Celestial Tapestry - Nicholas Mee ****

There was an old tradition amongst the landed gentry of collecting a 'cabinet of curiosities' - an unstructured collection of interesting stuff they had picked up on their travels. In many ways, Celestial Tapestry feels like a cabinet of curiosities of the mind, with interesting things linking maths and the the world, particularly the arts, that Nicholas Mee has picked up.

It is delightful being able to be transported by Mee on a number of distinctly varied trains of thought and diversions, all with shiny, full colour illustrations. (If I have one complaint about the pictures, it would have been better if this had been a coffee table sized book, so the beautiful images could have been bigger.)

The book is structured into six sections: the fabric of space, time and matter; weaving numbers and patterns; drawing out the golden threads; higher space and a deeper reality; wandering round the knot garden; and casting the celestial net. However, these heading don't really give a feel for how the topics jump around, making enjoyable and unexpected connections. So, for example, the very first topic 'Into the labyrinth' takes us through literal labyrinths to the Hereford Mappa Mundi to Dante's Divine Comedy, before we jump onto Earth, Air, Fire and Water, where we discover, for example, that Henry I's infamous death from a 'surfeit of lampreys' was not a matter of overeating, but was considered to be a problem due to consuming food that was cold and wet, which was supposed to have weighed on his phlegmatic nature.

Although each chapter has a theme, the flow from item to item can sometimes be a little abrupt and episodic. Many of the topics also were covered too briefly. For example, turf mazes are mentioned but not the near-hypnotic tradition of running them, and the wheel of fortune is brought into a section on medieval clocks without any mention of Carmina Burana. The very best segments were where Mee slowed down and spent longer on a single topic. I loved the section, for example, on the Holbein painting The Ambassadors, where we got a lot more depth on the fascinating detail of the painting.

The book works best where it's strongly linking mathematical and scientific concepts and the world around us through art. For me, the weakest section was the one on knot theory - clearly a big passion of Mee's, but one that is considerably more abstract, making it seem less effective.

You can always tell if a book is good if you can't wait to get back to it. That was definitely the case here. A little gem.

Hardback:

Kindle:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

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). ...

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos - Joe Tidy ****

Anyone like me with a background in programming is likely to be fascinated (if horrified) by books that present stories of hacking and other destructive work mostly by young males, some of whom have remarkable abilities with code, but use it for unpleasant purposes. I remember reading Clifford Stoll's 1990 book The Cuckoo's Egg about the first ever network worm (the 1988 ARPANet worm, which accidentally did more damage than was intended) - the book is so engraved in my mind I could still remember who the author was decades later. This is very much in the same vein, but brings the story into the true internet age. Joe Tidy gives us real insights into the often-teen hacking gangs, many with members from the US and UK, who have caused online chaos and real harm. These attacks seem to have mostly started as pranks, but have moved into financial extortion and attempts to destroy others' lives through doxing, swatting (sending false messages to the police resulting in a SWAT te...

Search This Blog