More Books

Two more books just finished:

Ten Tales Tall and True - Alasdair Gray
Nicely written and often entertaining, so why did it take me so long to read such a short book? (And it has pictures.) Some stories display an admirable sense of political anger, but generally these are anecdotes rather than full-blown short stories. Still I remember each one (almost), so it must have made an impression.

A Brief History of Infinity - Brian Clegg
Charting the predominantly mathematical problems and wonders of the concept of Infinity, Clegg treats his subject with an amiable broadness. For instance, when any mathematician, scientist or philosopher is introduced, we get a potted biography; rivalries and fights (eg. between Newton and Liebnitz, Cantor and Kronecker) are given blow by blow accounts. Related (or even unrelated) ideas, such as irrational numbers or quantum physics, get as much explanation as the main idea, often it strikes me, more. Indeed, given that this book should make the topic clear, it drops the ball more than once, though it could be argued that is natural with such a slippery notion as Infinity. Still enjoyable and I promise I'll investigate set theory again. Oh, and one last thing the book reinforces in my mind is what a git Newton was!

Living in a Vacuum

I'm reading John Gribbin's "Science: A History" and enjoying it immensely. But it is making me realise how little basic science I actually know. When I'm finished I have to go back to mathematics too. I wish I'd paid more attention to logarithms, calculus etc. back in school. To think that they could develop so much in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries while still only formulating basic mathematical syntax (the '+' and '-' symbols were apparently only introduced in 1540, though of course that's not to say Arabian mathematicians didn't have their own approaches).

Holy Tachyons!

I watched Richard Dawkins' 'Enemies of Reason' programme last night, an attempt to debunk religion and superstition. Whatever one's own beliefs might be, I felt he took a lot of fairly easy potshots at easy game (mediums, card readers, astrology, etc.), and dismissed some very large topics very cavalierly. For someone making a case for Science bringing an open mind to the world, he himself very definitely did not. Granted his view may be the result of years of 'open' consideration, but without proper background it came across as almost as much fanatical ranting as the subjects he was trying to debunk. Whether I agree with him or not is neither here nor there; he did himself a disservice.

Still on the scientific front, I didn't pick up reading the new McCarthy as promised, but instead started Gregory Benford's 'Timescape', a book on many a '100 Best SF' list. Concerning an ecologically ruined Earth's (set in 1998) attempts to contact the past, it is not as hare-brained as it sounds. Benford is a physics professor at the University of California, so he knows what he's talking about. Skipping from very lucid descriptions of theories by Feynmann to 'science' appropriate to his story, it's hard to see where one leaves off and the other begins. To get a better grip on this I looked up 'tachyons', the subatomic 'particle' at the heart of his thesis, in Wikipedia. They're everthing he said they were! If they exist! (And they don't, claims Wikipedia resolutely, because even if they did they couldn't (!!!!!!!)). They still have given rise to much research for things that don't exist. Incredible stuff! And then just when I was getting euphoric on tachyons, he introduces closed geometry universes, and how they might be within our own (and our's within others). Crazy stuff, and worth exploring. And to cap it all off, he is great at creating characters, and the lives to go with them. Hmmmm.