Amazon.com is of course the best site on the internet :-) And below you will find some of my recent book reviews on that site : Gribbin, "In search of Schroedingers kittens". Stephen Baxter, "Manifold 2, Space". Stephen Baxter, "Manifold 1, Time". Oliver Saks, "The man who mistook his wife for a hat". Paul Davies, "About Time, Einsteins unfinished revolution". David Koerner and Simon Levay, "Here be dragons, the scientific quest for Extraterrestrial life". go to www.amazon.com for more reviews. -------------------------------------------- New twists in the world of the quantum, July 1, 2001 Gribbin, "In search of Schroedingers kittens". I enjoyed "In search of schrodingers cat", so I had to read "In search of Schroedingers kittens" as well. Sure Gribbin has his pet theories, but all in all I think he just tells the story of what is actually mainstream physics. Or more precisely - problems facing mainstream physics. This brings you to the concept of "truth". Actually, the books conveys a picture where the only difference between physicists and novelists is that the physicist thinks that his story might actually be true. Where a physicist spends his time seeking out physical models of already discovered mathematical structures hoping that they comply with experiment. Reality ? Who knows, seems to be the message. Perhaps thats the truth ? Along the road towards this "clarification" comes a lot of very exciting thought experiments. Where Gribbin twists the standard interpretations just a little to give you a new insight. I particular enjoyed one about special relativity, Where Gribbin twists it one step further than usual and comes up with a logical consequence of the standard Lorentz transformation: How does time flow for a photon? Answer: It doesn't ! According to the standard Lorentz contraction the space interval between two objects does not exist for a photon. And so, from the point of view of the photon, it takes no time to travel this distance. Gribbin remarks that most people are just so stunned by what the equations say that they have not fully thought out the implications. Some understatement ! -Simon -------------------------------------------- Double shadows June 5, 2001 Stephen Baxter, "Manifold 2, Space". Obviously, when you are in binary star system you must cast double shadows, as Reid Malenfant realizes out there on Alpha Centauri. Stephen Baxters book (Space) cast at least two kinds of shadows. First there is the wonderful feeling of being an astronaut out there among the stars. And then, on a deeper level, there is the question of what it means to be a sentient living thing in the Galaxy. The Galaxy being such a big, big place with so much to explore and so much to learn about. I suppose 2001 is year 19 before the Gaijin, or so at least according to Space. 19 years before the cosmic "let the games begin". So there is still time to prepare for that strange environment called Space. And a good place to start preparing would definitely be the book Space. Manifold 1 (Time) was great, and this one Manifold 2 (Space) is just as good. So, now I am just looking forward to Manifold 3 (SpaceTime?). -Simon -------------------------------------------- What a fantastic thing the brain is . Oliver Saks, "The man who mistook his wife for a hat". In this book we are first presented with case stories of patients that more or less convince you that the brain is a kind of mechanical contraption. Strange things happens, when parts of this contraption is damaged. These stories of loss are interesting and puts you in awe: What a fantastic thing the brain is! But there is more. The story about the [twins] left me baffled. With an IQ of 60 they couldn't do simple additions or subtractions. And certainly they couldn't do multiplications or divisions. But nevertheless their brains could somehow master 20 digits primes. Without using any "methods" they could somehow "sense", whether such an enormous number was a prime or not. This twin story alone makes the book worthwhile. -Simon -------------------------------------------- A good overview. Paul Davies, "About Time, Einsteins unfinished revolution". Whether time is an illusion or not is perhaps the biggest question humanity faces. Certainly our minds construct many plausible fictions. And perhaps time is just such a fiction. Buried deep within human consciousness and the (illusion of) the self we find time, which then might in reality be something quite different. I cannot think of a subject of greater importance, and as this books give a good contemporary overview of the subject, it is highly recommended. -Simon -------------------------------------------- Feynman radio from the future: This book is good. Stephen Baxter, "Manifold 1, Time". When you have probabilistic doomsday predictions, intelligent squids, Feynman radios (to pick up signals from the future) etc. - thrown at you, it could easily have been just a lot of weird stuff that seemed pretty far removed from anything you could relate to. Not so in Stephen Baxters "Time". Here it all seems pretty logical and inevitable. Surely, some future Malenfant guy will genetically enhance a squid brain, and then let the squid control a spaceship instead of some old computer. And surely the squid will rebel and try to get back to Earth with its giant Oceans and lots of room to breed.... Brilliant stuff and thats just just the prelude! I read all 456 pages in one session. Simply I just had to know what would happen next.... -Simon -------------------------------------------- Science is a detective story. David Koerner and Simon Levay, "Here be dragons, the scientific quest for Extraterrestrial life". Science at its best reads like a detective story. Authors David Koerner and Simon LeVay certainly convey this feeling in their wide-ranging overview of the search for ETs in the universe. Even in our solar system life might exist outside Earth. Europa, one of the moons of Jupitor, might possess an icecovered ocean. With all the right ingredients for life down in a dark ocean. Another likely candidate is the Saturn moon Titan. Even though it seems a pretty cold place at minus 178 degress Celcius. In its atmosphere one is likely to find amino acids, nucleotide bases and many other building blocks of life. All of which is thoroughly described by Koerner and Levay in an easy and engaging way. And surely a lot of the other stars must have planets. In a little treat of a chapter authors Koerner and Levay makes the case for stars with planets. Some of them with life on them. That is life as we know it. Still a number of other possibilities (infinite ?) exists. Without goning into the details of the examples in the book - one possibility in particular excites me. And I think they should have dwelled more on it than they actually do: Take life on an neutron star. A neutron star is the superdense remnant of a supernova explosion. The original star collapses to a state were gravity overcomes repulsion between electrons and protons. They then fuses forming a sea of neutrons. Life there could exists as patterns of bounded neutrons. With a breakneck speed of metabolism. Where organism live and die within 10e-15 seconds. Entire civilisations might be formed within a fraction of second. Advanced civilisation might create such neutron stars in order to use them as computers. Some 10e30 time more powerful than the human brain. The authors regrettablely stops here - I think it could be relevant to speculate further on installing computers in spacetime itself, just taking the neutron star example one step further to a black hole, that explodes into a new universe (big bang) with the order (computer) installed in its very fabric of space time. Still the book "Here be dragons" is highly recomended as it takes on all the interesting questions: Who are we ? Where do we come from ? Are we alone ? and let you in on the detective story of finding some answers. -Simon