the Kirkreview
  • Home
  • Blog
  • reviews
    • evolution >
      • The Poetic Species
      • The Reef
      • The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet
      • The Compatibility Gene
      • Last Ape Standing
      • Secret Chambers: The Inside Story of Cells & Complex Life
      • Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
      • What a Plant Knows
      • Gifts of the Crow: How Perception, Emotion, and Thought Allow Smart Birds to Behave Like Humans
      • Bird Sense: What It's Like to Be a Bird
      • The Social Conquest of Earth
      • Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins
      • Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
      • My Beautiful Genome
      • Mindfield
      • The Mysteries of Metamorphosis
      • The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore
      • The Problems of Evolution
      • The Problems of Biology
      • The Double Helix
    • physics, cosmology and astronomy >
      • The Universe
      • Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn
      • Gravity's Engines
      • Erwin Schrodinger and the Quantum Revolution
      • Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbruck, George Gamow, and the Origins of Genomics and Big Bang Cosmology
      • Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the God Particle
      • 4% universe
      • The Elegant Universe
    • planet science >
      • Earthmasters
      • The Goldilocks Planet
      • The Universe Within
      • Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883
    • brain science >
      • The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them
      • Waking Up
    • ancient history >
      • ghosts of cannae
      • scipio africanus
      • universe of stone
    • OUP Very Short Introducions >
      • Networks
      • Nelson Mandela
      • Fossils
      • The Animal Kingdom
      • Cancer
      • Magnetism
    • Scandinavian Noir
    • Essays >
      • Ausralian Quarterly Essays >
        • Quarterly Essay 59: Faction Man: Bill Shorten's path to power by David Marr
        • Quarterly Essay 58: Blood Year: Terror and the Islamic State by David Kilcullen
        • Quarterly Essay 57: Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly by Karen Hitchcock
        • Quarterly Essay 56: Clivosaurus: The Politics of Clive Palmer
        • Quarterly Essay 55: A Rightful Place: Race, recognition and a more complete Commonwealth
        • Quarterly Essay 54: Dragon's Tail: The Lucky Country after the China Boom
        • Quarterly Essay 53: That Sinking Feeling: Asylum seekers and the search for the Indonesian solution
        • Quarterly Essay 52 Found in Translation: In Praise of a Plural World
        • Quarterly Essay 51 The Prince: Faith, Abuse and George Pell
        • Quarterly Essay 50 Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny
        • Quarterly Essay 49 Not Dead Yet
        • Quarterly Essay 48 After the Future: Australia's New Extinction Crisis
        • Quarterly Essay 47: Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott
        • Quarterly Essay 46 Great Expectations: Government, Entitlement and an Angry Nation
        • Quarterly Essay 37 What's Right? The Future of Conservatism in Australia
  • creative
    • poetry
    • stories
    • essays
  • where next?
    • trajectories
  • contact Kirkreview
    • editing
  • climate

 Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn by Amanda Gefter

16/7/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
"Reality is radically observer-dependent" - indeed this book is entangled with its key finding. Concurring with most reviews, I consider it to be a fabulous, explorative, stream of consciousness narrative but, and this is probably a good "but", it is heavy going in places. And it is a BIG book. Sure, it contains around 400 pages which is not enormous, it has medium size print and the language is not difficult. It is very well written. The reason it is BIG is because the topics covered address the very meaning of reality and Gefter explains her thoughts, and those of others, with wonderful clarity. You stop and reread something, for example about invariant and observer independent reality, or about event horizons or light cones, because Gefter offers one of the most fresh and incisive descriptions you will hear. Inevitably there will be topics that are covered superficially in order to get to another issue. In a book that introduces so much about modern physics and cosmology in a way that the reader gets a comfortable feel for it, flitting over a few bits is fine.

Gefter's journey through the big questions of physics and cosmology can be summed up by her quest to understand the words of her central character, physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in describing the universe as a "self excited loop" and his obsession that "the boundary of a boundary is zero". After Wheeler died, Gefter and her father read Wheeler's vast collection of journals seeking answers. In many ways, Gefter's book is like the Wheeler journals, it is an enquiring narrative of her journey to gain an inkling of the basis of reality.

`Trespassing ...' is embellished with a very helpful glossary, Notes and a well considered `Suggestions for further reading'. However, the warm and entertaining narrative is the strength of Gefter's book. Her journey, accompanied often by her father, to understand reality through discussions with the great thinkers in modern physics is enlightening. Many of the players, for example John Wheeler and Leonard Susskind, emerge pretty much as you would expect them - amazing thinkers - but many others are surprisingly different and are characterised wittily by Gefter. Her allegorical journeys through rat-holes in London and nerdy colloquia reinforce her story of the quest for the `ultimate reality' (this being the title of the first conference she conned her way into, although "ultimate" would be a term the reader will discover to be very relative).

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    The Kirkreview blog offers discussion on writers and writing, as well as the ephemeral and quotidian influences that shape this art. And there's commentary. The rest of the Kirkreview site contains hard-nosed reviews.

    Archives

    April 2016
    March 2016
    September 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly