Does Gödel Matter? by Jordan Ellenberg (reviewing Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel by Rebecca Goldstein)
The reticent and relentlessly abstract logician Kurt Gödel might seem an unlikely candidate for popular appreciation. But that's what Rebecca Goldstein aims for in her new book Incompleteness, an account of Gödel's most famous theorem, which was announced 75 years ago this October. Goldstein calls Gödel's incompleteness theorem "the third leg, together with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Einstein's relativity, of that tripod of theoretical cataclysms that have been felt to force disturbances deep down in the foundations of the 'exact sciences.' "
The Original Computer Geek by Clive Thomson (reviewing Dark Hero Of The Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman)
To be a truly famous scientist, you need to have a hit single. Einstein had E = mc2. Newton had the apple and gravity. Even the lesser rock-star scientists have one shining achievement for which they're known -- such as Niels Bohr's theory of the atom.
But there's another kind of scientist who never breaks through, usually because while his discovery is revolutionary it's also maddeningly hard to summarize in a simple sentence or two. He never produces a catchy hit single. He's more like a back-room influencer: his work inspires dozens of other innovators who absorb the idea, produce more easily comprehensible innovations and become more famous than their mentor could have dreamed. Find an influencer, and you'll find a deeply bitter man.
Norbert Wiener -- the inventor of ''cybernetics'' -- is precisely this type of scientist. Odds are that you are only dimly aware of cybernetics, if at all. (A friend asked me, ''Isn't that like Dianetics?'') ''Dark Hero of the Information Age,'' by the journalists Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, intends to correct this, but their book struggles with the circular tautologies of fame: it must continually plead the case of why the guy ought to have been better known.
In roughly reverse-chronological order:
Souls in the Great Machine, Sean McMullen [Sci-fi lovers will get a kick out of this post-apocalyptic yarn where some humans are indeed cogs in the machine (or, more accurately, adders, multipliers, etc.]Also, I perused back-issues of Foreign Affairs borrowed from my father-in-law (only 15$/year for students!), PC Gamer and Scientific American. A tip from a recent issue of SciAm: try Dreyer’s Light Ice cream. It is made by a new process that creates smaller air-bubbles and ice-crystals, thus enhancing the creaminess and minimizing both fat and calories (no crappy fat and sugar substitutes).The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon [A quick light mystery told from the POV of an Asperger's sufferer.]
The Cassini Division, Ken MacLeod [Imaginative space adventure, featuring a formidable heroine, politico-philosophical asides and smart space suits.]
The Fabric of Reality, David Deutsch [Deutsch tries to weave together Popper, evolutionary biology, quantum computing and the many worlds interpretation of quantum phenomena, with mixed results. MW is still hard to swallow]
Prisoner’s Dilemma, William Poundstone [Part Von Neumann biography, part cold war history, part Game Theory primer; all fun.]
Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener [A classic text from the American genius with an unfortunate name. Where successful, it was subsumed.]
Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks [Funny, sometimes insightful book by NY Times' bush apologist.]
Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell [Vivid portrait of war in its initial ideals and inevitable squalor]
The Dreams of Reason, Heinz Pagels [Pagels had a gift for compelling metaphor, and accessible prose. Here he outlines complex systems theory.]
Cosmic Code, Heinz Pagels [As above, but reviewing modern physics.]
Skepticism Inc., Bo Fowler [Hilariously absurd tale of a future where people "put their money where their metaphysics are", as told by a sentient shopping cart. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams]
The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon [Epic story set in the golden age of comics, brimming with pathos and imagination. Read it!]
reread Quicksilver and read The Confusion, Neil Stephenson [First two of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. The first’s flavor is scientific, the second economic; both are excellent. Not for those with short attention spans.]
reread Feynman and Computation, Anthony J. G. Hey (Ed) [Excellent compilation of papers memorializing Feynman while exploring the physical and conceptual limits of computation. ]
Reality Rules 2: The Frontier, John Casti
Computation, Dynamics, and Cognition, Giunti, Marco
Logic and Structure, Dirk Van Dalen
Computability: Computable Functions Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics, Walter A. Carnielli & Richard L. Epstein
Brains, Machines and Mathematics , Michael Arbib
Representation and Invariance of Scientific Structures, Patrick Suppes
Game Theory Evolving, Herbert Gintis
An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, Melanie Mitchell
Causality : Models, Reasoning, and Inference, Judea Pearl
An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications, Ming Li, Paul Vitanyi
Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Dan Sperber, et al
Decision Theory as Philosophy, Mark Kaplan
The Logic of Reliable Inquiry, Kevin Kelly
Take this long list and highlight everything you've read (via Pharyngula who, in turn, picked it up from Reflections in d minor).
Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son
Some of you may remember—I started college as an English major. American and ancient literature were favorites. I never got around to those illustrious Ruskies. Pity.
The New York Review of Books features Freeman J. Dyson's review of Debunked!. Here is a particularly interesting exherpt:
The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood's Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stat-ing his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but oc-curs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle."Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law.
Substantive content (Musings on Physical Church-Turing Thesis, A Critique of Conceptual Analysis, The Culture of Fear and more) will come later. For now, books I desperately want:
An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, Melanie Mitchell
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, Rudolf Carnap
Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, Wojciech H. Zurek (editor)
Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge, Deborah G. Mayo
Reality Rules 2, the Frontier, John Casti
The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudo Problems of Philosophy, Rudolf Carnap
The Logical Syntax of Language, Rudolf Carnap
The Mathematical Theory of Information, Jan Kahre
Representations, Targets, and Attitudes, Robert Cummins
I am currently engrossed in Stephenson’s newest book. I’ve enjoyed what I have read so far—scientific intrigue, Newton’s dispute with Liebniz, a young Ben Franklin and the ancestors of the main characters from Cryptonomicon. Dani has found the beginning to be a little strained in its efforts to explain the historical background, but it gets better. Interestingly, he has started a metaweb like Wikipedia containing information relevant to the book (character info, theories, historical personages…). I am not sure why Stephenson didn’t just make his FAQ a node in Wikipedia rather than launching his own site.
Damn I love Greg Egan's writing. He has two recent stories online: Oracle and Singleton. I should warn that he is a cerebral writer and may demand too much of some readers.
I have not read Singleton yet, but Oracle features alternate worlds were wildly divergent minds (I won't say who) meet on the ground between faith and science. Excellent.
Also, his book Permutation City is a mindbender well worth a read or two.
Dani and I have been reading The Portable Dorothy Parker on and off before going to sleep. We adore Parker’s wit, and cutting humor. While reading her review of "House at Pooh Corner" (1928), which can be summed up in one line "Tonstant weader fwowed up.", it occurred to me that Parker remains relatively obscure, while Pooh is a childhood staple. A commercial behemoth dispensing sentimental treacle and a bohemian trash talking wit—which will we remember as a culture? A quick google search (argumentum ad googleum?) shows 621,000 hits for "Winnie the Pooh" and have 86,900 hits for "Dorothy Parker". This does not bode well.
Where have all the cynics gone?
Addendum: We recently dubbed our bathroom Pooh corner.
Publisher John Brockman and his cadre of intellectuals/media darlings have produced a new book. Having followed the content of edge.org, I realize that it consists of interviews and essays freely available on the website—hardly worth purchasing to someone with access to college printing facilities. Ahem. However, I do urge you guys to peruse the online content since it addresses in a (mostly) readable way some of the most interesting theories and ideas from science: quantum computing, (Non-pseudoscientific/Jungian) synchronicity, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, the many-worlds hypothesis, evolutionary biology, etc. Better, you should read the author’s original books. This may be asking too much of you, though.
Keeping in mind that those who attempt to define the Zeitgeist are almost always wrong, these essays do present a wide-angle view of what Brockman calls the New Humanists—an idea he has been peddling this idea for a while now. In the Third Culture he proposes much the same thing. Alluding to C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures—referring to the problematic divide between the humanities and the sciences—Brockman suggests there is a new synthesis of the two cultures a.k.a. the third culture, the new humanists. What the ultimate significance of the Neohumanists remains to be seen, but I am just happy that serious ideas from science (and a few from philosophy) are being disseminated to the masses.
I am three-fourths through "Cryptonomicon". This is my third reading. It has nearly everything: cryptography, hackers, WWII, data-havens, Nazi gold, lawyers, Alan Turing, General MacArthur, role-playing geeks, morphine addicts and young Ronald Reagan’s pompadour. Go find it and read it if you haven’t yet.
I’m done with "The Big U". It is apparent that this is his first book—the writing is just as amusing and quirky (full of geek fetishism) as in his other books, but it lacks clarity and subtlety. It is an entertaining send-up of college life, though.