Skip to main content

Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire - Thomas Lin (Ed.) ***

This book contains a considerable amount of good (and interesting) science - but, for me, it's not a good science book. A book should have structure and flow, leading the reader through its narrative. This is a collection of articles (from the website Quanta). As a result, what we've got here is a magazine in book's clothing. And at that it's not a very good magazine.

What do we look for in a science magazine? Good illustrations, for one. Even a top-level science magazine such as Nature has plenty of illustrations and graphics. Here there are none. Also we want a smorgasbord of interesting articles - the origin of the term 'magazine' is a storehouse - the editor's job is to ensure variety and range, so even if one article isn't really to your taste, the next one will be something completely different. Here, the articles are grouped in topics, and are often quite similar within the topic - many even have quotes from the same handful of scientists over and over again.

Take the first section, which surely should be one designed to whet the appetite. Titled 'Why doesn't our universe make sense?', these articles are all what I'd call fantasy physics. As the book's title suggests, they obsess over purely theoretical concepts like black hole firewalls. There is no observational or experimental evidence for black hole firewalls. They are simply the result of playing mathematical games - which is fine for mathematicians, but shouldn't really be presented as science when there is no prospect of taking a close look at a black hole in the foreseeable future.  Every single one of the seven articles in this section is concerned with mathematical or philosophical considerations (such as 'naturalness') which are arguably not really science at all. There is a lot of discussion in the physics world at the moment about the validity of this kind of work - but none of it surfaces here.

Another section I struggled with was one labelled 'How do machines learn?' This was about AI and was very gung-ho about artificial intelligence, giving us hardly anything about the problems it raises and the concerns that it is being overhyped, reflected so well in books such as Common Sense, the Turing Test and the Search for Real AI and The AI Delusion.

The sections I found most interesting were those on biology - 'What is Life?' and 'What Makes us Human?' There was a time when physicists could deservedly be snide about biology, culminating in Rutherford's famous 'stamp collecting' put down. Yet these biology sections felt far more like real science than the physics ones. The articles were excellent and there seemed far more that was generally interesting here. (And I say this as someone with a physics background.)

In the end, I'm not sure that collecting together the 'best' articles (if the first section were the best physics articles, I'd hate to see the worst) from a website makes for a particularly useful book. By all means visit Quanta and read the articles there (they even have illustrations!) - it's a great resource. But the book doesn't do it for me.
Paperback:  

Kindle:  
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

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Einstein's Fridge - Paul Sen ****

In Einstein's Fridge (interesting factoid: this is at least the third popular science book to be named after Einstein's not particularly exciting refrigerator), Paul Sen has taken on a scary challenge. As Jim Al-Khalili made clear in his excellent The World According to Physics , our physical understanding of reality rests on three pillars: relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. But there is no doubt that the third of these, the topic of Sen's book, is a hard sell. While it's true that these are the three pillars of physics, from the point of view of making interesting popular science, the first two might be considered pillars of gold and platinum, while the third is a pillar of salt. Relativity and quantum theory are very much of the twentieth century. They are exciting and sometimes downright weird and wonderful. Thermodynamics, by contrast, has a very Victorian feel and, well, is uninspiring. Luckily, though, thermodynamics is important enough, lying behind ...
Post a Comment
Read more