 1999
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A couple of weeks ago, all I knew about ASL was what I could remember from watching Children of a Lesser God in the 80s (basically: Marlee Matlin is h
A couple of weeks ago, all I knew about ASL was what I could remember from watching Children of a Lesser God in the 80s (basically: Marlee Matlin is hot), plus a sign language joke that a colleague once told me. But we are about to start a new project which is meant to result in a prototype French-to-sign translation system, so I thought I needed to be better informed. I looked around a bit on Google and ended up ordering this book, which I've just finished. Excuse me while I rhapsodize a moment. Wow! ASL, where have you been all my life! I want to learn to sign too! Although I'm afraid to say that, so far at least, I have acquired no practical skills whatsoever, I was fascinated by the overview that Neidel and her colleagues present of ASL linguistics, a new but apparently rapidly growing field. The book is nearly 15 years old, so it may already be out of date; but it's been cited a lot, so hopefully it's had a positive influence and resulted in some progress. It turns out that, at least when the book was written, there was a great deal of disagreement about the most fundamental issues. The authors start by discussing why this might be. First, formal syntacticians have only really been studying the subject since the 70s. Second, linguists, like all scientists, are dependent on their data, and it's difficult to know what information is reliable. It is impossible to write down ASL in a way that captures all the nuances, and Neidel et al repeatedly stress the importance of looking at video recordings of native signers. They express frustration with the fact that many groups treat their recorded data as proprietary and refuse to share it with the research community; this means that it is often hard to decide whether claims made in the literature are plausible or not. I hope things have now improved. The book then presents a quick summary of how ASL works. For readers as ignorant as I was, this will be very interesting. When people are signing to each other, it turns out, they establish an imaginary space between them which contains places that represent the various things they are talking about. When they want to refer to one of these things, they indicate the corresponding place, which they can do by pointing, inclining their head towards it, or looking at it. I found this early example helpful for seeing how it all fits together: The arrangement presents the "manual content" (hand gestures) at the bottom, and the "non-manual content" (head, eyes etc) at the top, with the lines under the non-manual content showing when it happens. The speaker wants to say that John (associated with place i) thinks Mary (associated with place j) loves him (i.e. loves John). He indicates this at the end of the sentence by tilting his head towards place j and slightly later looking towards place i; "IX-i" means "point to place i". If you find the above incomprehensible or baffling, then avoid this book; it is stuffed full of similar examples, many of them far more complicated. If, on the other hand, you were delighted by this glimpse of an alien but strangely logical language, you might well want to consider acquiring a copy. As the title suggests, the authors' goal is to establish a number of claims about ASL syntax. I am in no way competent to evaluate the plausibility of their arguments, but was captivated all the same; they do their best to open up this exotic world so that outsiders can get some idea of what is going on there. The most striking chapter (also the longest one) studies the syntax of questions, where the claim is that WH-questions in ASL, in sharp contrast to virtually all spoken languages, involve moving the WH element to the right, not the left. Thus while English says "What did you buy yesterday?", with the "What" at the leftmost end of the sentence, ASL will use the order "YOU BUY YESTERDAY WHAT", with the "WHAT" at the opposite end. If this result holds up - in 2000, it was apparently rather controversial - it could have significant implications for linguistics as a whole. I want to learn more about signing... ...more | Notes are private!
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I had trouble at first making sense of this controversial book, but after a while I thought of my autistic son Jonathan and it all came into focus. Jo
I had trouble at first making sense of this controversial book, but after a while I thought of my autistic son Jonathan and it all came into focus. Jonathan has a number of behavioral patterns which make life difficult for him, and the worst of them is his love of Making People Angry. As he explains in his disarmingly candid way, Making People Angry Is Fun. Ideally, the people being made angry should be attractive women; these are described as "Sweet And Pretty" if they are under 30, or "Beautiful And Exciting" if they are older than the cutoff date. (As you can see, Jonathan is ageist, but chivalrously so). Possibly under the influence of watching too many Elvis Presley movies - he is a huge fan - Jonathan sometimes hopes, as a result of being Made Angry, that the Sweet And Pretty women will Lie Down In His Lap. It has never become clear what this would involve, since Jonathan's carers, particularly the Sweet and Pretty ones, have made it clear that Making People Angry is Inappropriate, and resolutely refuse even to talk about the possibility of any Lying Down In Laps. But Jonathan continues to hope. And so to Mind and Cosmos. I am afraid that Thomas Nagel, a distinguished philosopher who definitely should know better, also seems to be rather fond of Making People Angry. Here, he says a number of very Inappropriate things. He casts doubt on the validity of Neo-Darwinian evolution as an explanatory mechanism for the development of the mental faculties we observe in the higher species, and in particular in humans. He states that there is no reason to believe that life arose on Earth as a result of natural physical and chemical processes, and impudently quotes authorities like Crick and Monod as supporting his position. He dismisses the notion of a multiverse in two sentences, which, to provide added sting, he puts in a footnote. He argues that moral judgments have objective validity, which humans are somehow capable of directly perceiving. Worst of all, he repeatedly uses the T-word: if you have not come across it, this word starts with a T and ends in "eleology", and it is a very Inappropriate word indeed. I strongly advise you not to use it yourself. I can only guess why Professor Nagel has been behaving so Inappropriately, but I note that he repeatedly mentions the many interesting discussions he has had with Professor Sharon Street of New York University. Professor Street has published several articles on evolutionary theory and its implications for theories of morality, from which Nagel quotes at length. Her position here is very different from Nagel's, and I can well believe that some of his claims could have left her feeling a little Angry. Looking at her picture, it does not seem out of the question that an elderly male academic might consider her Beautiful and Exciting, or perhaps even Sweet and Pretty. One hopes that Professor Nagel is already behaving more Appropriately, in which case my advice will be superfluous. If not, I would recommend that he spends less time with the personable Professor Street, who seems to have an Unsettling Influence, and reads less Aristotle. Possibly he would also find it therapeutic to write a sequel to his very popular article on the philosophy of being a bat. I ought to charge for this kind of thing. ...more | Notes are private!
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As far as I can make out from a little background reading, the origin of this book came in 1948. Jacques Monod, a highly distinguished molecular biolo
As far as I can make out from a little background reading, the origin of this book came in 1948. Jacques Monod, a highly distinguished molecular biologist who would later win the 1965 Nobel Prize, was asked by his friend Albert Camus to write a critique of Lysenkoism; at the time this was officially declared by Stalin as holy writ to which all right-thinking Marxists had to subscribe on pain of excommunication. Monod, appalled at Lysenko's mendacious pseudo-scientific nonsense, tore it to pieces. But I get the impression that he then thought a great deal about how things had got to this point, and discussed the ideas with Camus and other people. The eventual result was Le hasard et la nécessité, which came out nearly 20 years later. Monod was evidently a very deep thinker. If you want to pin Lysenkoism on someone, the obvious culprit is Lysenko himself, and the next most obvious is his protector Stalin. Monod wasn't satisfied with blaming Stalin, or even Marx. He looks at the philosophical basis of Marxism, which, he persuasively argues, is really just another example of what he refers to as "animism": the belief that the world is somehow infused with a purpose. For a Christian, that purpose comes from God, and for a Marxist it comes from the dialectical interpretation of history. Monod thinks that Christianity, Marxism and all other "animist" philosophies are equally off-target. In the main body of the text, he presents a brilliantly condensed account of how his work in molecular biology led him to this position; although the book was written in the late 60s, his line of reasoning still comes across as extremely convincing. Monod starts by considering the similarities and differences between three general kinds of things: living creatures, artifacts, and "natural objects". He shows how difficult it is to frame clear rules to distinguish them, and concludes that there is in fact no hard-and-fast difference separating a living creature from a crystal. In both cases, the patterns and symmetries we see come from the mathematical nature of the underlying molecular structures; crystal lattices in one case, DNA in the other. The real difference is that living creatures are vastly more complicated. Monod goes on to elaborate this correspondance, and shows how the processes by which living creatures reproduce are fundamentally similar, at a molecular level, to those that make a crystal grow. He spends a good deal of time explaining the fascinating details of how enzymes, the complex proteins involved in the process of DNA replication, are both created by the DNA and also used by it to perform this task. He shows how these enzymes are to all intents and purposes wonderfully ingenious machines, which give every appearance of having been designed to serve highly specific purposes; but, just when you think he's contradicted himself, he goes on to demonstrate that their structure reveals they can only be the product of blind chance. There is no one running the show: not God, History, the Life Force or anything else. As Lucretius said a couple of thousand years earlier, there is just atoms and void. After the long segue into molecular biology, Monod concludes by looping back to his starting point. Nothing in the universe, he says, gives it external purpose. We are the ones who give it purpose, based on our billions of years of inherited molecular experience; we must keep our objectivity, and be careful not to confuse facts and values. As an Existentialist sermon, I have never seen it done better. Chapeau, Monsieur. ...more | Notes are private!
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Since the pages for Roland Omnès and all his books are still broken, for reasons explained in this thread, I am unable to review the one I have just f
Since the pages for Roland Omnès and all his books are still broken, for reasons explained in this thread, I am unable to review the one I have just finished. Instead, I present Celebrity Death Match Special: Philosophie de la science contemporaine versus Divergent A new girl joins the group today. She arrives at dinner time and just sits at a table on her own, reading a book. After ten minutes, one of the Physicists, a thickset boy called Kyle, goes over to her. She doesn't even look up. "What's your name?" he asks, when it's become clear she's going to ignore him if he doesn't say anything. "Omnèsia," she replies. "But people call me Omnès." "So tell me what you're reading, Omnès," says Kyle. He doesn't sound too friendly. She sighs and puts the book down. "Philosophie de la science contemporaine", she says. "Philosophy of contemporary science." "And you're a Physicist?" he persists. "Could be," she grunts. Kyle looks at her, shocked. "What do you mean, could be? You're over sixteen. You're a Physicist, a Mathematical, a Philosophy, a Literature or a Religious. Or are you telling us you're D--" "I'm a Physicist," she says reluctantly. I see now that she has a tattoo on the back of her neck; it looks like the Dirac equation. "So what are you doing reading that book?" asks Kyle. "You're a Physicist. You don't need to know what some German pussy said three hundred years ago. You--" "Kant," she says, interrupting him. Kyle looks like he's been slapped in the face. "Not 'German pussy', Kant. Can't you say it? According to this book, a lot of the great twentieth-century physicists read him. Some of his ideas are still pretty relevant today. The interdiction on thinking about the Ding an sich - isn't that a lot like Bohr's interdiction on thinking directly about the quantum realm? But I guess you wouldn't ever have heard of the Ding an sich, right?" Kyle shakes his head. He seems too angry even to say anything. She just goes on talking. "It's not like I agree with everything Kant says." She makes a point of pronouncing the name as clearly as possible; she's needling him, seeing how far she can go. "About how space and time are necessary windows through which we are forced to perceive the world. We now know that's wrong. Modern science is essentially formal, so not limited to the traditional categories. But what's going to replace them? Don't you think that's an important question?" "Maybe important if you're Philosophy," says Kyle. It's an open insult. One of the girls gasps and tries to move forward to say something, but the boy next to her pulls her back. Omnès doesn't seem bothered though. "It's important if you're Philosophy," she agrees in a calm and reasonable voice. "And if you're a Mathematical. Maybe even if you're Literature or Religious. It's definitely important to Physicists. Wouldn't you like to hear more?" Kyle's jaw muscles are jumping all over the place and I know something bad is going to happen. But at that moment the bell rings, and we all troop off to the dormitory. There's the usual frantic scramble to get ready, then the lights go out for the night. I think I'm going to be too tense to go to sleep, but my eyes close before I realize what's happened. I don't know how long I've been asleep when I'm woken up by the screaming. I've never heard anyone scream like this before. Suddenly the lights come on again, and there's Kyle, lying three bunks over, his face covered in blood. There's a butter knife sticking out of his right eye. He's screaming and clawing at the knife. "Look," says Omnès in her unnaturally calm voice. "That's just what I mean. Even if the Many Worlds Interpretation is internally consistent and can be explained in terms of the phenomenon of decoherence, the possible existence of other branches of the wave function is a purely formal result and has no necessary connection to the reality we perceive. Don't you agree?" Match point: Philosophie de la science contemporaine ...more | Notes are private!
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| Jan 01, 2013
| Apr 29, 2013
The Rise of the Machines This is the first book about a field which may turn out to play a key role in the development of 21st century technology; as i The Rise of the Machines This is the first book about a field which may turn out to play a key role in the development of 21st century technology; as is so often the case, this field has been created by a collision between two existing ones. Spoken language systems have been around for a good half-century, and, with Siri, are just starting to go mainstream. Crowdsourcing is a newer idea, but it's already become well established. The internet makes it easier than it ever has been to move information and money between different locations; it was inevitable that someone would exploit this to create a virtual marketplace where requesters are able to post small jobs that can be picked up by internet workers. Once, it would have made no sense to offer a task to someone on the other side of the world and not pay them at least a few hundred dollars; your overhead would kill you. Now, you can pay them fifty cents or even less. As so often, the pioneer has been Amazon, and the Amazon Mechanical Turk still rules the crowdsourcing universe. The connection between crowdsourcing and speech processing is a natural one. As recently as the 80s, people like the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus were arguing that machines would never be able to crack the problem of understanding speech. Dreyfus was right in a way: it is indeed very hard, quite likely impossible, to do this by writing the software yourself. Even if you assemble a large, highly qualified team of engineers and linguists, it seems that the problem is too slippery. But Dreyfus underestimated machine learning methods. You don't tell the machine what to do; instead, you give it larger and larger sets of examples, and let the machine learning algorithm figure out the patterns. Speech understanding works, basically, by taking as much recorded speech as you can get your hands on and telling the computer to make sense of it. People transcribe the speech, so that the machine can gradually learn to convert speech into text on its own. Other people match the text to semantic representations - perhaps bits of XML - so that it starts figuring out what appropriate responses to the words are going to look like. The details, of course, are complicated, but the basic scheme is simple. Gather enough data, let the machine process it, and after a while it'll be guessing right most of the time. Crowdsourcing, as you can see, is a natural match to this way of doing things. You chop up your data annotation task into a million little jobs and distribute them over the web, where many "Turkers", it turns out, will be happy to do them for minimum wage or less. The eleven chapters of the book have been written by some of the early explorers in this terra incognita. The speed with which it was produced amply demonstrates how excited the speech technology community is about these new possibilities. I have been involved in producing several similar collections; typically, they take three to four years to finish, as editors harass lazy authors and publishers move things down the pipeline with snail-like slowness. This one came out in about a year. Inevitably, some parts are better written than others, and the editing could have been tighter; I think though that the decision to prioritize speed was absolutely right. If you're a specialist, you'll find plenty of details about the various technical problems that arise: how to get audio to and from a browser (unfortunately, much harder than it should be), statistical methods for combining information from multiple unreliable workers, the pros and cons of different crowdsourcing platforms. Some of this will be tedious to the layperson. Two sets of issues, however, are of much more general interest. First, there is the ethical and moral dimension; a whole chapter is devoted to these questions. I was struck by the fact that there are clear resonances with problems that have been debated at length here on Goodreads, in particular the asymmetric power relationship between the workers and the managers of the virtual marketplace. (In both cases, the ultimate owner, in general, is Amazon). Fascinating and scary as this was, it was eclipsed, at least as far as I was concerned, by the visionary contribution from Ian McGraw and Joseph Polifroni. Stripping away the details, McGraw and Polifroni consider the abstract nature of the socio-economic process we see here. The machine, as they have demonstrated, can be given full control of the crowdsourcing process, passing data from one set of workers to another in completely autonomous fashion. As they say, we are close to being able to field algorithms which use the human resources made available by crowdsourcing to create intelligent software on their own. You give the machine a budget, and it uses the money to build as good a classifier or speech recognizer as it can afford, delegating the tasks it can't do itself to the human employees under its direct economic control. You only need to take a couple more steps to reach a disquieting conclusion. The system envisaged by McGraw and Polifroni spends money to build artificially intelligent software. But that software, if it is of high enough quality, will have commercial value, and can generate income which the machine then ploughs back into the development cycle. Of course, there will be people monitoring and controlling the process; but you can also see that their role becomes increasingly irrelevant. The system's creators control the machine, but the machine controls the army of workers it can pay for, which help it get smarter. Evidently, we haven't reached the Terminator scenario yet, but I've never read anything which so tangibly made me feel it was getting closer. If your library doesn't have a copy of this book, crowdsource a few dozen people to write letters asking why not. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| May 12, 2014
| May 27, 2014
Apr 13, 2014
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
| 9780198507918
| 4.00
| 4
| May 01, 2005
| Aug 11, 2005
Yesterday, I was reading this book when our friend R, a 30-something British translator and interpreter, dropped in for dinner. "Do you know who Fred
Yesterday, I was reading this book when our friend R, a 30-something British translator and interpreter, dropped in for dinner. "Do you know who Fred Hoyle was?" I asked. R considered, but didn't think she'd heard the name before. How the mighty are fallen. When I was a geeky kid in the 60s, Hoyle was as big a name as Dawkins is now. Absolutely everyone knew who he was. He was often referred to as Britain's greatest living scientist, and was far from unknown on the other side of the Atlantic; his picture once appeared on the cover of Newsweek. His pop science books were nonfiction bestsellers, and made the steady-state theory, his daringly controversial model of the universe, something that ordinary people discussed during their tea-breaks. He wrote SF novels that did quite well, and even screenplays for TV dramas. Journalists called him a modern Leonardo. And then, over a few years, everything came apart. The steady-state theory was refuted. Hoyle resigned his Cambridge chair - established in 1707 by Newton himself - and went off to live in isolation in Northern England. He got into meaningless academic feuds and started publishing cranky books, in which his science and science-fiction ideas become more and more inextricably entangled. The Nobel prize committee gave the 1983 physics prize to one of his collaborators, pointedly ignoring him. By the 90s, he was more or less forgotten. Last week I read his autobiography, Home is Where the Wind Blows , and now I wanted to compare it with Jane Gregory's workmanlike biography. The question that was uppermost in my mind was the obvious one. The autobiography didn't even pretend to be complete: what had he left out? Well, I have to hand it to Sir Fred, who goes up in my estimation. Unsurprisingly, he didn't provide us with all the details of how the steady-state theory suffered its death of a thousand cuts, and there was even less about his bizarre anti-evolutionary theories, in which life and genetic information have been sent to Earth by powerful aliens. (Some creationists once made the unfortunate mistake of asking Hoyle's colleague Wikramasinghe to act as an expert witness in an evolution-in-schools court case; he caused rather more trouble for them than for the evolutionists). He said nothing about the large sum of money that inexplicably went missing while he was director of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. But let's forget these sad incidents and look at the positive side of the balance sheet. I am frankly envious. Hoyle, it turns out, had had such an interesting life that he never got around to mentioning that Margaret Thatcher once asked him for advice on how to justify expenditure on astronomy to the Cabinet. He didn't think it was worth telling us that Stephen Hawking worked for him for several years. And - this simply took my breath away - he omitted the story of how he discovered the then-unknown Julie Christie and cast her as the lead in his 1961 BBC series A for Andromeda. She was such a hit that they couldn't afford her for the sequel, and she had to be replaced by Susan Hampshire. Not even a footnote to say you discovered Julie Christie. Now that's class. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Mar 30, 2014
| Apr 02, 2014
Mar 30, 2014
| Hardcover
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| 9780935702279
| 4.00
| 12
| Apr 26, 1994
| Jun 01, 1994
If you know something about Fred Hoyle, this book, the autobiography he published when he was 79, is a terrifying piece of writing. Hoyle was a great
If you know something about Fred Hoyle, this book, the autobiography he published when he was 79, is a terrifying piece of writing. Hoyle was a great scientist who was responsible for at least one absolutely first-rate piece of work, the explanation of how the various chemical elements are formed in stars. ("We are all stardust"). He was also a talented author, whose popular science books inspired a generation of younger researchers, and an all-round supersmart guy. The first two thirds of this book, covering the period up to the 50s, reminded me more than once of Feynman's memoirs. Hoyle has the same gift for finding clever solutions to an extraordinary range of problems, both practical and scientific, the same flair for telling outrageous anecdotes about famous scientists, the same fearless approach to life. How can you not admire someone who turns up at a secret radar establishment at the beginning of WW II, candidly admitting that he doesn't know the first thing about radar, and then proceeds to make several major inventions without even thinking he's done anything special? Or who descends a treacherous mountain road in the Sierras in a car with faulty brakes, trusting that he'll be able to use the technique a Canadian friend has taught him of bouncing your vehicle off the snowbanks? Or who writes a popular SF novel for fun in his spare time and has a critical essay written about it by Carl Jung? If you're not completely won over after reading these and numerous similar stories, you're made of much stronger stuff than I am. But, as the book progressed, there were more and more things that made me stop and wonder. Hoyle is best remembered for championing the Steady State scenario, which almost managed to rival the mainstream Big Bang theory in popularity between 1950 and 1965, and it's barely mentioned. Why? And there is also next to nothing about his even more controversial ideas concerning evolution and the origins of life, which occupied a good ten years of his career. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Surely he wasn't just going to skip all this crucial material? Alas, it all becomes clear as you pull into the last hundred pages. First, the exciting scientific narrative is abandoned in favor of a paralyzingly dull series of descriptions of committee meetings and academic infighting, which lead to Hoyle resigning his ultra-prestigious Cambridge chair over a point of principle which I'm afraid I've already forgotten three hours after reading it. And then we get the bits of science that were omitted earlier. The Steady State is saved for the final, utterly incoherent, chapter, which tells you that the Big Bang theory explains nothing, is merely the product of scientific groupthink, and has made no progress for the last 25 years; this a year or two after COBE's triumphant measurement of anisotropy in the Cosmic Background Radiation. The cosmology is followed by some extremely naive quantum mysticism, which claims that conscious beings create the universe by observing it, and finally a couple of pages outlining an even loopier idea according to which (I think) our immortal souls live in another universe, controlling our corporeal selves through some kind of intangible link. It crossed my mind to wonder whether Hoyle in his final days had discovered Scientology. It is horrible to think that someone as brilliant as Hoyle could suffer such a fate. What is even more horrible is that the book is actually very well written, so that the contrast between the lucidity of the early chapters and the insanity of the late ones is rendered as sharp as possible. You get the impression that Hoyle was, at some level, aware of what had happened to him and wanted to tell people about it. It would make a great movie; I'd cast John Turturro as Hoyle and Jennifer Connelly as his loyal and beautiful wife, with the Coen brothers directing and producing. If by some chance you know them, please drop the suggestion. I honestly think it has potential. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Mar 25, 2014
| Mar 29, 2014
Mar 25, 2014
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
| 9780691153353
| 3.42
| 31
| Jan 01, 2014
| Jun 04, 2014
One of my favorite movies is Legally Blonde, an extremely clever balancing act that made Reese Witherspoon a superstar overnight. Throughout the whole One of my favorite movies is Legally Blonde, an extremely clever balancing act that made Reese Witherspoon a superstar overnight. Throughout the whole story, she manages to leave you uncertain about how intelligent she really is. Maybe she's just an amiably airheaded blonde who spends her time reading Cosmo and getting her nails done? But she's studying law at Harvard and seems to be doing okay in class, and every now and then she does something that looks really smart, so there must be more to her than that? Witherspoon throws out just the right number of false clues and leaves you guessing until the final courtroom scene; I can watch it any number of times. In this book, Katherine (Katie) Freese seems to be trying to do something similar. As early as the second paragraph, she tells us that she worked for a while in a Tokyo hostess bar. This is rapidly followed by passages about how much she likes partying, skiing and dancing, and on page 5 there's a picture of her in her early 20s, sitting rather inappropriately close to her handsome and much older male supervisor. The writing is dreadful: the acknowledgements at the end include a tribute to "Mrs Selig", her eighth grade instructor, and indeed she barely seems to have advanced since then. Whatever is going on? I thought she was a famous scientist? As the book progresses, it turns out that, like Elle Woods, Dr. Freese enjoys messing with your mind. She has fun for a while projecting the illiterate ski-bunny persona, but after a few chapters gets down to business and tells you about what's going on in dark matter research, where she is generally acknowledged as one of the top people in the field. Suddenly, the tone changes completely, and instead of inane anecdotes it's crisp, no-nonsense summaries of the key issues. I learned a lot from her presentation; I'd seen accounts in several other places, most recently in Panek's The 4% Universe, but Freese is much better. The field appears to be a bit of a mess at the moment, with apparently incompatible results coming in from several different projects. Freese gives you the necessary background, then provides insightful and balanced assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the different arguments. It's exciting stuff. We may be close to determining the identity of the elusive dark-matter particle, which would have enormous implications both for cosmology and for particle physics; or, if we're unlucky, people may just have been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. Freese would clearly prefer the first alternative, but she presents the facts dispassionately and lets you decide for yourself. The second half of the book is as good as the first half is bad. Who is the real Katie Freese? This question still bothers me: just as in Legally Blonde, both sides come over as perfectly credible. Maybe, like Elle, she's both people at the same time, and if so it's an interesting combination. I found the book annoying in places but absolutely unputdownable, and finished it in a little more than a day. If you want to know more about what's happening in one of the hottest areas in modern science or just feel curious about this unusual person, it's well worth checking out. Recommended. ...more | Notes are private!
| Sean
| Apr 16, 2014
| Apr 18, 2014
Mar 24, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780563084426
| 3.75
| 4
| unknown
| unknown
Noticing that I am fond of this genre, people sometimes ask me whether they should believe what they read in pop science books. There is a straightfor
Noticing that I am fond of this genre, people sometimes ask me whether they should believe what they read in pop science books. There is a straightforward answer to the question: pick up any old pop science book, leaf through it for half an hour, and you'll soon realize that you need to be rather skeptical. Violent Universe is another fine example. A tie-in to what was apparently a successful BBC science mini-series screened in 1969 (Damn! Why did I miss it?), it promises to fill you in on all the exciting developments that were then happening in astronomy. They have done a good job, engaging a quality science writer to coordinate things; he's travelled all over the world to talk to top astronomers and look at their experiments. The book is nicely produced, with many striking pictures. The problem is that what they've set out to do is impossible. Cutting-edge science is by definition science that people aren't really sure about yet, so they're going to get it wrong a fair amount of the time. It is consequently rather surprising to see Calder state near the end of the book that "... to say that we can see 'everything' can no longer be much of an exaggeration. Barring the discovery of completely new forms of energy and matter, our children and even our great-great-grandchildren will have few new windows to open." Let's use our modern knowledge - only an additional 45 years! - to check his score-card. Over a quarter of the book is about quasars and active galaxies. Clearly something is causing these immense explosions and outpourings of radiation. Calder very briefly considers the hypothesis that it could be black holes, but quotes Fred Hoyle, still a respectable figure in the public eye, who thought that a black hole, if it could exist at all, would extinguish itself within a year; Hoyle speculates that quasars are driven by 'some new kind of physics'. Only a few years later, everyone knew this was wrong, and that matter falling into a black hole would create exactly the kind of violent events that were being observed. At the time, however, only a handful of general relativity experts had realized this. There is no speculation at all about what caused the Big Bang. Ten years later, Guth, Linde and Vilenkin launched the theory of inflation, which tied together a bunch of hitherto unexplained facts and opened the door to the possibility that the Big Bang had occurred many times. Twenty years after that, dark energy was discovered, and in fact shown to account for 70% of the universe's mass. Here, it is not even mentioned as a possibility. Neither is dark matter, which was starting to look quite likely - Peebles presents interesting data in his 1969 Princeton lectures, which were being given as the BBC program aired. Maybe Calder knew about it and didn't want to include material which looked too much like science-fiction; his most exotic candidate for the 'missing matter' is high-temperature intergalactic hydrogen, quickly ruled out by Peebles on the basis of a simple calculation. Don't get the idea that this is a bad book. It isn't: it's pleasantly written, and I learned all sorts of interesting things, including details of how long baseline interferometry works and how you collect data from a neutrino telescope. I doubt that other pop science writers would have done better. The problem is, simply, that we never know as much as we think we do. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Mar 09, 2014
| Mar 09, 2014
Mar 09, 2014
| Hardcover
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| 9781847082640
| 3.88
| 16
| Jan 06, 2011
| 2012
Hardly anyone seems to have read this book, and it has a stupid title and a stupid cover. It seemed reasonable to assume that the content would be stu
Hardly anyone seems to have read this book, and it has a stupid title and a stupid cover. It seemed reasonable to assume that the content would be stupid too, but in the event I was pleasantly surprised; it turns out to be an elegant little study of how the scientific process works in a practical case. The author, a geologist, seems to know a great deal about meteoritics, and he does a fine job of explaining the tangled story. He is particularly good at finding odd connections: the historical figures who end up with unexpected walk-on parts include Emma Hamilton, Laurence Sterne and the Emperor Heliogabalus, and there are some cute literary and artistic references (Dürer was my favorite). The book is divided into three sections. In the first one, the author gives a general overview of the subject and a tour of its early history. It is quite astonishing to see how resistant Western scientists were to the idea that stones could fall out of the sky, despite the fact that they plainly did so from time to time. In 1794, for example, many meteorites fell in Siena. They were witnessed by all sorts of people, including members of the Scientific Academy; but the majority explanation, at least at first, was that they must have come from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius the day before, although Vesuvius lay 320 km south of Siena, the stones looked nothing like volcanic ejecta, and everyone agreed that they had come from the north. When you're sure something's not there, it's very hard to see it. The second section focuses on the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Chicxulub crater. I had read about this several times before, for example in Frankel's The End of the Dinosaurs, but has not understood how complicated it was. Frankel paints a straightforward picture, unambiguously identifying the meteorite as the cause of the end-Cretaceous extinction event and suggesting that the other major extinction events in the geological record were similar. Here, I find that it's rather less clear. There is no strong evidence to show that any other great extinction is meteorite-related, and even Chicxulub is far from a slam-dunk. One carefully conducted series of studies appears to show that the meteorite impact predates the extinction by as much as 300,000 years. It seems entirely possible that the real story involved a combination of causes, most likely including massive volcanic activity and maybe other things too. In the third section, there's a meteorite story I'd never even seen before. In the Ordovician period, a bit more than 450 million years ago, there's a well-documented part of the fossil record called the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. Apparently there are suddenly a lot more different kinds of brachiopods. There's also good evidence of much higher levels of meteorite activity around then. It doesn't seem impossible that there's a causal link here too: maybe regular meteorite impacts kept opening up new ecological niches, shuffling the evolutionary pack faster so that more hands could be played in the same time. A formula which was lethal for dinosaurs choking on volcanic fumes might have been good news for brachiopods in warm, shallow seas. It's an intriguing idea. In each part, you see that the core message is roughly the same: we don't know as much as we think we do, weigh the evidence carefully, don't trust the currently fashionable explanations too much. It makes a nice change from the absurdly overconfident pronouncements typical of today's popular science books. This is a classy piece of work. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Mar 03, 2014
| Mar 04, 2014
Mar 03, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780486602677
| 3.71
| 7
| Jun 01, 1952
| Jun 01, 1952
Having enjoyed two of Weyl's other books in English translation, I had high hopes for this one; but I am afraid to say that it is unreadable. I gave u
Having enjoyed two of Weyl's other books in English translation, I had high hopes for this one; but I am afraid to say that it is unreadable. I gave up at the following sentence, around page 60: The fact that a tensor which has been derived from them by mathematical operations and is an invariant (i.e. dependent on them alone and not upon the co-ordinate system) is equal to zero is what, in general, the expression of a physical law amounts to.I did wonder why Weyl, in the foreword to Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science, made such a point of stressing that it had been translated correctly. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Mar 20, 2014
| Apr 03, 2014
Mar 01, 2014
| Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||
| 9780691019338
| 3.78
| 23
| Apr 01, 1993
| May 09, 1993
In this magnificent book, James Peebles, in 1993 perhaps the world's most distinguished cosmologist, sets out to present a detailed overview of the su
In this magnificent book, James Peebles, in 1993 perhaps the world's most distinguished cosmologist, sets out to present a detailed overview of the subject. It is an absolute model of how to do this kind of thing: the scope is suitably encyclopedic, the treatment is scrupulously balanced and the writing is excellent. My only complaint is that I don't know enough physics to follow all of it; he assumes a decent graduate-level acquaintance with the subject, which is more than I can claim. The book is divided into three parts. The first summarizes the global observational picture, what we knew empirically about the universe at the time the book was written. There are many interesting charts showing our cosmic neighborhood, going out to distances of a few tens of thousands of light years. It becomes clear that galaxies, at least on this scale, do not appear to be randomly distributed. Many of them collect together in vast sheet-like structures, introducing a theme which will play an important role throughout the book. There is data about the Cosmic Background Radiation (the light left over from the Big Bang) and evidence for the likely presence of dark matter, inferred from anomalous movements of stars within galaxies and galaxies within galactic clusters. Reading this section left me feeling much more confident about my grasp of cosmic geography. If I have to take a citizenship exam for the Virgo Supercluster Federation, there is now a reasonable chance that I'd pass. The second part presents a concise but rigorous treatment of general relativity. Everyone who reads pop science books knows the basic ideas, but the curvature of space is here treated almost as a branch of engineering. Peebles is interested in calculating specific things he will need in the later chapters, and it is impressive how he manipulates the equations to get his results; you see him estimating values for the components of the metric tensor as matter-of-factly as a garage mechanic checks the oil in a customer's truck. He is most occupied with gravitational lensing, and also spends quite a lot of time discussing cosmic strings, hypothetical ultra-dense wires which could have formed at an early stage in the universe's history and now stretch for billions of light years through the cosmos. If cosmic strings exist, this book gives a good description of how they would affect the space around them. It is conceivable, though not likely, that they are responsible for creating those gigantic sheets of galaxies as they sweep majestically though space. The third section uses all the machinery introduced in the first half of the book to discuss a variety of more or less controversial topics in cosmology. In his usual balanced way, Peebles describes the idea of "inflation", then a little more than a decade old. Maybe this is how the universe got started, as a brief exponential expansion driven by the "inflaton field". He lays out the advantages and disadvantages of the idea. There is no clear idea of what the inflaton field actually is, and it is hard to test the theory empirically. On the other hand, it explains several otherwise baffling things, in particular the flatness and homogeneity of the universe, and no one can come up with anything that makes more sense. He goes on to discuss possible candidates for what dark matter could be, and looks at various techniques for probing the structure of the early universe. One in particular, the so-called Gunn-Peterson test, caught my imagination; astronomers look at the light from quasars, emitted when the universe was less than a quarter of its current age, and from the spectral structure infer things about what kinds of objects that light has passed through on its way to us. It is almost like a cosmic version of Plato's Allegory of the Cave. There is a great deal about galaxy formation, a subject where Peebles is an acknowledged expert. I had not realized that galaxies started to coalesce so early: at the beginning, they were almost touching each other. Another thing I had not understood is that galactic clusters seem to be created bottom-up, not top-down. The great clusters and superclusters we see are comparatively recent, and are indeed still forming. At the end, when I was feeling quite dizzy from the variety of remarkable things I'd been shown, Peebles fits the pieces together. What does all this tell us about the large-scale structure of the cosmos? I had the advantage of reading his summing-up in 2014, so I was able to evaluate the reasoning; I knew that, only half a dozen years later, people would find clear evidence for the existence of dark energy accounting for about 70% of the universe's mass density. But although Peebles has nearly everything he requires to conclude that the dark energy must be there, he can't quite believe it. He knows very well that it's a possibility; he presents convincing arguments to show that space should be flat, which requires a certain critical density of mass-energy; he ingeniously interprets the evidence to show that, on most reasonable models, visible matter and dark matter aren't enough to reach that critical density. He's almost got the answer. But he thinks dark energy is an inelegant solution, and dismisses the idea after brief consideration. I was disappointed that Peebles didn't find the buried treasure; but he'd done such an excellent job of mapping the terrain that other researchers were soon able to pick up where he'd left off. I'd wondered why everyone was so willing to accept the 1998 dark energy results, which to me seemed to report a staggering leap into the unknown. Now I see that it was anything but unexpected. It had to be there, it was just the last piece of the jigsaw. It's fascinating to see how science works. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Feb 18, 2014
| Aug 10, 2014
Feb 18, 2014
| Paperback
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| 9780199603497
| 3.74
| 158
| Jul 24, 2012
| Sep 06, 2012
I knew many individual pieces of the story of how the Higgs particle was discovered, but when I read this book I found that I didn't understand the ov
I knew many individual pieces of the story of how the Higgs particle was discovered, but when I read this book I found that I didn't understand the overall picture nearly as well as I'd thought I did. Baggott does a very good job of tying it all together and showing you how a major scientific theory grows from a crazy idea you can't even get published into something that makes front-page news when it's empirically validated. He seems to know the science well - he's written a couple of other books on quantum mechanics - and he's clearly read a lot of background and talked to many of the people involved. There are some excellent anecdotes. The Manhattan project ran out of copper for the powerful electromagnets, and they had to borrow 15,000 tons of silver from the US Treasury; the standard metaphor for how the Higgs field works was the result of a challenge from then-Cabinet Minister William Waldegrave to describe it on one sheet of paper. It's interesting to see that the plot becomes easier and easier to follow as it progresses; once they've got up to running the actual experiments and crunching the numbers, it all appears very clear, and he gives a convincing explanation of how it was possible to extract an unambiguous signal from such a huge amount of noise. (The raw data contained billions of interaction events; only a few dozen were relevant to demonstrating the existence of the Higgs). But going backwards towards the beginnings, it still seems mysterious to me. Three or four times, there is magic with representations of symmetry groups and renormalization, and somehow a new concept of the physical world emerges. I don't think it's Baggott's fault: I've seen several other people try to explain it in non-mathematical terms, and it doesn't seem to be possible. The moral is painfully obvious. I need to read more real quantum mechanics. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Feb 12, 2014
| Feb 12, 2014
Feb 12, 2014
| Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||||
| 9780691081083
| 4.00
| 4
| 1971
| Jan 28, 1971
This undeservedly obscure book came to me through a strange route. First off, it very nearly didn't get written. In 1969, Jim Peebles, a 34 year old P
This undeservedly obscure book came to me through a strange route. First off, it very nearly didn't get written. In 1969, Jim Peebles, a 34 year old Princeton astrophysicist, was giving a graduate course on recent developments in cosmology. Word got around that it was pretty good, and John Archibald Wheeler, the Godfather of US physics, suggested to him that he should write it up as a book. Peebles apologized: he was too busy. Wheeler didn't say anything, but started attending the lectures, ostentatiously taking copious and minutely exact notes. After a couple of sessions, Peebles cracked and said he'd changed his mind. The book came out two years later. According to accounts I have read elsewhere, it had a huge impact on the field and pushed many brilliant young researchers into observational cosmology. (The most prominent one was George Smoot, who later became famous as the man behind the COBE satellite project). But it was terse, uncompromising and only aimed at the specialist market; it was soon out of print. When I went looking for a copy, I was pleased to find one on Abebooks. I was even more pleased when it arrived. According to the stamp on the inside front cover, it previously belonged to William A. Fowler, 1983 Nobel Laureate in Physics. Eat your hearts out, science geeks! The book assumes rather more physics than I know, but Peebles's lucid style makes it comprehensible if you're willing to skim the equations and rely on the accompanying explanations of their physical significance; it helped that I had just read Tolman's 1934 classic Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology, which is frequently quoted. Peebles does a fantastic job of conveying the excitement of late 60s cosmology, which was beginning to come together as a real scientific discipline thanks to the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation four years earlier. He carefully walks you through the evidence, as far as I can see neither exaggerating it nor playing down its momentous significance. His conclusion is that it is not quite watertight; there are still some puzzling anomalies that need to be explained. Nonetheless, he says that the Big Bang is now as well-supported as any empirical fact in cosmology, including the expansion of the universe. This was a game-changer. Other chapters cover more topics that were soon going to prove almost as important. Peebles presents the facts that not long afterwards were going to have everyone agreeing that dark matter had to exist, but responsibly stops just short of saying it's certain that something new is out there. He gives an excellent reconstruction of what was known at the time about the Big Bang scenario, in particular focusing on explaining the black-body spectrum of the background radiation and the observed high abundance of helium in the universe. He seems totally in command of his material, suggesting hypotheses and then deftly sketching simple physical models that can be used to investigate them. He is careful about tying theoretical ideas to observable quantities when he can, often describing practical tricks for actually performing the measurements. When he can't link an idea to observations, he gives you a clear warning. The astonishing thing is that it's possible at all: cosmology, which Kant viewed as a branch of metaphysics, has suddenly grown up to become an empirical science. Peebles never lapses into overt poetry, but manages all the same to let you experience the breathless wonder of the moment. Three hundred years earlier, Newton had made the greatest scientific breakthrough in history, when he realized that the force which caused an apple to drop from a tree was the same force that made the Moon circle the Earth and the Earth circle the Sun. Now we had gone a step further, to understand that the nuclear forces which had just been discovered were the same forces that had shaped the first few minutes of the universe. Many things still remained to be demonstrated with the requisite clarity, but it started to seem that there was only one Law, which operated in exactly the same way here on Earth and at the beginning of time, and that people would soon be able to understand that Law. Thank you, Jim Peebles, for taking the time to write this book so that people half a century later can still attend your beautiful lectures. I feel privileged. ...more | Notes are private!
| none
| Feb 02, 2014
| Feb 08, 2014
Feb 02, 2014
| Hardcover
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