Void: The Strange Physics of Nothing
James Owen Weatherall
Physics, philosophy
To some extent, Void is another book that falls between two stools. To someone completely new to the subject, it might seem formidably abstruse. To someone who has even an educated layman's grasp of physics and astronomy, there's a lot of repetition. There are no equations, no illustrations, no graphs--even where they might prove helpful.
I ended up enjoying the book anyway--mainly for the speculation, rather than the physics. We think of black holes as being things, to take one example--the remnants of dead stars--and yet, mathematically at least, you could have a universe that contains nothing but a single black hole and always has. Is such a universe "empty"? Is space-time itself a thing? Since the vacuum itself has energy, is it even sensible to talk about nothing?
So Void is mental calisthenics, coupled with an aggressively non-quantitative overview of such topics as special and general relativity, quantum electrodynamics, and string theory. It also contains some nice short character portraits of many important scientists, which is always a plus. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but if you're interested in physics and you like big unanswered questions you should give it a shot.
Weatherall, in his notes, says that he was in part inspired by James Holt's Why Does the World Exist?, which I liked very much.
Friday, March 30, 2018
Saturday, March 24, 2018
Book Review: Floodpath
Floodpath: The Deadliest Man-Made Disaster of 20th-Century America and the Making of Modern Los Angeles
Jon Wilkman
History, engineering
This is a perfectly decent book about the failure of the St. Francis Dam in 1928. The writing is decent. There's a lot of detailed research. The description of the flood is evocative. Wilkman does some modest analysis, reaches a few tentative conclusions, and ties the events of 1928 lightly into a larger context. There's nothing that falls short of the title, and nothing that goes beyond it. In short, if you think the subject matter sounds interesting ...
For a closely related book, see Water to the Angels, although Floodpath is more measured in its assessments. The grandfather of all dam-failure disaster books is, of course, David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. For a book full of local interest, Elizabeth Sharpe's In the Shadow of the Dam describes the Mill River flood of 1874 in Northampton, MA.
Jon Wilkman
History, engineering
This is a perfectly decent book about the failure of the St. Francis Dam in 1928. The writing is decent. There's a lot of detailed research. The description of the flood is evocative. Wilkman does some modest analysis, reaches a few tentative conclusions, and ties the events of 1928 lightly into a larger context. There's nothing that falls short of the title, and nothing that goes beyond it. In short, if you think the subject matter sounds interesting ...
For a closely related book, see Water to the Angels, although Floodpath is more measured in its assessments. The grandfather of all dam-failure disaster books is, of course, David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. For a book full of local interest, Elizabeth Sharpe's In the Shadow of the Dam describes the Mill River flood of 1874 in Northampton, MA.
Friday, March 23, 2018
Essay: What Trump Voters Got Right
I am not a Donald Trump enthusiast. I do, however, think it's useful to assess Trumpism in an analytical, detached fashion (blame this guy), as opposed to the hyper-partisan mode of . . . well . . . everyone else. Trumpism is not an inexplicable force of nature. Further, while there are bad people among Trump voters, they are not universally bad, nor does it follow that they are all wrong about everything.
I think Trump voters are reacting--at least some of them, some of the time--to a genuine problem. I don't think they've chosen a good solution, but that doesn't mean that the problem isn't there. Specifically:
I think Trump voters are reacting--at least some of them, some of the time--to a genuine problem. I don't think they've chosen a good solution, but that doesn't mean that the problem isn't there. Specifically:
- The system is in need of radical (in the sense of Latin radix, "root") reform.
- The system is designed to make radical reform impossible.
- The project been legally mandated since 1990.
- The MBTA already owns the right-of-way, which runs alongside the commuter rail tracks.
- It's supported by virtually everybody.
- It doesn't require any tunnels or complex engineering.
- It's even genuinely useful.
The line is 4.7 miles long. In the 9,944 days since December 31, 1990, the amount of track that has been laid along that 4.7 miles is zero feet, zero inches. If I could snap my fingers and have the line completed overnight, the average rate of construction would have been just about thirty inches per day.
Of course, the line won't be completed overnight. After the MBTA fired its original contractor, it took them 23 months just to name a replacement. Naturally, no work whatsoever happened in the interim.
Consider that from 1863 to 1869 this country built a railroad from Omaha to Sacramento using black powder, mules, and human muscles. Obviously things were a lot different there and then, and there was both enormous waste and grave injustice involved . . . but still. In six years, the Pacific Railroad laid 1,868 miles of track. In the six years since the so-called "ground-breaking" of the Green Line extension, we've paid a lot of money for virtually nothing.
Multiply that by all the things that the federal and state governments do, and you get the kind of institutional sclerosis that lets the nationalist populist authoritarians take over.
By the way, I think my prognostications here were pretty accurate. Just saying.
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Book Review: Crucible of Faith
Crucible of Faith: The Ancient Revolution That Made Our Modern Religious World
Philip Jenkins
Religion, philosophy, history
Crucible of Faith is well outside my usual reading areas. My religious education is nil. I am, however, interested in the history of ideas, and, well . . . why not give it a try? And on balance, the verdict is pretty good. Crucible of Faith wasn't such a gripping read that I'd recommend it far and wide (unlike some other books I could name), but it was good enough to keep me reading.
Jenkins's thesis is that a vast chunk of what we consider "mainstream Judeo-Christian thought" only developed comparatively late in Jewish history--c. 250 - 50 BC--as the result of a period of intense conceptual ferment, owing in large part to the Jews' sudden immersion into the cosmopolitan intellectual life of the Hellenic period. Such concepts as the vast hierarchy of named angels, life after death, the emergence of Satan as a major figure, dualism and its discontents, Gnosticism, and apocalyptic writing were innovative, not traditional. I have no firm opinion on whether he's right or wrong, but he does a good job arguing the case.
What's especially strong is Jenkins's argument that Judaism was radically altered by forced engagement with a philosophical ecosystem that was both widespread and much more sophisticated: Greek philosophy, especially Platonism. This I find plausible. Imagine an Aristotle or an Eratosthenes smiling indulgently at this rustic collection of folktales and wonder stories that the Jews called "scripture." How it must have rankled! There's evidence, it seems, for strong and sometimes violent conflicts within Judaism--between Hellenizers and ethnic nationalists, as well as among various sects. It seems a pity that the Hellenizers lost out, but that's just me.
Some of Crucible of Faith is less accessible. The digressions into Biblical historiography, for example, are mainly of interest to specialists. Also, it must be said, I'm sufficiently ignorant of the basic texts that some of the arguments more or less rolled off of me. Overall, though, this was a successful experiment in expanding my own philosophical boundaries.
My reading doesn't include a lot of companion books, but The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve might be a good crossover.
Philip Jenkins
Religion, philosophy, history
Crucible of Faith is well outside my usual reading areas. My religious education is nil. I am, however, interested in the history of ideas, and, well . . . why not give it a try? And on balance, the verdict is pretty good. Crucible of Faith wasn't such a gripping read that I'd recommend it far and wide (unlike some other books I could name), but it was good enough to keep me reading.
Jenkins's thesis is that a vast chunk of what we consider "mainstream Judeo-Christian thought" only developed comparatively late in Jewish history--c. 250 - 50 BC--as the result of a period of intense conceptual ferment, owing in large part to the Jews' sudden immersion into the cosmopolitan intellectual life of the Hellenic period. Such concepts as the vast hierarchy of named angels, life after death, the emergence of Satan as a major figure, dualism and its discontents, Gnosticism, and apocalyptic writing were innovative, not traditional. I have no firm opinion on whether he's right or wrong, but he does a good job arguing the case.
What's especially strong is Jenkins's argument that Judaism was radically altered by forced engagement with a philosophical ecosystem that was both widespread and much more sophisticated: Greek philosophy, especially Platonism. This I find plausible. Imagine an Aristotle or an Eratosthenes smiling indulgently at this rustic collection of folktales and wonder stories that the Jews called "scripture." How it must have rankled! There's evidence, it seems, for strong and sometimes violent conflicts within Judaism--between Hellenizers and ethnic nationalists, as well as among various sects. It seems a pity that the Hellenizers lost out, but that's just me.
Some of Crucible of Faith is less accessible. The digressions into Biblical historiography, for example, are mainly of interest to specialists. Also, it must be said, I'm sufficiently ignorant of the basic texts that some of the arguments more or less rolled off of me. Overall, though, this was a successful experiment in expanding my own philosophical boundaries.
My reading doesn't include a lot of companion books, but The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve might be a good crossover.
Monday, March 5, 2018
Book Review: The Bohemians
The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
Ben Tarnoff
Literature, biography
The Bohemians isn't a bad book, but it's not original or insightful enough to be a great book. It's another IYTTSMSIYPETB. The big problem is that it wouldn't exist without Mark Twain, and Mark Twain does not lack for previous literary coverage. Without Twain, the three remaining Bohemians would consist of Bret Harte--briefly famous, now obscure--and a couple of (from a literary viewpoint) nonentities. It was Mark Twain who reinvented American literature; the others were "and supporting cast".
Okay, maybe that's a little harsh towards Harte. At the outset he was far better-known than Twain. He was the first to crack the eastern literary establishment, and he was a friend and mentor to Twain when the latter first fetched up in San Francisco. He didn't launch Twain's career by himself, but he played a part. So, too, did the city of 1860s San Francisco itself--its roaring debauches, its raw frontier cosmopolitanism, its outrageous Western characters, its sprung-from-nowhere ambiance, its boosterism. The city is a character in The Bohemians, one that Tarnoff limns particularly well.
If Tarnoff had stuck to the relationship among Harte, Twain, and San Francisco, this would be a more focused and more interesting read. No doubt his other two protagonists--Ina Coolbrith and Charles Stoddard--have a moral right something more than obscurity, but obscurity is what they have, and The Bohemians gives us no reason to think it should be otherwise.
Justin Martin's Rebel Souls is about the first American Bohemians--the New York set centered around Walt Whitman. There, too, there's the problem that one member of the cast completely obscures the others. I thought it was more enlightening than Tarnoff's book, though, in part because the New York Bohemians made a somewhat lasting impact as a group.
Ben Tarnoff
Literature, biography
The Bohemians isn't a bad book, but it's not original or insightful enough to be a great book. It's another IYTTSMSIYPETB. The big problem is that it wouldn't exist without Mark Twain, and Mark Twain does not lack for previous literary coverage. Without Twain, the three remaining Bohemians would consist of Bret Harte--briefly famous, now obscure--and a couple of (from a literary viewpoint) nonentities. It was Mark Twain who reinvented American literature; the others were "and supporting cast".
Okay, maybe that's a little harsh towards Harte. At the outset he was far better-known than Twain. He was the first to crack the eastern literary establishment, and he was a friend and mentor to Twain when the latter first fetched up in San Francisco. He didn't launch Twain's career by himself, but he played a part. So, too, did the city of 1860s San Francisco itself--its roaring debauches, its raw frontier cosmopolitanism, its outrageous Western characters, its sprung-from-nowhere ambiance, its boosterism. The city is a character in The Bohemians, one that Tarnoff limns particularly well.
If Tarnoff had stuck to the relationship among Harte, Twain, and San Francisco, this would be a more focused and more interesting read. No doubt his other two protagonists--Ina Coolbrith and Charles Stoddard--have a moral right something more than obscurity, but obscurity is what they have, and The Bohemians gives us no reason to think it should be otherwise.
Justin Martin's Rebel Souls is about the first American Bohemians--the New York set centered around Walt Whitman. There, too, there's the problem that one member of the cast completely obscures the others. I thought it was more enlightening than Tarnoff's book, though, in part because the New York Bohemians made a somewhat lasting impact as a group.
Saturday, March 3, 2018
Book Review: The Wizard and the Prophet
The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World
Charles C. Mann
Science, biography, ecology, philosophy, politics
[DISCLAIMER: Charles C. Mann graduated from my alma mater and lives in my home town. I don't think we've ever met, but it would be surprising if we didn't have connections in common.]
It's quite likely that The Wizard and the Prophet will be my favorite book of 2018.
Here's the core of the matter: in thirty years, the world will have ten billion people. Should we:
Most importantly, Mann is scrupulously fair towards both Wizards and Prophets. He presents each sides's arguments fairly and in their best lights, and then presents the other side's critique with equal insight. That lifts the book up from "enjoyable" to "important". These are big ideas, and they are consequential. How we think about them will have a profound effect on life on earth--within our lifetimes.
It subtracts nothing from Mann's wonderful book to point out that the dichotomy he points out is an artificial one. "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing": Prophets and Wizards are hedgehogs, but the answer probably lies with the foxes. It's true that we should waste less, decentralize our electrical grid, be skeptical of claims that innovation will inevitably save us. It's also true that innovation has produced miracles, that more people are living better now than ever before, that the doomsayers have hitherto been wrong. We should recognize both truths.
Related books worth reading are Gretchen Bakke's The Grid, Rose George's The Big Necessity, and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City. Mann's own 1491 and 1493, though unrelated, are also good.
Charles C. Mann
Science, biography, ecology, philosophy, politics
[DISCLAIMER: Charles C. Mann graduated from my alma mater and lives in my home town. I don't think we've ever met, but it would be surprising if we didn't have connections in common.]
It's quite likely that The Wizard and the Prophet will be my favorite book of 2018.
Here's the core of the matter: in thirty years, the world will have ten billion people. Should we:
- Make wise use of our existing resources, conserving and cutting back as necessary, in order to minimize the damage we cause to ourselves and our planet? That's the "Prophet" response, exemplified in Mann's book by the early ecologist William Vogt.
- Innovate, adapt, embracing creativity and dynamic capitalism, in order to expand the carrying capacity of the world and lift more people out of poverty? That's the "Wizard" response, as espoused by Norman Borlaug--a man who won a Nobel Peace Prize as the father of the so-called "Green Revolution".
Most importantly, Mann is scrupulously fair towards both Wizards and Prophets. He presents each sides's arguments fairly and in their best lights, and then presents the other side's critique with equal insight. That lifts the book up from "enjoyable" to "important". These are big ideas, and they are consequential. How we think about them will have a profound effect on life on earth--within our lifetimes.
It subtracts nothing from Mann's wonderful book to point out that the dichotomy he points out is an artificial one. "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing": Prophets and Wizards are hedgehogs, but the answer probably lies with the foxes. It's true that we should waste less, decentralize our electrical grid, be skeptical of claims that innovation will inevitably save us. It's also true that innovation has produced miracles, that more people are living better now than ever before, that the doomsayers have hitherto been wrong. We should recognize both truths.
Related books worth reading are Gretchen Bakke's The Grid, Rose George's The Big Necessity, and Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City. Mann's own 1491 and 1493, though unrelated, are also good.
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