Bill DeSmedt's Blog: The Accidental Author, page 3
August 4, 2021
The Making of a Thriller: Part I
Two scenes and a thought experiment, that’s where my second technothriller, Dualism, started.
For a while there after I finished writing Singularity, I thought I was done writing, period. I’d exorcised this incubus of an idea that’d had me hagridden for the better part of seven years (you can check out my “Accidental Author” blog on GoodReads for the whole spine-chilling story), by the simple expedient of getting it out of my head and onto paper. Only …
Only the problem was that Jon Knox and Marianna Bonaventure — who’d started out as little more than clotheshorses on which to hang the fabric of the plot — had, by the time I was done, grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I’d become voyeuristically entangled in their interpersonal dynamics, the evolution of their relationship, the whole question they raised and embodied of whether relationships are even possible in this post-modern era (in case you hadn’t guessed, the title of that first book and now this one too are allusions to stages in their growth toward couplehood). And so, just as I’d written Singularity “to see how things came out in the end,” so too I was moved to write Dualism to see where Jon and Marianna went from there.
Only there was an additional problem: namely, I had no idea what Dualism was about. What I did have was these two scenes. One was very old, perhaps the first piece of creative writing I’d done since Freshman English, and that prompted by a loss that metaphorically kicked my heart out of my ribcage, like the hind hoof of one of Larry Niven’s tripodal Puppeteers. The other, comprising the first lines I’d written specifically with Dualism in mind, was evoked by a favorite song: Andrea Boccelli’s “Il Mare Calmo della Sera” (“The Calm Sea of Evening”).
So, two scenes, not altogether unrelated, though damned if I could figure how to relate them.
And the thought experiment? That’s the oldest thread of all. I’ll unravel it in a bit more detail later. For now, suffice it to say that, in the end, it was the key to weaving those two scenes together, and much else besides.
Now, all I needed was a MacGuffin. Which, of course, raises the question:
What is a MacGuffin anyway?
Well, the man who popularized the term, the thriller-master himself, Alfred Hitchcock, used to explain it with a story about two men on a train.
One of them notices that the other has stowed a strange-looking object up in the baggage rack and the following dialogue ensues:
“Say,” says the first man, “just what is that thing?”
“Oh, that’s a MacGuffin,” comes the laconic response.
“So,” the first man persists, “what’s a MacGuffin?”
“It’s a mechanism for hunting lions on the moors of Scotland,” the proud MacGuffin-owner explains.
“But,” the first man objects, “there are no lions on the moors of Scotland.”
“Well, then,” replies the second, “that’s no MacGuffin.”
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that a MacGuffin is nothing at all, a fiction, a figment of the imagination. It’s also what Hitchcock called any plot device that all the characters in a story are vying for and striving to possess, but about which the audience could not care less.
The textbook example is Hitchcock’s own film Notorious, starring Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Though the film itself wouldn’t premiere until 1946, the script was already under development in 1944 and — here’s the kicker — it featured uranium ore as its McGuffin nearly a year before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. When the studio (and the government) raised understandable concerns about this particular plot-point, Hitchcock told them “the gimmick was unimportant,” and blithely offered to substitute industrial diamonds for the radioactives.
One MacGuffin, in other words, was pretty much as good as another.
That was then, this is now.
Blame it on that selfsame atom bomb, perhaps, or on decades of Cold War, or maybe just a heightened appreciation for the precariousness of existence in general, but modern readers and moviegoers seem to have lost the ability to distance themselves so nonchalantly from the perils shown on the screen or printed on the page. Nowadays, we have come to expect thrillers where we do care about the device that drives the plot — not least because said device represents a credible threat to our nation, our way of life, or, best (or rather, worst) of all, our whole world.
This was the context in which I went hunting for Dualism’s MacGuffin. Nor did it help that Singularity, the first book in the Archon Sequence, had steered a course between the Scylla of nuclear holocaust and the Charybdis of a primordial black hole poised to swallow the planet. Kind of set a high bar for coming up with an encore.
Well, as alluded to above, there’s no end of credible existential threats in our modern world.
Did you know, for instance, that electromagnetic pulses generated by high-altitude nuclear detonations could fry the entire US power grid, leading to consequences that a 2008 Congressional Commission described as “catastrophic,” insofar as “many people may ultimately die for lack of the basic elements necessary to sustain life”?[1] Or that, around the time of Dualism’s writing, Iran had been laying the groundwork for just such an attack?[2]
I actually wrote a few trial chapters around that EMP MacGuffin, but wound up setting them aside. Devastating as such a scenario might be, it all seemed too — how best to put this? — pedestrian. Deadly, yes, but not enough of a “Wow!” Factor.
In the end, it was rather the very subject matter that Dualism engaged, the philosophical conundrum on which the plot (and the above-mentioned thought experiment) both turned, that pointed a way forward.
Next time, I’ll tell you how.
Footnotes[1] John S. Foster et al., Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, April 2008, www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473-EMP_Commission-7MB.pdf.
[2] Joseph Farah, “Iran Military Journal Eyes Nuclear EMP Attack on U.S.,” April 29, 2005, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=44017.
The post The Making of a Thriller: Part I appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
August 3, 2021
Review: Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest
Poul Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest, 1974 — Imagine an alternate universe in which every word written by William Shakespeare was the literal, historical truth. Since that, in turn, would imply the existence of clocks capable of chiming the hour in Julius Caesar‘s Rome and cannons in Hamlet‘s tenth-century Denmark, it’d be no wonder if this world’s seventeenth century were more technologically advanced than ours! And, shades of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of course there’d be myth and magic too!
Poul Anderson picks up this premise and runs with it, in a story peopled with a latter-day knight errant, a damsel who refuses to passively give in to distress, and a Shakespearean fool nearly the equal of Falstaff himself.
Watch for the rhyming couplets, and wait for the climax — it’s one you won’t soon forget!
The post Review: Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
August 2, 2021
Review: Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh
A work studded with extraordinary and unsettling insights: Christianity an usurpation rather than excrescence of Judaism? The New Testament as deliberate misreading of the Hebrew Bible?
In this slim, dense volume, Harold Bloom, the late Yale humanities professor — who did not shrink from antagonizing America’s million-mom PTA by declaring that it would be better if grade school children should read nothing at all than read Harry Potter — sets his sights on even bigger game: the Godhead Him-/Her-/It-/Themself.
A life of literary study and criticism has evidently left Bloom bereft of any approach to Yahweh and Yeshua other than as literary characters. But then, as he had already made clear in his Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Bloom considers all of us literary characters, too — or, worse luck, poor parodies thereof.
In his at times too-cryptic aphorisms and in the way he interpenetrates the personal with the cosmic, Bloom reminds me of no one so much as another great nay-sayer: Frederick Nietzsche.
The post Review: Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh Review
A work studded with extraordinary and unsettling insights: Christianity an usurpation rather than excrescence of Judaism? The New Testament as deliberate misreading of the Hebrew Bible?
In this slim, dense volume, Harold Bloom, the late Yale humanities professor — who did not shrink from antagonizing America’s million-mom PTA by declaring that it would be better if grade school children should read nothing at all than read Harry Potter — sets his sights on even bigger game: the Godhead Him-/Her-/It-/Themself.
A life of literary study and criticism has evidently left Bloom bereft of any approach to Yahweh and Yeshua other than as literary characters. But then, as he had already made clear in his Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Bloom considers all of us literary characters, too — or, worse luck, poor parodies thereof.
In his at times too-cryptic aphorisms and in the way he interpenetrates the personal with the cosmic, Bloom reminds me of no one so much as another great nay-sayer: Frederick Nietzsche.
The post Bloom’s Jesus and Yahweh Review appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
July 28, 2021
Lucky Chickens
Many years ago now, I had the privilege of spending the better part of a weekend with sf&f great Roger Zelazny.
It was back in the early ’nineties, and the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO), of which I was a member and occasional chair of its Artificial Intelligence special interest group, was holding its annual convocation in Monterey CA. And Roger was to be the Guest of Honor.
(Roger wasn’t actually the CALICOfest organizers’ first choice — They had tried to get Isaac Asimov, unaware that the Good Doctor’s fear of flying ruled out a transcontinental trek).
in any case, it’s safe to say that Roger was not nearly as well known as Isaac would have been to the crew of college professors and other assorted language instructors who frequented CALICOfests back in the day. In fact, I was probably one of the few in attendance who even knew who he was, much less had read any of his work. As to that, I had been a fan ever since encountering The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Lord of Light — a fan-fetish that kicked into hyperdrive with the first Chronicles of Amber pentalogy.
All of which worked out splendidly as far as I was concerned, because it meant I basically had Roger all to myself for the weekend. It was like a WorldCon for one!
At the same time, although Roger doubtless would not have realized it when he got the GoH invitation, I was in all likelihood the blip that put him on CALICO’s radar.
It happened like this:
A couple of years prior to the event in question, I had been casting about for an appropriately evocative name for a small company I was forming in hopes of commercializing Herr Kommissar (Mr. Commissioner), an instructional game for students of German that I’d coded (more about that here). As luck would have it, at that same time time I was also re-reading The Hand of Oberon, the fourth book in the first Amber Chronicles series. And it was there that I came upon (on page 52) the brief scene where Corwin, the hero of the tale, meets its author — his maker, so to speak — who’s standing guard down in Castle Amber’s dungeon. It goes as follows:
“Good evening, Lord Corwin,” said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
“Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?”
“A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.”
“You enjoy this duty?”
He nodded.
“I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”
Until I (re)read that last line, it had never occurred to me that The Amber Chronicles was a work of philosophy. Thereafter, I could never forget it. Because the work as a whole is shot through not only with “elements of horror and morbidity,” but even more so with Roger’s personal outlook on life, the universe, everything, which I’d been unconsciously absorbing all along. It’s a view which sees everything in flux (did Roger’s panoply of Shadow worlds anticipate the Multiverse of String Theory?), where our understanding, not just of the present, but of the past as well, is not firm and fixed, but subject to shift at a moment’s notice, where, in navigating the riptides of underlying chaos, we must find our lodestar within us.
It’s a philosophy, I dare say, that may have enabled him to contemplate his subsequent all-too-early death with some measure of equanimity.
More to my immediate purpose as well, that line illuminated how Roger had managed to instruct while seeming merely to entertain — the very model of what I was, in my own small way, trying to accomplish with Herr Kommissar. Was it any wonder, then, if I went and named my startup “Amber Productions”?
… Or if I came prepared for the meeting with Roger bearing a rare hardcover copy of The Hand of Oberon , which he obligingly signed on page 52, right next to the passage quoted above.
Suffice it to say, we talked a good deal over that weekend in between the language-learning presentations and panel discussions. And I even got an answer to a question that had been bugging me ever since reading Amber Book II, The Guns of Avalon — namely: “Did you always know the truth about Ganelon?”
Saturday night, I was called on to introduce Roger for his after-dinner speech at the CALICO Banquet. Ironic in a way, because as far as the CALICO audience was concerned, I was the celebrity — they all knew Amber Productions and Herr Kommissar far better than the Amber Chronicles that had given my little company its name.
As the centerpiece of his banquet remarks, Roger related the story of a discussion he’d had with a British sf&f writer about human genetics, and what traits to select for, assuming you could accomplish such selection. (This was in the early nineties, remember — at a time when Jennifer Doudna’s Nobel Prize for CRISPR still lay far in the future.)
Anyway, Roger and his friend quickly rejected physical beauty and money-making ability as desirable attributes to breed for, because, in either case, how could you be sure if people really liked you for yourself? Intelligence was on the table, but then lots of intelligent people seemed to be pretty miserable pretty much of the time. Finally, perhaps harking back to how Larry Niven’s two-headed Puppeteers messed with Earth’s Birth Lottery, they settled on luck as the best genetic legacy one could bestow on one’s progeny.
Which left them, however, with the problem of how to do the bestowing? How do you select for luck?
No problem, said Roger’s friend: Put a clutch of fertilized chicken eggs on a platter and throw them up in the air. Pick out the unbroken eggs and let them hatch, grow to maturity, and lay their own eggs. Rinse, repeat. After not too many generations, you’d have bred a strain of the luckiest chickens alive!
“And so,” Roger summed up, “As I look out at the CALICO audience here tonight, I see a group of folks doing what they most want to do in this world, engaged in the work they love the best.
“As am I.
“And so I think we are, all of us, lucky chickens.”
That was the last time I saw him — had to leave early Sunday morning for the drive down to San Diego. We corresponded a little over the next couple of years. I recall him being very excited about his collaboration with Gahan Wilson on A Night in the Lonesome October — a project he’d been thinking about since the 1970s.
Oh, and somehow along the way, he inspired me to try my own hand at writing.
Well, Roger’s been gone over a quarter century now. He is still much missed.
He was indeed a lucky chicken!
* * *
PS: You can read a recent retrospective on Roger’s work here.
The post Lucky Chickens appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
July 25, 2021
Review: Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?
One chill Paris night shortly before the turn of the millennium, Jim Holt stood on the Ponts des Arts smoking, looking down at the Seine, and pondering Leibniz’s old question “Why is there Something and not Nothing?” Maybe I should write a book about it, he thought.
And now he has.
Why Does the World Exist? chronicles Holt’s decade-long expedition into the mystery of existence. Not just your existence, or mine. Everyone’s and everything’s.
In pursuit of an answer he encounters theists and atheists, physicists and philosophers, Platonists (to whom he gives particularly short shrift) and Hegelians. The result is a fascinating, if ultimately flawed book.
Part of the problem is that the exposition quickly settles into a predictable pattern: Holt encounters, either in print, or more often in person, each next wise man (I can’t recall him mentioning any women — women find existence less problematic than men do, I suppose). He then converses at length with his subject and departs.
The French have a phrase for what invariably happens next: l’esprit de escalier (the wit of the staircase), by which they mean what would have been the perfect comeback if only it had occurred to you at the time, and not when you were walking down the stairs on your way out. But the advantage to staircase wit is, you do get to have the last word — if only to yourself. And so it is that, unhampered by any rejoinders, Holt adroitly dispatches the argument of each successive wise man and moves on to the next.
No doubt some such structure is needed to move the narrative forward: After all, if Holt were to give us The Answer in, say, Chapter 3, why would we bother reading on? But the repetitiveness does begin to wear thin after a while. So I was relieved (perhaps that’s not really the right word) when, somewhere toward midpoint, a break in the pattern occurred.
Because there, in the midst of all the “metaphysical fun” (Holt’s term, not mine), we get a heartrending little vignette. On the brink of an interview with cosmologist Steven Weinberg of The First Three Minutes fame, Holt is called home to New York from Austin, because his long-haired dachshund Renzo has been diagnosed as dying of cancer. Having gone through something not wholly dissimilar myself the same year Holt’s book was published (see ), I can appreciate how the for-real encroachment of Nothingness puts an end to all our toying with imagined notions of it. The final breaths of a beloved pet come to outweigh the first minutes of the universe as a whole.
Yet even in extremis, Holt can’t quite bring himself to live in the world whose existence he is laboring so hard to ground: As Renzo’s euthanizing injection takes effect, he maintains his composure by mentally working out the implications of one of Fermat’s prime number theorems. The scene seems emblematic of the book as a whole: absorption in intellectual puzzles to keep from sobbing while awaiting the end.
After this brief real-world interlude, the above thesis-antithesis-with-never-a-synthesis dialectic resumes. Until near the end, when Holt surprised me again by actually answering, to his own satisfaction at least, the Question he started out with.
SPOILER ALERT! FOLLOWING DISCUSSION REVEALS JIM’S CONCLUDING “PROOF”
Holt begins by reviewing all the explanations encountered so far as to why Something might exist rather than Nothing: The world came into existence in obedience to some principle of simplicity or fecundity or ethical goodness or sheer randomicity or what have you. Then, following Derek Parfit, he abstracts a single structure from this welter of competing hypotheses — namely, they all posit the operation of some sort of Selector in bringing the world into being.
This, however, immediately raises the question of what selected the Selector.
Sidestepping the implicit infinite regress, Holt goes with a two-tiered Selector/MetaSelector solution, which in turn leads him to conclude — through a chain of logic which, though clear enough, is a bit too convoluted to recapitulate here — that the Meta-Selector that ultimately caused our world to exist operated to select for … mediocrity. “The cosmic possibility selected … to be reality would be thoroughly mediocre” (Holt’s emphasis, p. 240).
And here, I’m afraid, I must part company with Jim and his magical mystery tour. His “proof” disregards one feature of our universe that he had explored earlier in detail — namely that, whatever else the engines of creation selected for, they selected for us. And, in the process, they had to fine-tune the fundamental parameters of physics in such a way as to make matter, stars, planets, life, and intelligence all possible. Whether you prefer to explain our own extremely unlikely existence as nonetheless inevitable given a multiverse of infinitely many parallel realities, or as owing to the operation of some anthropic principle, the fact remains: Here we are.
Why, then, should a universe chosen utterly at random, a thoroughly generic universe to use Holt’s term, have included us? To be sure, Holt does assert that his mediocre universe would be infinite in some sense, but not infinite enough to include every roll of the dice. It would rather be a discrete, denumerable infinity — one that encompasses the integers only, and not even all of them (see pp. 240-1).
On the other hand, the likelihood is that reality, at its most fundamental level, is not discrete but continuous, not digital but analogue, based on real numbers rather than integers (see, e.g., David Tong, “The Unquantum Quantum,” Scientific American, December 2012). What that means is that an aleph-null infinity couldn’t even begin to cover all the bases, much less the home run that accounts for our own existence.
The constraints applied by physics — a physics that somehow leads to us — may or may not be enough to justify the world on their own, but that doesn’t mean they can be swept under the rug.
All that said, kudos to Jim Holt for this book. If he has not supplied The Answer, at least he has come to grips with The Question.
The post Review: Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
Why Does the World Exist? Review
One chill Paris night shortly before the turn of the millennium, Jim Holt stood on the Ponts des Arts smoking, looking down at the Seine, and pondering Leibniz’s old question “Why is there Something and not Nothing?” Maybe I should write a book about it, he thought.
And now he has.
Why Does the World Exist? chronicles Holt’s decade-long expedition into the mystery of existence. Not just your existence, or mine. Everyone’s and everything’s.
In pursuit of an answer he encounters theists and atheists, physicists and philosophers, Platonists (to whom he gives particularly short shrift) and Hegelians. The result is a fascinating, if ultimately flawed book.
Part of the problem is that the exposition quickly settles into a predictable pattern: Holt encounters, either in print, or more often in person, each next wise man (I can’t recall him mentioning any women — women find existence less problematic than men do, I suppose). He then converses at length with his subject and departs.
The French have a phrase for what invariably happens next: l’esprit de escalier (the wit of the staircase), by which they mean what would have been the perfect comeback if only it had occurred to you at the time, and not when you were walking down the stairs on your way out. But the advantage to staircase wit is, you do get to have the last word — if only to yourself. And so it is that, unhampered by any rejoinders, Holt adroitly dispatches the argument of each successive wise man and moves on to the next.
No doubt some such structure is needed to move the narrative forward: After all, if Holt were to give us The Answer in, say, Chapter 3, why would we bother reading on? But the repetitiveness does begin to wear thin after a while. So I was relieved (perhaps that’s not really the right word) when, somewhere toward midpoint, a break in the pattern occurred.
Because there, in the midst of all the “metaphysical fun” (Holt’s term, not mine), we get a heartrending little vignette. On the brink of an interview with cosmologist Steven Weinberg of The First Three Minutes fame, Holt is called home to New York from Austin, because his long-haired dachshund Renzo has been diagnosed as dying of cancer. Having gone through something not wholly dissimilar myself the same year Holt’s book was published (see ), I can appreciate how the for-real encroachment of Nothingness puts an end to all our toying with imagined notions of it. The final breaths of a beloved pet come to outweigh the first minutes of the universe as a whole.
Yet even in extremis, Holt can’t quite bring himself to live in the world whose existence he is laboring so hard to ground: As Renzo’s euthanizing injection takes effect, he maintains his composure by mentally working out the implications of one of Fermat’s prime number theorems. The scene seems emblematic of the book as a whole: absorption in intellectual puzzles to keep from sobbing while awaiting the end.
After this brief real-world interlude, the above thesis-antithesis-with-never-a-synthesis dialectic resumes. Until near the end, when Holt surprised me again by actually answering, to his own satisfaction at least, the Question he started out with.
SPOILER ALERT! FOLLOWING DISCUSSION REVEALS JIM’S CONCLUDING “PROOF”
Holt begins by reviewing all the explanations encountered so far as to why Something might exist rather than Nothing: The world came into existence in obedience to some principle of simplicity or fecundity or ethical goodness or sheer randomicity or what have you. Then, following Derek Parfit, he abstracts a single structure from this welter of competing hypotheses — namely, they all posit the operation of some sort of Selector in bringing the world into being.
This, however, immediately raises the question of what selected the Selector.
Sidestepping the implicit infinite regress, Holt goes with a two-tiered Selector/MetaSelector solution, which in turn leads him to conclude — through a chain of logic which, though clear enough, is a bit too convoluted to recapitulate here — that the Meta-Selector that ultimately caused our world to exist operated to select for … mediocrity. “The cosmic possibility selected … to be reality would be thoroughly mediocre” (Holt’s emphasis, p. 240).
And here, I’m afraid, I must part company with Jim and his magical mystery tour. His “proof” disregards one feature of our universe that he had explored earlier in detail — namely that, whatever else the engines of creation selected for, they selected for us. And, in the process, they had to fine-tune the fundamental parameters of physics in such a way as to make matter, stars, planets, life, and intelligence all possible. Whether you prefer to explain our own extremely unlikely existence as nonetheless inevitable given a multiverse of infinitely many parallel realities, or as owing to the operation of some anthropic principle, the fact remains: Here we are.
Why, then, should a universe chosen utterly at random, a thoroughly generic universe to use Holt’s term, have included us? To be sure, Holt does assert that his mediocre universe would be infinite in some sense, but not infinite enough to include every roll of the dice. It would rather be a discrete, denumerable infinity — one that encompasses the integers only, and not even all of them (see pp. 240-1).
On the other hand, the likelihood is that reality, at its most fundamental level, is not discrete but continuous, not digital but analogue, based on real numbers rather than integers (see, e.g., David Tong, “The Unquantum Quantum,” Scientific American, December 2012). What that means is that an aleph-null infinity couldn’t even begin to cover all the bases, much less the home run that accounts for our own existence.
The constraints applied by physics — a physics that somehow leads to us — may or may not be enough to justify the world on their own, but that doesn’t mean they can be swept under the rug.
All that said, kudos to Jim Holt for this book. If he has not supplied The Answer, at least he has come to grips with The Question.
The post Why Does the World Exist? Review appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
Review: Hawking’s A Brief History of Time
This book puts me in mind of the story about how a Harvard number theorist, through some malfunction of the scheduling computer, got assigned to teach an introductory course in pre-calculus.
Being one of those fortunate(?) individuals to whom math comes so easily that they cannot grasp how difficult others may find it, the professor had no clue what to cover in such a course. So, he went to the chair of the department, who told him: “You’ll want to start with the real number-line and then progress to inequalities; from there, move on to quadratic equations, then trigonometry and the wrapping function, Cartesian and polar coordinate systems, and, if time permits, conic sections.”
The professor thanked the chairperson and went off to meet with his first class. The following week, he was back.
“What should I teach them next?” he said.
A Brief History of Time is like that — Professor Hawking doesn’t seem to notice when his treatment segues from the obvious to the arcane with scarcely a speed bump to signal the transition, only to wind up with his concept of “imaginary time” (very nearly incomprehensible in this overly brief presentation).
Fun nonetheless.
The post Review: Hawking’s A Brief History of Time appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
A Brief History of Time Review
This book puts me in mind of the story about how a Harvard number theorist, through some malfunction of the scheduling computer, got assigned to teach an introductory course in pre-calculus.
Being one of those fortunate(?) individuals to whom math comes so easily that they cannot grasp how difficult others may find it, the professor had no clue what to cover in such a course. So, he went to the chair of the department, who told him: “You’ll want to start with the real number-line and then progress to inequalities; from there, move on to quadratic equations, then trigonometry and the wrapping function, Cartesian and polar coordinate systems, and, if time permits, conic sections.”
The professor thanked the chairperson and went off to meet with his first class. The following week, he was back.
“What should I teach them next?” he said.
A Brief History of Time is like that — Professor Hawking doesn’t seem to notice when his treatment segues from the obvious to the arcane with scarcely a speed bump to signal the transition, only to wind up with his concept of “imaginary time” (very nearly incomprehensible in this overly brief presentation).
Fun nonetheless.
The post A Brief History of Time Review appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
Brief History of Time Review
This book puts me in mind of the story about how a Harvard number theorist, through some malfunction of the scheduling computer, got assigned to teach an introductory course in pre-calculus.
Being one of those fortunate(?) individuals to whom math comes so easily that they cannot grasp how difficult others may find it, the professor had no clue what to cover in such a course. So, he went to the chair of the department, who told him: “You’ll want to start with the real number-line and then progress to inequalities; from there, move on to quadratic equations, then trigonometry and the wrapping function, Cartesian and polar coordinate systems, and, if time permits, conic sections.”
The professor thanked the chairperson and went off to meet with his first class. Next week, he was back.
“What should I teach them now?” he said.
A Brief History of Time is like that — Professor Hawking doesn’t seem to notice when his treatment strays from the obvious to the arcane with scarcely a speed bump to mark the transition, only to wind up with his concept of “imaginary time” (very nearly incomprehensible in this overly brief presentation).
Fun nonetheless.
The post Brief History of Time Review appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.
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