Books – Page 2 – Meadowbank

The Future of Humanity

No, I’m not getting all beard stroking, navel gazing and blue sky thinking! The title of this post equates to the book title of Michio Kaku’s future gazing book, which covers topics such as terraforming Mars, interstellar travel, immortality and our destiny beyond Earth.

At this point, I should point out that the timeline of this blog is somewhat out of whack, because I read this book prior to reading Carlo Revelli’s book, Seven Lessons in Physics. In comparison, Michio’s book is somewhat disappointing. for two reasons.

Firstly, Michio is somebody that I’ve encountered over the years in many a BBC documentary. Primarily, Horizon documentaries (when Horizon was good – less thematic, and more hard facts). Michio is a professor at City University of New York, and one of the co-founders of string theory, and this isn’t his first book. Thus, in my book, he is a known entity, a kent face, a good chap, he has gravitas. However, reflecting the route taken by the BBC with Horizon, the book turned out to be somewhat dumbed down. The book didn’t deliver what I expected of Michio.

Secondly, and worse still, from the perspective of somebody who is a bit of a geek and has followed a wide spectrum of science related subjects for decades (yes, I do very much like my tech and science!), in reading this book I discovered nothing new.

Throughout, I found myself willing myself to continue to read the book in the belief/hope that it would get better. All the time, I was somewhat frustrated in that I found myself knowing more about some of the subject matter and asking myself, when is he going to mention “X” … and disappointingly, Michio never did. And, I should point out, that’s not because events have subsequently overtaken the book – I have taken into account the book’s publication date.

The book also suffers from being just a bit too whimsical and, dare I say it, erm … starry eyed at some points.

If you’re somebody to whom the subjects covered are all new (why would you be reading this blog … ?), then perhaps this book would be an eye opener. I’m sure that as a teenager, eager to soak up all the science/tech latest, I would gorge myself on the book’s contents.

As it is, I’m no a newbie to the subjects covered, so this book gets a C-

America City

Arthur C Clarke Award winning author is what the book cover if America City proclaims … before telling you who the author is (Chris Beckett) … and then the title of the book. That order is significant, because Mr Beckett certainly didn’t win the award for this piece of fiction.

That perhaps sounds a bit harsh, and granted America City is quite good at extrapolating where we are at present, with regards to technology and the ecology of the Earth, and fast forwarding a century or so hence.

Also, from the perspective of where politics sits and seems to be heading, America City is a bit of food for thought in terms the wall across the border between Mexico and the USA, and all the hoo-ha that Trump stirs up.

Nonetheless, I found America City uninspiring and unsurprising. The story line and the characters were predicable. The final chapters had an inevitability about them and the hoped for twist just never transpired.

Nevertheless, America City was still good enough to make me feel inclined to hunt down Mr Beckett’s award winning novel Dark Eden.

7 Brief Lesson on Physics

Continuing on the recent theme of books about the cosmos/astronomy/physics, I read Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli while having a long soak in the bath – for reasons that I’m about to explain, the bath didn’t take as long as you may think, and I certainly did not look prune-like by the end of!

My initial impressions of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics were not favourable. Firstly, the book is very short – a skinny, seventy-nine pages of large print. If it were fiction, it would be described as a short story/novella. Since I was expecting something which was going to be hard science, I didn’t get “into it” immediately. Initially it struck me that the target audience was those who are not of a scientific bent; more arty and those that would opt to read the literary, rather than the technology, supplement of their Sunday newspaper. But, once I’d switched mindset, the cadence of the Seven Brief Lessons on Physics really started to sing to me.

Key points were the non-linear view of time, and also how “now” doesn’t really exist, and that concepts of time can be very localised. For instance, how “now” and localised time on Earth versus their equivalents on Jupiter or Alpha Centuri (four hours and four light years away respectively) can all be very different indeed. It is how time is perceived by the individual.

Furthermore, there is the notion that time is akin to entropy, where apparently chaotic like states are seen to be ordered (past & present), but only based on the order projected upon the subject of the entropic state of time by the viewer. Analogous to bolts ordered/separated by their colour vs the colour blind person who sees chaos since they perceive order based on bolt size!

In addition, how loop quantum gravity might be able to tie general relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics together. Furthermore, that the Rosetta stone of these dislocated theories might be black holes. This is because an infinite state is not logical and also that thermodynamics dictates that a changed state in entropy must omit energy, thus Hawking radiation must be present.

Once you’ve read the book, a very good piece of follow-up material is a Royal Institute lecture by the man himself, Carlo Rovelli, which focuses in on the subject of time itself.