Quantum Space by Jim Baggott Following on from the previous book where Baggott took aim at wildly speculative ideas in modern physics, this is his effort to describe and advocate for the theory of loop quantum gravity (LQG) as an alternative. LQG is an attempt to unify Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum mechanics and is in competition for the most part with string theory in this - albeit being somewhat less ambitious than string theory (making no claim to be a theory of everything for example). I hadn't read a proper description of LQG previously, and this is one of very few doing the rounds. It asserts that space is an emergent property of "spin" networks, which are loops of gravitational force. These exist at the Planck scale and are thus many orders of magnitude smaller than the elementary particles that we can detect. Baggott tells the story of how this theory was developed through the stories of Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli, two of the most prominent scientists involved in its development. I found the description of the technical details (already simplified) to be difficult to follow at times. In fairness to the author, this may be an unavoidable issue of the subject matter - this stuff is all very far away from our intuitive day to day experience. However I was also unconvinced that the theory offers any prospect of empirical verification, in that regard little different from string theory. So while it did fill some gaps in my knowledge I suspect the definitive account of the subject is yet to be written.
Planck scale is mind-bending. I recently saw an analogy that said that if the nucleus of an atom was the size of the Earth, the Planck size would be the size of a proton. Not sure if that's entirely accurate but yoiks . . .
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco The most acclaimed novel of Italian writer Umberto Eco, this tells the tale of a murder mystery in a 14th century Italian monastery. It is narrated by a young monk who accompanies the investigator, William of Baskerville, a character obviously owing a lot to Sherlock Holmes. I found that it successfully evoked the feeling of a place and time very different from our own. Integral to the plot are many of the prominent issues of the time, from conflicts between the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor, between Franciscans who promote poverty and others who do not, and between the growing power of the cities, the approaching Renaissance and the old feudal monastic way of life. Central to it all is that it's a a book about books, items which we may now take for granted but which in former times took enormous effort to maintain. Much of the business of the monastery involves the preservation and copying of manuscripts and the library is the location around which many of the events unfold. I must make special mention of the sequences involving the inquisition, which are nothing short of terrifying. All in all it is a demanding read, philosophically dense, which can seem a little ponderous at first but by its second half is gripping and at times profound.
Diameter of Earth = about 10^7 meters Diameter of proton = about 10^-15 meters Planck length = about 10^-35 meters Ratio of Earth to proton = 10^22 Ratio of proton to Planck length = 10^20 So, yeah. Pretty similar. A couple orders of magnitude difference. The Planck length is veeeeeery small.
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the past number of years knows that Edward Snowden is the whistleblower who, after spending several years working for the NSA and other branches of US intelligence, exposed the existence of a number of illegal mass surveillance programs being carried out by the United States. This is his autobiography. (TPTB have tried to hinder it, which of course has led to it becoming a bestseller!) I was broadly familiar with much of it already but it was good to get the details filled in and hear everything from his perspective. Snowden comes across as something of a technical prodigy. In the early parts of the book I identified quite a bit with his growing up as technology did (we're nearly the same age) and in retrospect I see his point about how the internet has changed in a negative way from being a new frontier to something dominated by a handful of companies. As events move on and he gets deeper into the workings of the intelligence apparatus, the book begins to read like a thriller and I found it difficult to put down during the last third. His decision to go public is made over a long period of time, with much preparation and after much moral wrangling. The Obama Administration comes off particularly badly for their betrayals. But there is a happy ending of sorts for Snowden, and one hopes that this is sustained. As an aside, though he was helped by Wikileaks and highlights his debt of gratitude to Sarah Harrison, I did have an issue with his digs at Julian Assange. These come across as a little self-serving given the latters current predicament.
Snowden is a traitor and an egotistical shitbag. Nothing else. And he will realize no profit from this book.
Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke Time for a return to sci-fi. I'd ready all of Clarke's Odyssey series but nothing else and this is perhaps his best-known other work. The story concerns the arrival of aliens known as the Overlords, who institute a benevolent dictatorship over mankind yet maintain an aloofness about their long-term goals. Written in 1953, there's plenty that hasn't aged well. The ease with which utopia is achieved by the Overlord's presence seems terribly naive, and Clarke more than once compares their supposedly positive influence to that of the British in India, about which the less is said the better. Yet it is highly engaging and readable. I found myself racing through the second half of it as Clarke steadily reveals more and more about the aliens and the universe they inhabit. The philosophical ideas are actually similar to those from 2001 in some respects. Both these and its the utopianism probably speak to the difference between that age - now approaching 70 years ago - and this. Clarke imagined that progress would be inevitable and spectacular, and we see it as uncertain and messy if at all.
Now go back and watch the SciFi Channel's shit adaptation of the work and marvel at the sheer incompetence of it.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov Everyone is familiar at least with premise of this one, in which an adult man grows attracted to a 12 year old girl. I hadn't seen either of the movie adaptations so apart from the basic concept I came to it relatively fresh. Humbert, our main character, is a paedophile and a probably a psychopath as well. Growing up in Europe he suffers a tragedy involving one young girl, has various dalliances with underage prostitutes, attempts (and fails) at a conventional marriage and finally moves to the US where he becomes obsessed with Lolita, the child of his landlady. The novel is narrated by him, partly a confession and partly a defense of his actions. The curveball is that Herbert is astonishingly eloquent and persuasive, utterly convinving the reader or his love for Lolita, even as his actions become more depraved. He's an openly unreliable narrator, admitting to lying to others and even to the reader on occasion. He dwells at length on his own feelings and on the minutiae of his journeys, while revealing only in passing things like the fact that he's spent time in a sanitorium, that Lolita cries herself to sleep or that he's begun hitting her. Nabakov had difficulty getting this published in the 50s and it retains its power to shock. It appears to regard mere denunciation of Humbert as beside the point, putting the reader inside his head, switching between and toying with genre conventions (pornography, romance, road movie, detective novel, comedy, tragedy) in an effort perhaps to say that people and the world are more complicated than that.
I guess I just took it for granted, but did your edition have the Postscript in it? If not, it's well, well worth tracking down. An essay from Eco about writing the book and writing in general.
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory & Practice by Christopher Hitchens This is a short work - essentially a long essay - written in the 90s which deconstructs the cult that had grown up around the Albanian nun known as "Mother Teresa" and her Missionaries of Charity. I'm reading a much longer one on Irish history so this was a bit of a break from that. Hitchens claims that the image that she and the church have worked hard to cultivate - of a simple and apolitical friend to the poor, is a fraud. He highlights connections with dictatorships, the appalling conditions maintained (deliberately) in her institutions, the furtherance of reactionary Catholic dogma and the misuse or misappropriation of the enormous sums of money available to her. Mother Teresa was not so much a friend of the poor as a friend of poverty, who obscenely viewed both it and human suffering as beautiful and desirable. It's a bit of an easy target to some extent and given that it might have been longer with some more detail. But nevertheless it's a welcome corrective to the record given how many literal hagiographies (deservedly ridiculed here) have been produced concerning the same individual.
Burglars Can't Be Choosers - Lawrence Block This was on the library's "please take me" cart, and I couldn't resist the cover. Bernie Rhodenbarr is a sharp, smooth-talking burglar who takes a job to steal an important blue box (not that one) from a mark's apartment. Well, he can't find the box, the police walk in shortly after, and when the occupant is found dead, it seems that Bernie's been framed for murder! He goes to ground in a friend's apartment and hooks up, in several senses, with the cleaning girl as he tries to solve the mystery and clear his name. Well, clear it of murder, I mean. This is a 1977 crime novel and the sleaze is accordingly muted enough to not get in the way while still being enough there to be worth putting in . The dialogue is slick, a few twists I saw coming and most I didn't which is a good balance IMO, and it's a fun, quick little read.
The Transformation of Ireland: 1900 to 2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter This is a well-regarded and substantial history (running to almost 800 pages) of Ireland in the 20th century. It's as much a social history as a political one, with a focus on groups such as women, the labour movement, farmers, travellers and so forth. With so much ground to be covered Ferriter dispenses with the idea of a simple narrative structure and in each of his chapters (covering one or more decades each) jumps back and forward while dealing with each topic. The corollary of this is the assumption that the reader already has some grasp of the events under consideration - so this is not one for newcomers to the subject. There is much focus on the 1916-1923 period of revolution and civil war, with the national mythology being thoroughly deconstructed. One learns of the divisions and maneuverings among the revolutionaries and the atrocities committed by all sides, particularly in the ruthless extra-legal suppression of the anti-treatyites. On the one hand this entirely obliterates the arguments of modern Irish Republican legitimitism and on the other kindles a new appreciation for the achievement of these people in simultaneously forcing the British out and taking the population with them as they did so. But ultimately the new state is exposed as a backward and poverty-stricken entity for most of its existence, dominated by reactionaries in the Catholic Church, abjectly failing to live up to the ideals of its founders. Movement away from policies of pastoralism and self-sufficiency in the 1960s eventually broke the back of much of this old establishment but by the end of the century, Ferriter notes that while many Irish people may have spectacularly wealthy privately, the public did not necessarily all share in this and there was yawning inequality.
The Lake Michigan Mothman, by Tobias Wayland I have a long standing interest in cryptids that started when I was a wee lad and saw The Legend of Boggy Creek at a drive-in. Around the same time there was a "serious" Bigfoot documentary in theaters, and then Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of series did episodes on the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot. A bit later, when I was in high school, John Keel released his book The Mothman Prophecies, and that one was so weird and creepy that I was hooked. I reread The Mothman Prophecies every few years just for entertainment. I follow a Bigfoot group, Smalltown Monsters, and a Fortean group on Facebook. Most of it - 90%? 95%? - is complete rubbish, of course, but I find it amusing. But Mothman I pay attention to, because Keel's book is just so fuckin' weird. So when that Fortean group I mentioned promoted this new Mothman book, I went and ordered it. And boy, what a disappointment. Unlike Keel's book from the 70s, which focused on the strange events in Point Pleasant West by-God Virginia in the late 1960s, this one reports on a wave of sightings in the general Chicago area in the last few years. And also unlike Keel, this guy just presents a series of incident and sighting reports. There's no narrative structure at all, no attempt at analysis beyond a few weak "this one was probably a heron or owl" type things, and a total lack of compelling writing style. It's very flat and dull. It's also very obviously a print-on-demand book, softcover, with many typos, grammar, and spelling errors. The illustrations are of poor quality, low resolution and all black-and-white. The sighting flap itself is interesting in a general way if you follow such things, but Wayland does nothing to make the events engaging. It's like reading the local police blotter when the most exciting thing that happened was a bake sale at the Methodist church. Sadly, I think I wasted my time with this. Ah well.
Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones Sophie Hatter is doomed, as the eldest of three daughters, to fail in any attempt to strike out and seek her own fortune, all the best fairy tales say so. So she resigns herself to a lifetime of making and selling hats in her stepmother's haberdashery. Until a witch's curse causes her to go on a journey that leads her to Howl's moving castle and a meeting with the characters within. Sparks fly and magic is all over the place. This makes for a wonderful movie, and it's a wonderful little novel as well, told in charming prose. The movie takes out many subplots, adds several in, and alters quite a few plot twists, to the point that the two really are two different stories, in a good way.
The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by The Secret Barrister Written by an anonymous junior barrister who works within the UK justice system, this is an exposure of the problems within that system. It's not an area that I had much knowledge of (apathy of the public being identified as an issue) and it's fairly shocking. The author reviews the main aspects of the justice system, including defense, prosecution, remand, sentencing, appeal and so forth. These are failing in many different ways and there are shocking real-life stories showing how - from relevant evidence not being made available to the court, to innocent people being forced to cover ruinous legal costs, to trials being delayed for years, to unqualified magistrates being unable to apply basic principles like presumption of innocence, to unscrupulous firms collecting legal fees and providing no service....the list goes on. Most of it goes back to the spending cuts that the Tory government have implemented during the 2010's. Justice was seen as an easy place from which to cut budgets, meaning that by now the entire system is overworked and those within it underpaid. Politicians are also chasing or reacting to tabloid headlines like "victims first" and "rapist walks free", putting bad legislation in place that distorts its functioning. I had expected it to be a little more irreverant and humorous than it is but the heavier subject matter is well warranted. As well as highlighting the issues, it serves as a crash course in how the justice system works which I now feel that I understand much better. And despite it's current crisis-ridden state, the author is a big believer in justice and a big admirer of the UK system of providing that, both considering and rejecting alternative approaches and holding up the way that it is supposed to work as an ideal worth defending.
Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis Regarded as one of the key novels that captured the zeitgeist of the 1980's and the best work of author Martin Amis, Money is a take on the greed and excess of the Reagan-Thatcher period seen through the lens of its main character, John Self, a yobbish drunk who has gotten lucky as the result of directing TV adverts and is now embarking on a lucrative career in film direction. Self bounces between London and New York, meeting film stars, writers and also indulging to excess in all manner of pornography, alcohol, food and other vices. He is, or should be, frequently embarrassed by his behaviour and is often so drunk as to lead to memory blackouts. Throw in self-absorbed actors, a stalker making cranks calls to him, a girlfriend with whom he has a bizarre and transactional relationship, and a father running a pub while dating a stripper and you've got quite a collection of extremely unlikeable characters. There's also a meta-narrative introduced as Amis inserts a version of himself as a character in the novel, and musings about what moral responsibility the author has towards his characters and their sufferings hits just on the nose. It probably got overtaken in popular culture over the years by Gordon Gecko, American Psycho, The Wolf of Wall Street and Donald Trump but there's a lot here that serves to take down the crass commercialism and aspirations to fame that dominate modern culture. It also does unsurprisingly have a lot to say about money.
A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 - 1714 - Mark Kishlansky Covers the Stuart period in a little over 300 pages. A couple of chapters survey the status of common people, and then the focus is mainly on royalty and a few other key figures as they drive history from the top down, through wars, Civil Wars, royal finances, executive and legislative meddling in each other's branches, and a whole lot of Episcopal vs. Presbyterian vs. Quaker vs. high church vs. low church and everyone out to get the papists. The power balance in Ireland sloshes back and forth between new Protestants and old Protestants + Catholics. Scotland is rebellious but eventually gets brought into the Great Britain fold. And most of the City of London proper burns down because the mayor didn't want to get sued. This book is not strong on biographical details, which is understandable because of the focus on covering events and trends in such a small space. It's stronger on following the events and who is impacting them. There was enough meat to the book to feel like I got a good basic grip on the period beyond just the surface. As we occasionally talk about how hard it is to 'bring democracy' to parts of the world that aren't used to it, this book is a reminder that England wasn't ready for democracy just a few centuries ago. The monarchy is deposed, only for one new form of government after another to be tried and disposed of in short order before the island winds up heartily welcoming the return of the crown again. The big difference, as the last Stuart passes, is that finance is on a more modern footing and the new Great Britain now has a constitutional monarchy, with the legislature having greater powers to hold the king in check. And the Anglican church is the central religious authority that keeps the nation's spiritual life from collapsing into chaos because people still can't be trusted to have their own opinions about relatively small questions of faith.
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl Written by a holocaust survivor, this is a book of two parts - the first an autobiographical telling of his time spent in concentration camps, and the second an outline description of the psychiatric theories developed partially as a result. The harrowing details of the first section are of a type with the other accounts that exist - forced labour, starvation, disease and gas chambers. They differ in the focus given to the authors own mental state as he witnesses these horrors. He observes a desensitisation in himself and a loss of the will to live in many others. The conclusion that he shapes from this is that it is necessary - even in the face of certain death - to find meaning in life. This can take on various forms - love for others, dedication to work or simply strength despite suffering. As such it's as much a work of existential philosophy as anything else, and Frankl quotes the likes of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche several times. These ideas are what he then extends into his system of "logotherapy" in the latter part of the book. I found the autobiographical parts most interesting - including his insights into his own psyche and also some of the detail around what happened after the camps were liberated, something often relegated to historical footnote. The parts dealing with psychotherapy were a little dull - and while obviously valuable for some, I find the scientific value of these fields to be questionable.
I read that one a year or two ago and yes, it's absolutely an existential work. I found it gripping, to the point that I was reading it on my iPhone while waiting for my mechanic to finish working on my car! And I never read long form works on my phone. The small screen makes it too annoying.
I read this many years back and though I'm a bit fuzzy now on the logotherapy aspects, a few of the episodes in the concentration camp remain vivid. I do remember being struck by the "it's all in how you look at it" aspect of logotherapy. One example that stands out is the old man whose wife had died being able to find meaning in surviving her: he spared her the pain of watching him die and living without him.
Strangely enough, I read it because George Takei recommended it in one of his columns or Facebook posts, something like that. Yes, I follow Takei on Facebook. He's an interesting guy.
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne This story is well-known, but I'd never actually read it. Eccentric Victorian English gentleman Phileas Fogg attempts to travel around the world with his servant Passepartout in order to win a wager. It's knockabout fun for the most part and this has come to be marketed as a childrens book. The plot has certain contrivances, particularly with regard to Detective Fix who is on Fogg's tail and attempting to thwart him. But I found it most interesting as a historical artifact - both as a representation of what the world was like in the late 1800's and as an exposition of what European views at the time were towards it. Verne was French but he sees the British Empire in glorious terms, civilised and civilising. Other peoples are portrayed as barbarous or comical. The main character is a model of composure, punctuality and determination to the point where he represents a kind of upper-crust English archetype. Yet Fogg is not above duelling, bribery or skipping bail where it suits him. The focus on doing things by clockwork is revealing of the kind of mechanistic worldview that was prominent among scientific and progressive types at the time. That technological and philosophical confidence was exploded in several ways over the next century and a half and from our vantage point appears naive and self-serving.
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie I've been on an Agatha Christie kick of late. I recently watched three movies (two versions of Murder on the Orient Express, Evil Under the Sun) featuring her famed detective Hercule Poirot, and was hungry for more. I was in the bookstore the other day and decided to pick up Christie's most famous novel, And Then There Were None (also called Ten Little Indians). Despite its popularity and influence, I knew nothing about it. I liked the idea of experiencing a great mystery without any knowledge or preconceptions. The story is a classic: ten strangers, attracted in various ways by the mysterious Mr. Owen, are brought to a magnificent house on an island off the English coast. The island is well-isolated: there are no boats, and no communications with the mainland. After dinner the first night, a record played on an old gramophone (ostensibly the voice of Owen) speaks to the group: each of the people present are guilty of a murder. At first this is regarded as some outlandish joke, and everyone denies the charges. Then, one by one, the guests die, under circumstances that are clearly homicide. Their deaths seem to be linked to a poem hanging in each bedroom of the house which tells how 10 soldier boys are killed one by one until none remains. As an additional omen, each time a guest dies, one of ten soldier statues on a table are found broken. Tension mounts as the guests begin to suspect one another, and as details of each of their misdeeds come to light. Paranoia ratchets up as the guests' numbers dwindle. I won't reveal the ending, but, without a two-part epilogue that follows the story, the reader could think the story is impossible as told. Of course, mysteries play on your mistaken belief that everything is as it seems. There is a coherent and reasonably satisfying explanation. I say reasonably because I don't think there's enough in the story for the reader to guess, though there are clues. Before the epilogue, the reader has to know that more happened than they realized and that it can't be a cheat (e.g., an unknown person was on the island, it was all an hallucination, etc.). (Incidentally, I just watched the 1945 British film version, and it changes a lot, including the ending. This is one time the film ending might be better than the book's.) The influence of this book on films like Clue and The Thing (John Carpenter's version) are immediately apparent. The story was fairly gripping and moved along quickly. The characters were well-drawn. I finished the book in three sittings, which is fast for me, so it definitely kept my interest. Recommended if you want a quick and classic mystery read.
Addendum: although I watched the black and white version of the 1945 film on YouTube, there is a colorized version also available. It is a masterpiece of godawful colorization. The muted and blotchy colors change from frame to frame.
