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Grand Futures
Unknown Binding
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 25, 2024
A sort of apotheosis, readable engineering theory slash cosmology slash analytic philosophy. Tour de force first-principles thinking across whatever damn fields he needs to think about to get the inference made. Dozens of little arguments, many of them new / research-level, many of them previewed on StackExchange. Also scholarship: 130 A4 pages of citations at the back. The version I saw was 1200 pages.
Also an experimental test of fundamental epistemology: How far can a human mind leap and still land upright? If you work in muddy contested areas like politics or strategy or human stuff, it can be hard to remember that questions can in fact be answered conclusively.
I have rarely, if ever, read any real engineering texts. So I now know much more about gravity engines than ordinary terrestrial bridges.
It is not mostly made of sentences like this but there's one on most pages:
Besides standing as a justification of human imagination, it's also a rich source of hair-raising aphorisms and epigrams.
Stands shoulder to shoulder with The Road to Reality, except that you can actually read it. Reading it linearly makes little sense, so it's also the greatest toilet book of all time.
Also an experimental test of fundamental epistemology: How far can a human mind leap and still land upright? If you work in muddy contested areas like politics or strategy or human stuff, it can be hard to remember that questions can in fact be answered conclusively.
I have rarely, if ever, read any real engineering texts. So I now know much more about gravity engines than ordinary terrestrial bridges.
It is not mostly made of sentences like this but there's one on most pages:
Lasagna nuclear pasta phases appear to be able to maintain spiral ramp topological defects
[using] black holes as a heat sink
Section 18.1: What can we say about the unknown parts of physics?
Besides standing as a justification of human imagination, it's also a rich source of hair-raising aphorisms and epigrams.
Egan’s Law: “It all adds up to normality.” Observed reality is not changed when we discover new physics: it was always like this.
Stands shoulder to shoulder with The Road to Reality, except that you can actually read it. Reading it linearly makes little sense, so it's also the greatest toilet book of all time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review