Books I'm Reading: A Beautiful Question

The last book I read in 2018, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek's A Beautiful Question (Penguin, 2015) is one of those books that you immediately want to re-read the moment you're finished with it because it handles such difficult subject matter.

I periodically subject myself to these books on physics, because I want to understand what human beings so far understand about the universe, but I never seem to make much progress. The fault is mine, not the author's.

Wilczek lays out the now-familiar history of the development of quantum physics but approaches the story from a somewhat unusual perspective. His focus throughout the book is on beauty and idealizations of reality and the relationship of these to actual reality as we understand it. His greatest pleasure is in pointing out how human intellect, inspired by notions of the ideal, has arrived at solutions to basic problems that in large part conform to expectations—and in this symmetry, this conformance of real to the ideal, he sees great beauty. He looks at the universe as envisioned by Pythagoras, Socrates, Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and then by physicists of the modern era, pointing out along the way how our understanding of the universe points to a positive answer to the question he initially posits "Does the universe embody beautiful ideas?"

I see that I read only 14 books in 2018, which seems a shamefully small number. That's a book every 3.7 weeks. I'd like to be near one every two weeks, at the very least.... So many books. I will have to try harder in 2019.

Wine I'm Making: First Berry Sample of 2018 (September 14, 2018)

I took my first sample of the 2018 vintage of fruit on our 34 backyard vines today. The Sangiovese looks healthy and comparatively plentiful this year. The berry sample I took showed a brix of 19 and a pH of 3.22. The Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc sample showed a brix of 22.6 and a pH of 3.16. I like to pick the Sangiovese (from which we usually make rosé) at about 22 brix and the Cabernet at about 24-25 brix. So, we've probably got a couple of weeks to go in both cases.

So far, it looks like we'll have much more Cabernet fruit this year than last because of the removal of trees that were shading the vines, although there is a disheartening amount of mildew in some areas, despite careful sulfur spraying and exposing the fruit more than I usually do by pulling leaves earlier in the season. I don't know what the answer to that problem is, but, at least we've had no animal or bird damage so far. Fingers crossed.

I'm also watering the vines today. They'll get a six-hour drip, but this is only the second time they've been watered this year. It will probably be the last time as well.