Sleight of Mind - Matt Cook ***

I can't remember when I was last so frustrated that a book could have been so brilliant... but then managed to cut out 95 per cent of its potential audience. Matt Cook's book promises to deliver '75 ingenious paradoxes in mathematics, physics and philosophy'. And it does. Some are familiar, from Russell's paradox to the Monty Hall problem, but quite a few weren't to me. I absolutely loved reading about the paradoxes. But. There's a big but.

The problem is that Cook does two things that make the book unreadable to many. One is to forget Richard Feynman's assertion that there's no point just learning labels for things. (Ironic, as Cook frequently cites Feynman, and even has a dedication that includes 'To Richard Feynman, who saved my father's life'.) Yet Cook insists on telling us all the technical language and what it means - which is totally unnecessary to explain the paradoxes. Who cares that something is called a bijection? We don't need to know.

Secondly, and even more significantly, rather than explain the paradoxes using words and simple illustrations, he uses mathematical and logical notation. He tells us there is a notation guide at the back, but this totally misses the point. No one who doesn't already know this stuff is going to bother - they will just be turned off. To be honest, this approach is lazy. It's perfectly possible to explain the paradoxes without resorting to technical notation - but if you're already experienced in the field it's easier to use the symbols and expressions rather than words. What I found was that even for the paradoxes I know well, understand and have explained to others, I found it pretty much impossible to follow Cook's approach - it just made it all far too complicated.

I was also a little worried about the frequency with which Cook quotes Ayn Rand - it felt a bit like a modern psychology book quoting Freud - but that's perhaps just a personal or UK versus US preference.

Overall, then, I was so frustrated. There is a brilliant book inside here, trying to get out - but it is confined by the jargon and notation to an extent that I suspect this book will only appeal to those who are already well-versed in the appropriate methods and notation. Such a shame.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

The Infinite Book – John D. Barrow ****

Authors are often asked to review books on a topic they’ve written on themselves. The reasoning is sensible – they ought to know something about the subject – but there’s always that uneasy suspicion that there’s going to be a bit of bias creeping in. So I think it’s only fair to admit up front that I have written a book on infinity (of which more later). Infinity is a wonderful subject, because it’s intimately mind-bending (if the combination sounds paradoxical, that’s what infinity is all about) and gives you the chance to pull in all sorts of different concepts and assocations along the way, something Barrow does with great gusto. There’s a surprisingly large amount of coverage here for God, and for the universe, and the book jumps around from Aristotle to Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel (explained at great length), from the paradoxes of infinite sets to the paradoxes of time travel. Overall it’s an enjoyable journey that gives plenty of opportunity to be amazed and surprised. The...

Battle of the Big Bang - Niayesh Afshordi and Phil Harper *****

It's popular science Jim, but not as we know it. There have been plenty of popular science books about the big bang and the origins of the universe (including my own Before the Big Bang ) but this is unique. In part this is because it's bang up to date (so to speak), but more so because rather than present the theories in an approachable fashion, the book dives into the (sometimes extremely heated) disputed debates between theoreticians. It's still popular science as there's no maths, but it gives a real insight into the alternative viewpoints and depth of feeling. We begin with a rapid dash through the history of cosmological ideas, passing rapidly through the steady state/big bang debate (though not covering Hoyle's modified steady state that dealt with the 'early universe' issues), then slow down as we get into the various possibilities that would emerge once inflation arrived on the scene (including, of course, the theories that do away with inflation). ...

Adventures of a Computational Explorer - Stephen Wolfram ***

Stephen Wolfram, the man behind the scientist's mathematical tool of choice, Mathematica, plus a whole host of other software products, including the uncanny Wolfram Alpha knowledge engine, is undoubtedly a genius of the first order. In this book, we get an uncensored excursion into the mind of genius - which is, without doubt, a fascinating prospect. The book consists of a collection of essays and speeches that Wolfram has produced over the last ten to fifteen years, covering an eclectic range of topics. Like all such collections, the result is something that lacks the coherence of a book with a narrative that runs through it, inevitably introducing a degree of repetition and a mix of interesting and not-so-interesting topics - but there's likely to be something to catch the attention anyone who is into computing or mathematics. One of the most interesting pieces is the opening one, where Wolfram describes being a consultant on the SF movie Arrival. He seems to hav...

Search This Blog