pretty interesting! i'm not sure how i feel about this -- i don't read much sci-fi, so elements of the style were quite grating. also, what was up with the liquidgoo on the warehouse roof? i loved a few of the lines, though: "nothing could have lived up to four thousand years of waiting, except perhaps an original theorem." also, gotta love the reference to Thorne+Wheeler's Gravitation at the end.
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Supposedly "the hardest science fiction ever written," I'll freely admit that I'm reading this mainly to sit around afterwards and congratulate myself on how fucking smart I am, and because I've spent all afternoon rereading the papers of mad German computer scientist/physicist Jürgen Schmidhuber and some Freeman Dyson and am feeling the old digital physics monkey on my back (I still think I might one day reinvest myself in said field, once I've set supercomputer design on its head). We'll see how it goes; I'm not a big scifi fan by any means.

Funny reviews on Amazon:

"Not great literature in the classic sense, but there's a lot of intriguing speculation here. The would-be reader should be warned, though: you will not fully appreciate this book unless you've made significant progress toward a degree in physics or a related field! (You could also get away with just reading a lot of pop science, provided you've read enough to be familiar with ideas like decoherence and superselection.) This truly is the hardest SF I've read."

"Woosh. That was the sound of this book going right over my head.
I love hard sci-fi, don't get me wrong. I've read plenty of layman's books on quantum physics and consider myself reasonably well-informed on science in general. Still, large chunks of "Schild's Ladder" were basically gibberish to me, and the book was actually somewhat of a chore to get through. I haven't had that experience in a long time."

hehe, we'll see! Manny, I'm kind of surprised you haven't tackled Egan...