The meaning of it all?

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Richard P. Feynman wrote the book, The meaning of It all: thoughts of a citizen scientist.

I was surprised to see that it came out in 1998, even though the lectures that the book is based on were given in April of 1963. It took 35 years for the lectures to be more widely distributed. Maybe he did not want the lectures to be published at all. It seems like the audio or video of the lectures were found, and the text of his lectures were transcribed into this book. There are many cases where the book reads directly from his audio statements; it was not from his notes. He says “and so on” an awful lot. This is his thought filler like the word ummm for many people. On page 109-110, he said “It’s hard for me to explain how exciting that is, and how interesting. And, I’ve used up more time than I ought.” He continues on till page 117-118 when he says “I also appreciate that I’m talking too long, so I will mention them only. But it’s out of proportion. I wanted to spend more time.” Those phrases would not have been written in his notes.

I also found that the book did not really address the meaning of it all. The first two lectures of the three were better, and I found the last lecture to be long and rambling from one topic to another. On page 61 out of 122 pages (half of the book), he did state that the first two lectures were more organized, and that the last of the three lectures was more off the cuff. Specifically, he said that “I developed them slowly and carefully, completely, in two.” and “So, since I already contracted to give three lectures, the only thing I can do is to give this potpourri of uncomfortable feelings without having them very well organized.” Yes, indeed he did.

He was also of a time when the vast majority of scientists were men, so most of the book reads in a misogynistic way. He just assumed that a scientist is going to be a man.

I agree with several other reviewers that sections one and two are the most coherent, so if you come up on this book, just delve into the first half of the book. I agree with Timothy Ferris when he said section three had a “somewhat ‘ragged’ speech that followed.” It is also “badly dated and atrociously edited” and the book “does not honor his memory.”

Gardner – Are Universes Thicker than Blackberries?

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Martin Gardner is a prolific author. I had no idea that he wrote around 70 (or more) books. He passed away back in 2010, and I always knew of his math and puzzles background, but I did not know that he ventured into other areas like physics, philosophy, some literature, and magic. If you want an overview of his thoughts on all of these areas, this book would be a good place to start.

Based on the title, I thought he would delve more into physics, but he only had one or two chapters on the topic. For the rest of the book consisting of 31 chapters, he expounded on philosophy, religion, mathematics, general science, literature, and various pseudoscientific topics (such as distant healing and ESP.)

Many of the chapters were reprinted from other sources, such as book reviews or some of his magazine articles.

I did learn of a new word – the clerihew, which is “a whimsical, four-line biographical poem.” So says Wikipedia.

Based on this, I would not be afraid to pick up one of his other numerous books.

Two books that I read some or most of

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I read most of this book, Wayfinding: The science and mystery of how humans navigate the world. It came out in 2019, and I started reading it at some point during COVID. I lost interest in the middle of the book, since it started talking about “Dreamtime cartography,” dreaming tracks, and dream songlines from aboriginal cultures in Australia. Then, in the last couple of days, I found the last two or three chapters to be more interesting as the author discusses impacts on global warming, impact of technology like GPS on our wayfinding skills, and a good concluding chapter as an epilogue. I did like the chapters on the wayfinding of cultures in the SE Pacific Islanders and in Northern Canadian native North-Americans. She also did a good job of explaining how the brain worked on wayfinding.

The other book that I will probably never finish is the Pencil: A history of design and circumstance. I had read another book by Henry Petroski, but I just could not get through this one. I do like reading about the history of the pencil, but this was sort of boring. I made it to page 95 out of 434 pages.

Brief history of the future by John Naughton

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The full title of the book is A brief history of the future: From radio days to Internet years in a lifetime. This was written around 1998-1999, and it was published in 2000. That was so long ago, Google existed, but it was not even mentioned in the book. The author talked about how he used Alta Vista as a search engine. There was no blogging, no YouTube, no Facebook, no social media of any kind. I wanted to see if he had any inkling about what the Internet might look like in the future.

The closest he came was on page 265 when he said that “it’s clear that the forces which seek to make money on the Net have become noticeably stronger and more threatening in the years since the Web took off.” Yes, that indeed is the case. in 1997, I mentioned Amazon as a good place to buy books. I did not picture that it would grow to become the behemoth that it is today. I also maybe knew about eBay in the year 2000, but I thought it was a stupid name, and I did not think it would be as big as it is today.

Two pages late on page 267, he brings up Lawrence Lessig, and his 1999 book, Code and other laws of cyberspace. I have yet to read this book, but it sounds interesting. In it, he seems to argue that we had a lot of liberty in using the Internet in the late 1990s, but that liberty is not guaranteed to remain. “Freedoms that were foundational will slowly disappear.” (That is a direct quote from the Lessig book.)

Some other things of note:

  • He is a British author, and he had some strange turns of phrases. For example, on page 75 he wrote “Some of them, indeed, were potty about it.” Potty=happy or giddy? Also, “the folks at MIT had long ago twigged this.” From the context twigged=figured this out, but really, twigged?
  • Much of the language assumes that a dude is using a computer. The remote user sits at a terminal…. For much of the time he… Then he hits perhaps…. another burst of characters which appear on his screen. Only once near the end of the book does he consider that perhaps a woman might be using a computer and/or the Internet.
  • Page 176, he uses the word pukka. What the hell is pukka. I Googled that word to find that it is British slang — that something is genuine, authentic, excellent, or cool.
  • He also seemed a little racist. On page 185, he mentioned how outsiders who wished to have access to ARPANET or Usenet might have been like how “poor kids in black neighbourhoods might peer over the wall at rich kids enjoying the facilities of an expensive tennis training complex.” Really?
  • There was not really much about the fear that publishers had concerning the Internet. Commercial publishers did not get excited by the ability to publish content on the web. None of this angst was mentioned.
  • The website for the book is now dead, but most of it can be found at the Archive. However, his last reference/citation/footnote is saying that he put a picture of his father at http://www.briefhistory.com/da, but that link was never saved. I am curious what that image is.

Overall, it was an interesting read. I learned some stuff about some of the people who were involved in the early development of the communications system. I knew all about Vint Cerf and a little bit about Marc Andreesen, but there is more about them in the book than I have read elsewhere.

Unusual Telescopes by Peter L. Manly

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This book came out in 1991, and I bought a reprinted version that came out in 1999. The text is fine and all, but I found the reprinted images lacking. Below are some images that compares the book I bought with the hardback version (with the red cover) that I got from another library.

There were lots and lots of weird and interesting telescopes listed in there. I think they got most of the weird designs as of 1991.

Another negative is the gendered language used by the author. It was odd to see that still used even just 34 years ago. For example, he wrote this sentence on page 195. “This telescope design also supports the maxim that it is the mark of a good engineer to know where he can cut corners but it is the mark of an excellent engineer to know where he must not cut corners.” Are there no female engineers?

Otherwise, the book is ok. If you want to get a copy of the book for yourself, buy the original hardback if you can.

Timekeepers — Just Timekeepers

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There is an unofficial subtitle to this book by Simon Garfield, how the world became obsessed with time. One can find it on the dust jacket, but it is hard to find and read, since it has blue text with a blue background. A summary says it is an “exploration of the ways we have perceived, contained, and saved time over the last 250 years.” This paragraph can be found at the book website, and some of this text is on page 4 of the book.

“Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.”

I had read most of this book several years ago, but I never blogged about it. I figured I should make sure I read the whole thing and blog about it this time, since I like reading about and thinking about the concept of time.

The book has some British terminology that not everyone knows. On page 13, the author goes to the hospital that “had its own routines and schedules. As did the A & E,” where he sat for a long time. What is A & E? I guess it means the Accident & Emergency room.

Page 21. The most commonly used noun in the English language is time. Looks like many other website confirm that.

Page 35. There is a French group called Fonacon that booed the new year in the transition from 2008 to 2009. “’We’re saying no to the tyranny of time, no to the merciless onslaught of the calendar, and yes to staying put in 2008,’ says a man who identifies himself as Marie-Gabriel, a militant member of the Fonacon group, which is organizing its fourth annual anti–New Year protest.”

Page 46. Start discussion of how the railways forced people to coordinate their clocks across the country of England. Page 52-53. On November 18, 1883, the US changed from having 49 time zones to just 4 in the contiguous 48 (or the 38 states in 1883) states.

Page 130. There is an IWC watch that will show the correct moon phase for the next 577 or so years. What happens then? It will be off a day, and you simply have to take it to an IWC boutique shop in the year 2602 (or so) to get it adjusted.

Page 137. This book, Technique and history of the Swiss watch from its beginnings to the present day, is mentioned. There are two editions of it. One from 1953, and one from 1970.

Page 205. There is a watch by Louis Moinet that has a dinosaur bone on the inside.

Page 213. “Although the majority of the [watch] brands were aimed at overachieving men, overachieving women were also welcomed with promotional baloney.”

On page 222, he mentions a supposedly famous slogan that I had never heard. It is “Refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach.” Huh? I guess — “Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’ was written by Terry Lovelock in 1973, when he was a copywriter at the Collett Dickenson Pearce ad agency. It was a golden time in British advertising, and CDP was at its peak: led by Frank Lowe the agency set a benchmark for creativity in ads.”

Pages 231-232. There are a bunch of time management book recommendations.

Page 243. If you wish to get up an hour or two earlier to start the day, you will also have to ask your servants to prepare your morning tea and breakfast an hour or two earlier than usual. So says Arnold Bennet in his 1910 book, How to live on twenty-four hours a day.

Page 307. A book by Hartmut Rose was mentioned. Beschleunigung: Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. This roughly translates to [Social] Acceleration: The changing structures of time in modernity. The gist of the book is that “the more apps and computer programmes we download to streamline and order our lives, the more we feel like screaming.”

This passage from pages 316 to 317 hit home. “We struggle our whole lives to make enough money, to give enough love, to get the things we think are important, to do the things we think are important, to right some wrongs, to help others, to advance our understanding of the universe, to advance technology and the ease of living — and if we consider ourselves artists we try to create beauty and truth — and we try to do this all in the narrow time span available to us, and then every 100 years we’re all swept away and another bunch of people try to do the same. Time — and not even geologists deep time, just the time that comes after the time we have now — just keeps on rolling right along.” Yup, life is short, try to make the most of the time you have here in the universe.

Standard Handbook for Telescope Making

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I was able to check out the revised 1984 edition of this book by Neale E. Howard. I did not realized that the original edition of the book was from 1959 and it shows. I had not heard of Neale Howard, and I wanted to see how this book compared to some others by Allyn J. Thompson, Jean Texereau, and Albert G. Ingalls.

While the revised edition does include information on some of the telescope companies and part suppliers that appeared between 1959 and 1984 (with addresses but no phone numbers), I found that some/much of the book had not really been updated.

They did include some pages that mentioned the new (at the time) Dobsonian mounts on pages 196-200, but they paid it short shrift. The book starts by assuming that the builder will make an equatorial mount for a 8 inch f/7 telescope so that it can easily track the stars with one motion.

I did not realize that the book came out in 1959 at first. It wasn’t until page 12 when I saw the text that said that the Yerkes Observatory was built sixty years ago. That did not make sense. It was not built in the mid 1920s, it was from the late 1800s. So, in looking at the copyright page, it said it was originally published in 1959. Ah, yeah, now this makes sense.

With images like the one below on page 173, it certainly looks like the book came out in 1959. (Sorry, kid, you gotta wear a tie for this photoshoot.)

Thus, some of the book was updated between 1959 and 1984, but not the whole thing.

I would also not recommend following the 18 supposedly simple steps for silvering a mirror as given on pages 333 to 335. That process is probably best left to mirror coating professionals.

However, the advice on how to grind a mirror, how make a pitch lap, and how to polish and figure a mirror had not really changed in the intervening years (and to the year 2025), so that section of the book still seems relevant.

Overall, if you want to grind, polish, and figure your own telescope mirror, then this book might provide some good advice for you.

The Unknown Universe by Stuart Clark

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I probably picked up this ex-library book from the JCPL at their whale of used book sale. The full title is The Unknown Universe: A New Exploration of Time, Space, and Modern Cosmology.

I found the writing to be comprehensible to people with a sciencey background, but one does not need a science background to understand much of the material. I was worried it was going to be a little boring — covering too much of the basics, but he added in new details and comments about people and concepts that I had not encountered before.

Page 31. This quote is interesting by Georg Busch. Comets are “‘formed by the ascension from Earth of human sins and wickedness, making a sort of gas which was then set on fire by the anger of God. This poisonous stuff’, he added, ‘falls down on people’s heads, and causes all kinds of unpleasant phenomena, such as diseases, sudden death, bad weather and Frenchmen.” (The translation in the book is slightly different from what came from that website.)

The second sticky note was page 159. Another thing caught my attention. Inertial mass and gravitational mass appear identical. He said that “this is the most mystifying thing in the whole universe.” I had not ever considered the fact that inertial mass might be different from gravitational mass. I just assumed they were the same, since they are defined to have the same value, thus considered to be equivalent.

Page 218-219. Georges Lemaitre beat Hubble in finding the expansion of the universe. He wrote in 1927 the following.

(PDF link) “Un Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extra-galactiques“. Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles. A (in French). 47: 49–59. 1927a. Four years later, it was translated as: “A Homogeneous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radius Accounting for the Radial Velocity of Extra-galactic Nebulae”. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 91 (5): 483–490. 1931. (These cites were grabbed from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre.) When it was translated, they made it seem like this was confirming the Hubble data since they left out some information, but this 1927 article should have been found and read by others before Hubble got famous for his research of 1929.

Page 221. Einstein was supposed to have said for the first time “God does not play with dice” (or something like that) at the Solvay conference of 1927. The author noted that Neils Bohr replied with “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

Page 223. In 1924, a Swedish astronomer named Knut Lundmark had estimated the expansion rate of the universe, and this was three years before Lemaitre, and five years before Hubble. It is now about 1% off of the mark. He was much more accurate than both Hubble and Lemaitre, but he has not gotten the accolades for it.

Page 244. The half-life of a proton is something like 1.29 x 10^34 years. It might be now 1.67 x 10^34 years. No citation was given, but the Wikipedia page seems to cover it good enough.

Page 258. Thomas Buchert has a theory of inhomogeneous cosmology that does not need dark energy to explain the supposed acceleration of the expansion of the universe. In 2016, he said that dark energy will be gone by 2026, but I am not sure that will be the case. Instead of treating the whole universe as having an average density, voids and strands of galaxies (and clusters) are considered to have different average densities. This changes the calculations for supernovae distances.

Page 259. David Wiltshire. Universe as a timescape. From that same Wikipedia article on inhomogeneous cosmology, “David Wiltshire proposed a model (timescape cosmology) in which backreactions caused time to run more slowly or, in voids, more quickly, thus leading supernovae observed in 1998 to be thought to be further away than they were.[8][9]” Does time run differently in he voids between the galaxies?

Page 292-293. Here are a bunch of the books that he recommends for further reading. Of course, he recommends 5 of his other books. I might try to read his “The Day without Yesterday” since that was a good chapter in this book. I assume he will go into more detail about the Big Bang.

Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder

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The full title is Existential physics: a scientists guide to life’s biggest questions. This one came out in 2022.

I read this one right after reading Sabine’s previous book entitled Lost in Math. This was a good followup. As an amateur astronomer and a physics major from college a LONG time ago, I often have my head in the clouds and I ask myself some of the same deep questions that are posed in her new book. Some of those questions are:

“Does the past still exist? Do particles think? Was the universe made for us? Has physics ruled out free will? Will we ever have a theory of everything?” and — Does the universe think? Are humans predictable? What’s the purpose of anything anyway?

I did not mark as many pages to comment on as I did with the Lost in Math book, but I found this one just as enjoyable.

Starting on page 95, she interviewed David Deutsch. It was noted that he wrote some books, The Fabric of Reality and the Beginning of Infinity. They sound interesting.

Chapter 6 (page 125-) – Has physics ruled out free will? This depends on what you mean by free will. In short, she thinks that the answer to that is no. She wrote:

“The major problem with discussions about free will is that philosophers have put forward a heap of definitions that have nothing to do with what nonphilosophers think free will means. I am tempted to write “normal people” as opposed to ‘philosophers,’ but maybe that’s a little uncharitable. And I don’t want to be uncharitable. Certainly not.” More of this chapter was transcribed at this blog post.

I liked this line on page 134 — “If you tell someone you think free will is real because the renormalization group equations might run into an essential singularity, you might as well paint GEEK on your forehead.”

Brief answer on this question (page 141) — “According to the currently established laws of nature, the future is determined by the past, except for occasional quantum events that we cannot influence. Whether you take that to mean that free will does not exist depends on your definition of free will.” Not sure I agree with her on this.

Page 191 – Zeeya Merali wrote a book — Big Bang in a little room: the Quest to Create New Universes.

On page 217, she starts an epilogue. She noted that physicists who propose unobservable parallel universe, they are not using science. “It’s religion masquerading as science under the guise of mathematics.”

However, on page 219, she says she agrees with Stephen Jay Gould on how religion and science are two “nonoverlapping magisteria.” I do not agree with her on that point. I think that religions overlap (or try to overlap) into science all the time. It was a mystery how thunder and lightning worked, and it was a mystery how alcohol was made as literal spirits. Over time, science has shown how weather works, and how alcohol can be made. Science continues to explain things that religions do not, but religions never explain things (yet) that science could not. But I do agree that there are some questions that are asked by both religious and scientific people all the same, and we do not have good answers yet, or some questions may not be answerable — ever. Both groups want to make sense of the world, and to make sense of how people and groups of people behave.

She concludes with “So, yes, we are bags of atoms crawling around on a pale blue dot in the outer spiral arm of a remarkably unremarkable galaxy. And yet we are so much more than this.”

Sorry, but I prefer to think of myself as a meat robot with a skeleton and a brain, but anyway, yes, we are more than just those things.

Lost in Math by Sabine Hossenfelder

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The full title of the book is Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray. She wrote this back in 2016-2017, and it was published in 2018. She interviewed about a dozen researchers to get their takes on the concept of beauty in physics. In 2020, she provided an update to the book as it was going to paperback. She has current blog posts – essentially daily! Peter Woit also wrote a good overview/review of the book.

She feels that physics is losing its way, because it is becoming too dependent upon supposedly beautiful mathematical concepts, and less upon data derived from experiment. Physicists are not following the scientific method. At the small end of the physics spectrum where subatomic particles are being researched, physicists are starting to hit a wall where the energies needed to break apart protons and neutrons are getting to be too high.

There are problems where supersymmetry (SUSY) and string theory just cannot be verified with physical experiments. While the mathematics of the theories may look good, it is extremely difficult to verify with experimental data.

She is also not a fan of the multiverse idea, since that is near-impossible to verify — right now anyway.

I really like the subtitles of each chapter, such as Chapter 2 What a Wonderful World In which I read a lot of books about dead people and find that everyone likes pretty ideas but that pretty ideas sometimes work badly. At a conference I begin to worry that physicists are about to discard the scientific method. Or, Chapter 4 Cracks in the Foundations In which I meet with Nima Arkani-Hamed and do my best to accept that nature isn’t natural, everything we learn is awesome, and that nobody gives a fuck what I think. Other chapter titles can be found here. Most of the chapters had three or four bullet points at the end as nice summaries to tie things up.

In any case, I highly enjoyed the book. I am looking forward to reading her newer book, Existential Physics: A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.

Some of my favorite quotes are:

“Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed. And they’re not even good at that. In the Multiverse, you can’t explain the value of parameters; at best you can estimate their likelihood. But there are many ways to not explain something.” (page 108)

“The canary isn’t doing well. You’d think that scientists, with the professional task of being objective, would protect their creative freedom and rebel against the need to please colleagues in order to secure continued funding. They don’t.” (Page 197)

While talking with Katie Mack (future author of The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)), Sabine said “I think nature has more beauty in store for us. But beauty, like happiness, can’t be found by complaining about its absence.” (Page 209)

“But even with good problems and clearly stated assumptions, there can still be many mathematically possible solutions. In the end the only way to find out which theory is correct is to check whether it describes nature; non-empirical theory assessment will not do. In the search for a theory of quantum gravity and for a better formalism of quantum physics, the only way forward is to derive and test different predictions. And so, my third and final lesson is this: Observational guidance is necessary. Physics isn’t math. It’s choosing the right math.” (Page 234)