Books I'm Reading: The House on the Strand; Light Years

I haven't been reading lately as much as I customarily do. Too many distractions, I suppose. I've been much more deeply engaged in listening to music recently. It could be that – although the two aren't necessarily incompatible. 

My mother died in January. In the last ten days or so of her life I spent a lot of time in the hospital at her bedside. I brought a couple of books with me, picking up whatever was to hand. I'm not sure why, but I chose a copy of Daphne Du Maurier's classic The House on the Strand (a 1974 University of Pennsylvania Press paperback edition) that was on one of my bookshelves (as it happens, a copy my father left behind at the time of his death). I first read The House on the Strand in high school when I was going through a phase of reading a great deal of fiction by English writers, many of whom were suggested by my grandmother and my mother (school teachers both, my grandmother a teacher of English literature in high school; I read a great deal of Thomas Hardy at the time), so it is was perhaps an appropriate choice. 

I didn't remember much about the book, but it's held up pretty well, I'd say. Although a certain suspension of disbelief is required to accept the idea of a potion that transports people back in time, the transitions are written rather deftly and I enjoyed reading it again. The only Thomas Hardy novel I've re-approached as an adult is Return of the Native, which seemed rather naïve to me on re-reading. I recently re-read Moby Dick, which I enjoyed as much the second time around as the first. 

The other book I read during my mother's final days was Light Years (Icon Books, 2015), by Brian Clegg. I have a habit of subjecting myself from time to time to books about physics in the hope of better understanding some of the great peculiarities of the quantum world, but there always comes a point at which the mind boggles and I'm left feeling worn out and confused and like I've made no progress. Still, I like to keep trying. This was among the easier such books I've read, though, because it was essentially a survey of the history of human thinking about light and it was only at the very end of the book that the ideas became challenging. It was engagingly written and worth the time, I thought. It was at the very least a useful distraction. So far, these are the only books I've read in 2023. I will try to do better in the coming months....

Books I'm Reading: The Jazz of Physics

Yet another book about physics that I read with interest but found hard to process. Stephen Alexander's The Jazz of Physics (Basic Books, 2016) is well written and engaging, but I never got the feeling that I was reading a focused argument aimed at supporting the thesis suggested by the subtitle (The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe). The book seemed more diffuse than that.

The Jazz of Physics claims to shed light on difficult issues in physics by taking a serious look at the idea that music (broadly defined—in fact, here thought of as vibration) is at the core of the structure of the universe. One of those books that I immediately want to read over again from cover to cover in an effort to really understand, but I suspect I'll never get back to this one as there are so many other books to read.

These paragraphs are intended more as a record of my having read The Jazz of Physics than as something that might properly be called a review. Having said that, anyone with an interest in physics and music would probably enjoy reading this book.

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.

Books I'm Reading: The Theory of Almost Everything

Periodically, I subject myself to a little reading about physics. It's a difficult subject, but it interests me, and I can't help thinking that an educated person ought to understand how the universe works. Typically, I find it hard to retain the sometimes mind-boggling ideas that modern physics forces us to accept. Each time, though, I feel like I come a little closer to understanding.

I just finished reading Robert Oerter's The Theory of Almost Everything (Plume, 2006) and feel like I've made a quantum leap (pun intended--but the phrase is apt). Perhaps it's just because I've continued to read about physics over the years--it was bound to make more and more sense just by virtue of exposure--, but I feel Oerter's book is exceptionally clear and well written. It puts the whole progression of human thinking about the stuff of the universe into historical perspective, from Newton to string theory (and made it clear to me for the first time how string theory developed out of earlier models). The book talks a great deal about why none of the theories we have today is yet good enough (for example, all current models more or less ignore gravity). At the same time, however, the author makes it clear just how brilliant the currently accepted Standard Model is, despite its deficiencies. The book is something of a celebration of the Standard Model, which Oerter calls the crowning achievement of human thought in the past 100 years. Illuminating, and, given the difficulty of the subject, remarkably easy to follow. Highly recommended--if you like this sort of stuff, that is.