Goodreads | Bruce's review

Bruce's review

A Briefer History of Time
by Stephen W. Hawking

[close]

blog this review

Copy/paste the text below into your blog.

<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2094.A_Briefer_History_of_Time?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="A Briefer History of Time" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1159814394m/2094.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2094.A_Briefer_History_of_Time?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">A Briefer History of Time</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1401.Stephen_W_Hawking">Stephen W. Hawking</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/18500660?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 4 of 5 stars This will be a shorter-than-usual review for me, but it doesn't seem necessary to add much more to the many excellent reviews of this book. This is the Hawking-Mlodinow easy-reader (because his best-seller A Brief History of Time was bought to make people seem better informed, but not actually really read. The challenge here was to comprehensively and cogently present complex concepts like relativity, quantum theory, string theory, etc. without using *any* numbers whatsoever (not even powers of ten!) and yet without coming off as patronizing. After a few initial hiccups (the first chapter's historical survey of the evolution of human understanding was a touch treacly and almost lost me), the book completely and remarkably succeeds at this.
 
 Two minor quibbles:
 (1) The illustrations, while very pretty (and all in color!), add absolutely nothing to the text. Rather than seek to use pictures to flesh out the more difficult-to-grasp ideas (e.g., particles vs. waves, what Feynman diagrams mean and why or how they are used, why we might view a superstring as a particle, etc.), the drawings are irrelevant window-dressing (a magnifying glass next to a telescope to show the range of scale explored by modern physics, a "Dark Side of the Moon" album cover to accompany a discussion of how starlight can be analyzed to learn what elements the star contains and how quickly it is receding from us, a cutesy drawing of Hawking being pulled toward a photograph of Marilyn Monroe to show... attractive force?). Hey, pobody's nerfect, but this really seems like a tremendous missed opportunity. Had the authors not seen NASM's "Adventures of Priscilla the Proton?" A classic. Anyway...
 
 (2) In a weird attempt to justify their life's work, the authors write at length in the opening and concluding chapters about both the place of/rationale for God in the universe (drawing no potentially controversial conclusions) and the "uniqueness" of humankind. It's ironic, considering that their consideration of Ptolemy, Galileo, LaPlace (and Occam!) had already long removed us vain and self-congratulatory Earthpeople from our place at the center of the universe. So why perpetuate the "anthropic principle" fallacy to answer the unanswerable philosophical question, "Why is the universe the way we see it?" (p. 130). Out of billions and billions of possible configurations of the whole shootin' match we call existence, this one happened to arise. Freakish coincidence? Not really. After all, if we take as our premise that *AT LEAST ONE* configuration *MUST* emerge out of billions and billions of possible configurations of the whole shootin' match we call existence (the alternative being no existence of anything), then to do otherwise is to beg the premise. Presumably the gamma-tasting collective consciousness of silicon, potassium, chlorine, and fluorine living across a ring-system near-zero-temperature orbiting a red giant in some far distant galaxy perceives the remarkableness of a universe that makes possible its best of all possible worlds?
 
 Logic doesn't appear to be Hawking's forte when it comes to seeking existential self-justification. The answer is neither "We see it this way because we exist and that's what we must expect our environment to look like for our existence to be possible," nor "If the universe were otherwise we would not exist," but because we don't know how to describe it otherwise. Our descriptions are but metadata we superimpose on the data, why conflate the two? I should hope that we are ever-more-detailed, precise, and accurate in matching our descriptions to the reality of our environment on the assumptions that (a) we are aiming at this conceit, (b) we desire consistency, and (c) we (hopefully and when we don't try to make the data fit our theories instead of the other way around) are honest enough to discard those outdated models that don't seem to gibe with what our extended senses have recorded or which others without ulterior motives can independently confirm. Not to get on my high horse here (who am I ranting at, anyway?) but except in philosophy, our later identification of a tree as a yew or a hemlock and our theoretical use of a virtual graviton has no impact on the squirrel who gets conked on the head by a falling cone. Unless we are sharing a mass delusion straight out of Philip K. Dick, the universe appears to exist independently of and without concern for our appreciation of it. The ol' Trekkie-ism, "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it," is inherently contradictory. Better to say, "It's life, Jim, but not as we knew it." God bless us, we're always learning.
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/897874?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Bruce's review
rating:
recommended for: everyone who has not yet made it to a grad-school-level physics class

This will be a shorter-than-usual review for me, but it doesn't seem necessary to add much more to the many excellent reviews of this book. This is the Hawking-Mlodinow easy-reader (because his best-seller A Brief History of Time was bought to make people seem better informed, but not actually really read. The challenge here was to comprehensively and cogently present complex concepts like relativity, quantum theory, string theory, etc. without using *any* numbers whatsoever (not even powers of ten!) and yet without coming off as patronizing. After a few initial hiccups (the first chapter's historical survey of the evolution of human understanding was a touch treacly and almost lost me), the book completely and remarkably succeeds at this.

Two minor quibbles:
(1) The illustrations, while very pretty (and all in color!), add absolutely nothing to the text. Rather than seek to use pictures to flesh out the more difficult-to-grasp ideas (e.g., particles vs. waves, wh...more This will be a shorter-than-usual review for me, but it doesn't seem necessary to add much more to the many excellent reviews of this book. This is the Hawking-Mlodinow easy-reader (because his best-seller A Brief History of Time was bought to make people seem better informed, but not actually really read. The challenge here was to comprehensively and cogently present complex concepts like relativity, quantum theory, string theory, etc. without using *any* numbers whatsoever (not even powers of ten!) and yet without coming off as patronizing. After a few initial hiccups (the first chapter's historical survey of the evolution of human understanding was a touch treacly and almost lost me), the book completely and remarkably succeeds at this.

Two minor quibbles:
(1) The illustrations, while very pretty (and all in color!), add absolutely nothing to the text. Rather than seek to use pictures to flesh out the more difficult-to-grasp ideas (e.g., particles vs. waves, what Feynman diagrams mean and why or how they are used, why we might view a superstring as a particle, etc.), the drawings are irrelevant window-dressing (a magnifying glass next to a telescope to show the range of scale explored by modern physics, a "Dark Side of the Moon" album cover to accompany a discussion of how starlight can be analyzed to learn what elements the star contains and how quickly it is receding from us, a cutesy drawing of Hawking being pulled toward a photograph of Marilyn Monroe to show... attractive force?). Hey, pobody's nerfect, but this really seems like a tremendous missed opportunity. Had the authors not seen NASM's "Adventures of Priscilla the Proton?" A classic. Anyway...

(2) In a weird attempt to justify their life's work, the authors write at length in the opening and concluding chapters about both the place of/rationale for God in the universe (drawing no potentially controversial conclusions) and the "uniqueness" of humankind. It's ironic, considering that their consideration of Ptolemy, Galileo, LaPlace (and Occam!) had already long removed us vain and self-congratulatory Earthpeople from our place at the center of the universe. So why perpetuate the "anthropic principle" fallacy to answer the unanswerable philosophical question, "Why is the universe the way we see it?" (p. 130). Out of billions and billions of possible configurations of the whole shootin' match we call existence, this one happened to arise. Freakish coincidence? Not really. After all, if we take as our premise that *AT LEAST ONE* configuration *MUST* emerge out of billions and billions of possible configurations of the whole shootin' match we call existence (the alternative being no existence of anything), then to do otherwise is to beg the premise. Presumably the gamma-tasting collective consciousness of silicon, potassium, chlorine, and fluorine living across a ring-system near-zero-temperature orbiting a red giant in some far distant galaxy perceives the remarkableness of a universe that makes possible its best of all possible worlds?

Logic doesn't appear to be Hawking's forte when it comes to seeking existential self-justification. The answer is neither "We see it this way because we exist and that's what we must expect our environment to look like for our existence to be possible," nor "If the universe were otherwise we would not exist," but because we don't know how to describe it otherwise. Our descriptions are but metadata we superimpose on the data, why conflate the two? I should hope that we are ever-more-detailed, precise, and accurate in matching our descriptions to the reality of our environment on the assumptions that (a) we are aiming at this conceit, (b) we desire consistency, and (c) we (hopefully and when we don't try to make the data fit our theories instead of the other way around) are honest enough to discard those outdated models that don't seem to gibe with what our extended senses have recorded or which others without ulterior motives can independently confirm. Not to get on my high horse here (who am I ranting at, anyway?) but except in philosophy, our later identification of a tree as a yew or a hemlock and our theoretical use of a virtual graviton has no impact on the squirrel who gets conked on the head by a falling cone. Unless we are sharing a mass delusion straight out of Philip K. Dick, the universe appears to exist independently of and without concern for our appreciation of it. The ol' Trekkie-ism, "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it," is inherently contradictory. Better to say, "It's life, Jim, but not as we knew it." God bless us, we're always learning....less

Like this review? yes (1 person liked it) flag

comments (showing 1-3 of 3)

newest »

date

message 1: by Trevor

06/18/2008 09:27PM

Wonderful review - this version seems to cover more than the Brief History did. Must have a look. I found your descriptions of the illustrations a delight - worth checking out the book just for those alone.