Re: The Electric Life of Michael Faraday

I knew about Michael Faraday from his work showing the connection between electricity and magnetism. I even have a 20 pound note stashed away, showing him giving a public lecture. Reading The Electric Life of Michael Faraday, by Alan Hirshfield only deepens my admiration. Though he is still regarded as one of the great experimental […]

Re: The Ghost Brigades

After three chapters of talk and exposition, The Ghost Brigades, by John Scalzi really wakes up with Jared Dirac. He’s the second clone of the purported traitor Charles Boutin, who shot the first one in order to fake his death. Luckily, Boutin was a researcher in consciousness (sort of a critical field when you’re decanting […]

Re: Programming the Universe

The one Big Idea I learned from Programming the Universe, by Seth Lloyd, is that random input, processed through rules, creates structured output. Information is encoded in the attributes (the location, velocity, etc of every particle) of physical objects, and the laws of physics operate on them like programming instructions. So for the universe, we […]

Re: The View From the Center of the Universe

In The View from the Center of the Universe, Joel Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams attempt to create a new mythos, that is, a story that explains our world, based on science. Actually, I think they did a better job of explaining what they are trying to say in their various interviews than in the […]