Skip to main content

A Certain Ambiguity (SF) – Gaurav Suri & Hartosh Singh Bal ***(**)

This is one of the very few books we have been unable to give a straightforward star rating. The reason is that it has been important to separate the idea and the execution. More on this later.
A Certain Ambiguity is a novel, but a novel with the explicit intention of putting across information about mathematics. This might seem a very new thing to do, but in fact has plenty of historical precedent. For example, when Galileo wrote his two great books, they were in the form of dialogues between fictional characters. Of course they weren’t novels – the novel form didn’t exist – but they did make use of human discussion to help get across complex points to a more general reader.
In A Certain Ambiguity we meet Ravi Kapoor who travels from India to America to further his education, and finds himself increasingly fascinated by both maths and his grandfather, who was a mathematician and had been in the US himself. The storyline interwines Ravi’s experience at college with a gradual uncovering of the reasons his grandfather was jailed for blasphemy, and how his grandfather discussed issues of maths and philosophy with a judge.
First the good stuff, the reason A Certain Ambiguity gets those bracketed five stars. It is a wonderful idea. Popular science is all about getting the joy and wonder of science across to general readers. This is easier with, say, physics or genetics than with maths, which many might find cold and off-putting. Yet Suri and Bal set out to show the genuine joy of discovery that can be there in mathematics, and how knowing about maths can help us understand how human beings understand everything. This is a truly noble aim. Anything that can be done to make science and maths more approachable is well worth the effort. And there are some very effective moments in this novel where Suri and Bal manage to get across mathematical intuitions in a fashion that’s better than anything I’ve seen elsewhere.
However, and there has to be a “however”, it’s a flawed enterprise. Firstly it just isn’t a very good novel. There’s no real feeling of identity with the protagonists – I don’t really care what happens to them – and there’s much too much fake quotation and concentration on jazz that is simply boring. Then there are one or two factual issues that are a little uncomfortable. We hear a Stanford professor say that Galileo invented the telescope – painfully wrong. A judge in the US finds it shocking to have music in church – unlikely unless he was a Quaker, which other comments he makes seems unlikely. The whole lengthy argument over religion gets in the way of both the plot and the maths. The fictional journal entries are both banal and boring. To have Spinoza say “Today I was excommunicated,” is just too like a school essay attempt at a historical character’s journal.
There’s also too much mathematical exposition – more than I would expect in a straight popular maths book, let alone a novel where it breaks the flow. And in the end, the premise that seems to take everyone by surprise – in effect that the “truth” of mathematical systems can’t necessarily be equated with how the physical world works, but stands as a construct in its own right, certainly shouldn’t be a shock to any scientist, and I would have thought wouldn’t take any of the characters in the book by surprise either.
I can’t, in all sincerity, recommend this book either as a novel or as a way to get an understanding of the maths it contains, but I can and do wholeheartedly celebrate the value of the authors’ attempt.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On the Fringe - Michael Gordin *****

This little book is a pleasant surprise. That word 'little', by the way, is not intended as an insult, but a compliment. Kudos to OUP for realising that a book doesn't have to be three inches thick to be interesting. It's just 101 pages before you get to the notes - and that's plenty. The topic is fringe science or pseudoscience: it could be heavy going in a condensed form, but in fact Michael Gordin keeps the tone light and readable. In some ways, the most interesting bit is when Gordin plunges into just what pseudoscience actually is. As he points out, there are elements of subjectivity to this. For example, some would say that string theory is pseudoscience, even though many real scientists have dedicated their careers to it. Gordin also points out that, outside of denial (more on this a moment), many supporters of what most of us label pseudoscience do use the scientific method and see themselves as doing actual science. Gordin breaks pseudoscience down into a n
Post a Comment
Read more

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - Henry Gee *****

In writing this book, Henry Gee had a lot to live up to. His earlier title  The Accidental Species was a superbly readable and fascinating description of the evolutionary process leading to Homo sapiens . It seemed hard to beat - but he has succeeded with what is inevitably going to be described as a tour-de-force. As is promised on the cover, we are taken through nearly 4.6 billion years of life on Earth (actually rather more, as I'll cover below). It's a mark of Gee's skill that what could have ended up feeling like an interminable list of different organisms comes across instead as something of a pager turner. This is helped by the structuring - within those promised twelve chapters everything is divided up into handy bite-sized chunks. And although there certainly are very many species mentioned as we pass through the years, rather than feeling overwhelming, Gee's friendly prose and careful timing made the approach come across as natural and organic.  There was a w
Post a Comment
Read more

Michael D. Gordin - Four Way Interview

Michael D. Gordin is a historian of modern science and a professor at Princeton University, with particular interests in the physical sciences and in science in Russia and the Soviet Union. He is the author of six books, ranging from the periodic table to early nuclear weapons to the history of scientific languages. His most recent book is On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford University Press). Why history of science? The history of science grabbed me long before I knew that there were actual historians of science out there. I entered college committed to becoming a physicist, drawn in by the deep intellectual puzzles of entropy, quantum theory, and relativity. When I started taking courses, I came to understand that what really interested me about those puzzles were not so much their solutions — still replete with paradoxes — but rather the rich debates and even the dead-ends that scientists had taken to trying to resolve them. At first, I thought this fell under
Post a Comment
Read more