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Bohm takes on the theories and equations of Heisenberg, Bohr, Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky by scattering a bunch of Greek letters (π, δ, ψ, etc.) throughout this chapter, indicating that there are hidden variables these physicists left out that give him a better understanding of reality. In most cases, Bohm seems able to measure simultaneously expanded atomic processes while getting at the subquantum-level structure.

A rather straightforward account of the most essential part of Zen Buddhism, satori is an experience that takes us away from the rational experiences of the world into a more at-one sense of wholeness. In many ways it is what I would like to see happen with VR. But Suzuki demonstrates it requires more discipline than just having an image flash into one’s mind, thus proving the need to narrate the long history of Zen.

The Berliner Ensemble, the company most deeply indebted to Brecht for his theories about stagecraft with Communist ethics, created a workplace more than a playspace. The letter instructing one of the Ensemble’s actors, notes on Stanislavsky’s opposing Method and their collected effort to write Theaterarbeit, from which only Katzgraben made it to stage, is proof of too many cooks, not enough pudding.

Way, way back in the Lascaux Cave, our primitive ancestors painted art to create VR, recreating the world. While theatre is only briefly mentioned, Ewalt sees mechanical reproduction of reality in painting, stereoscopic photography and cineramic film that captures audiences imagination. Added to a virtual hall of fame is Thomas Furness who pioneered what seems like early augmented reality for American fighter pilots.

Way, way back in the Lascaux Cave, our primitive ancestors painted art to create VR, recreating the world. While theatre is only briefly mentioned, Ewalt sees mechanical reproduction of reality in painting, stereoscopic photography and cineramic film that captures audiences imagination. Added to a virtual hall of fame is Thomas Furness who pioneered what seems like early augmented reality for American fighter pilots.

Glad to see the Turing Police have finally shown up, like the Spanish Inquisition unexpectedly, to bring some law, or at least consequences, in motion the free-floating world of console cowboys. Of course they are killed off by the very next chapter and Wintermute reappears in the disguise of an already forgotten character. Yet its line about the holographic paradigm reveals that there is some deeper meaning at play.

More wordplay, getting down to the etymological root of all thoughts and processes, with the big revelation that at the heart of the near and dear term reality is the verb form reri that means “to think” and thus everything that fits into our reality is the platonic form dancing in our mind like the pollen-discovering honeybee. And yet thought and non-thought have an equal meaning, so unreal things are real?

Taking a very etymological approach to demonstrate how language sets up our fragmented outlook on the universe, Bohm takes the reader step by step through relevance to reconstation, revealing some unique qualities of words planted by our mostly Latin ancestors: fact comes from to make, division from either to see or set apart, etc. Yet there must be more than seeing how many concepts are reversed and made irrelevant.

Upon returning to Berlin, Brecht seems to have taken a slightly modified tack to his expostulations on the state of aristotelian theatre: he made models of his most noteworthy productions. In the postwar period of East and West Germany the noteworthiest play was Mother Courage which had sagely foretold in 1938 the futility of war and the peculiar mindset that insists on making money despite daily atrocities.

Case, Molly and a few other hard-to-describe conscious entities end up on the moon or some kind of space station built by Jamaican welders, on a mission to do something to Wintermute although it looks more like Wintermute is executing its armature in order to do something about them. The plot seems to flashforward continuously, requiring me to consult the real-life matrix, Wikipedia, to understand what just happened.

The history of Zen Buddhism is its northeastward journey from India to China, and in two hundred years, its natural home in Japan is only mentioned briefly in the last couple of pages. Most of this journey concerned Six Patriarchs following in the Bodhidharma’s footsteps, yet much like like the historian Suzuki himself, none make as much of an impression as other religious leaders might have done on a different path.

The is a certain measure of brave stubbornness in someone who goes into exile while one’s native country seems to tear itself apart and becomes more of a nightmare. For the essays leading up to Brecht’s departure from Germany, he expounds upon the value of epic theatre and the overlooked acting choices of his friend a Peter Lorre. On his return to Berlin a decade later Brecht may be a bit chastened but still as bold.

While difficult at times to pick out the fragments of this opening chapter and understand their relation to the implicit whole, there are moments of clarity, such as the measurable and immeasurable being two ways of seeing the same thing, or the current political climate of several countries (that often have United in their nation’s name) attempting to group together people who must not be split from our whole world.

Since leaving Japan the story has been all over the place: Atlanta, London, Istanbul, the Matrix, and it almost seems like a randomly assembled recollection of a dream: Case feels the haptics of Molly on a mission, for some reason, as Armitage sent them on some wild goose in either a self-driving or sentient Mercedes, in order to chase down the AI Wintermute. Case’s inside info on his employer doesn’t seem to matter.

Brecht’s fascination with innovation and new technologies like film and radio is tempered with his sense of aesthetics, as epic as he makes them out to be. It is only too bad that so many of his thoughts survive, in English, by these editorially truncated chapters, often missing entire paragraphs if parts were reprinted from somewhere else, such as the Threepenny Opera appendix, so doing lessen their impact.

As inspired as I really want to be with the early theories of aesthetics and staging Brecht writes about, I can’t help noticing as he comes across a little bit like a cranky attention-seeker who is happiest promoting his doubtlessly innovative work, so long as he can take subtle stabs at less successful rivals. It could just be me reading into his writing, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out he had a mean streak.

Final thoughts from il dottore about all this timey-wimey construct that doesn’t actually exist yet believed in and sometimes perceived in a song as Rovelli mentions recalling Augustine. Actually a lot more philosophical authors are mentioned in the concluding chapters, such as Proust and Reichenbach (in addition to the composer Bach) that brings everything down to the human level of living well and dying peacefully.

Case’s life in the outskirts of Chiba is very noir; despite all the blinking neon and gadgetry swirling about him, he is still a down-on-his-luck vet at the bar, when along comes Molly with her mirror lenses and switchblade knives for nails. So much data to process about this future, but really is just the grimy reality that will get a lot more messed up when shady Armitage brings Case back to what remains of the US.

Raising the rhetorical ante, Brecht takes as bold a step toward redesigning theatre from his new-found Marxist perspective as he is self-congratulatory over his Threepenny Opera. He pushes for epic theatre in response to the stale aesthetics audiences seem to enjoy but do not get much meaning related to their daily struggles. Even Shakespeare comes under fire as being irrelevant to the modern working mensch.

Like Scott Lang in Dr. Foster’s office confusedly commenting on how the word “quantum” gets thrown about, Rovelli seems to be aware that it can only provide so many answers before raising more troubling questions. He changes tack as the last section of his book rebuilds time by writing about another scientific concept: entropy. The irreversible nature of energy becoming heat brings Newton’s second law back into play.

The young theatre maven show his wider interests in sports (rather the attraction that keep masses of sport fans returning to large arenas) and Shaw (was the English playwright ever that popular in German or England?). His interview with Guillemin indicates how all of his circle-widening in print was an effort to achieve his vision of epic theatre on stage. He points to such elusive qualities in his and Shaw’s plays.

Deftly unpacking the quantum packages of time, noting how Planck has the first and last word on how small distance and time can conceivably get, he looks to a world where time has a role, just not the one we’d expect from a Newtonian absolute or presentist perspective (even the block universe supporters crumbles away). Ultimately, Rovelli proposes a new language for asking the right questions in unthing-like grammar.

Brecht has a lot to say about his favourite play, tinkering with it for decades after its Berlin premiere, and at times he can be a bit contradictory about the show’s meaning: firstly, in adapting Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, whether Brecht’s play was for beggars or by beggars. One feels sympathy for the poor actors having to learn new songs, break with stage conventions and still probably get criticized by Brecht.

So it’s not all about Brecht, as some of his writing discusses Laughton’s collaboration on Galileo or the passing on his mentor Wedekind earlier in this collection. Sometimes he sets his sights on an entire city, such as his hometown Augsberg, as referred to quaintly in the incomplete Der Messingkauf or damningly in his earlier “Reckoning.” Whether personally or locally, the playwright is reflected.

To bring this timeless play into more modern terms, a career criminal denies any claim to PTSD while his army buddy enables his waywardness. His addiction to the commercial sex industry leads to his downfall while also setting back the MeToo movement as the mistreated women always defend him. Meanwhile his father-in-law positions fake protestors to disrupt national interests. Corporations and banks are behind it all.

Much of what we know about time, say the information typically learned in the K-12 education, get thrown out the proverbial window thanks largely to Einstein and the theories he came up with decades before there was empirical proof to back up his claims about duration, direction and the present moment. So any kid may have a valid excuse for not being at their desk when the bell rings, thanks to that fuzzy-haired guy.

More mysteries abound, and it’s a wonder whether Shakespeare deliberately left names out of his Sonnets and final poems just to fret critics who would easily call him “upstart crow” as poetic genius. Most of Post’s discussion steers away from the dubious attempts to figure out who these poems were about, but comes up short on their intrinsic qualities. Very Short indeed! Isn’t the phoenix an alchemical term?

Here Rovelli reveals who truly he is as researcher and scientist: a time lord! His investigation into what time seems to be and theories about what it actually is will prove to be an enlightening account of the further mysteries of the universe. Once upon a time a friend told me about the operating system making all fundamental forces run as programmed. I suspect Rovelli has a better analogy based upon ancient texts.

It’s strange to see how the presumedly chronological collection of Brecht’s theories on theatre go from Denmark and Finland to the West Coast of the United States as if his travel through the Soviet Union were merely a trip by train without a thought on theatre or the most Marxist nation. Perhaps his agitated attacks on everything as evident in “Max Gorelik” suggest that some of his pages didn’t survive WWII‘s fires.

The two remaining lessons on loop quantum gravity and thermodynamics really are indications of how much we do not yet know, and in the tragic case of Boltzmann even how correctly figuring something out doesn’t lead to that thing’s immediate uptake. The final lesson covers a multitude of unknown qualities, ourselves, as part of the entire system being able to figure itself out before our short-lived civilization dies.