science
The Fabric of Reality
March 27, 2009 - 07:21 — bhugaInteresting.
It's been a while since I finished a book. I've started and put down 3 in the last 4 months (no great pace anyway) but Deutsch kept me going.
The Fabric of Reality is Deutsch's defense of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but it's a lot more than that, too. It's also a fairly scathing attack on the current scientific world, which is hardly even attempting to find explanatory mechanisms for quantum theory. It's admittedly a daunting task, and all of the options are pretty miserable, so it's hard to blame them, but Deutsch's epistemology is sound.
The book kind of drags, unfortunately. Deutsch spends a lot of time attacking authors I have not read (and never would have). It's difficult for me to judge how much if this is straw man, but the rest of the book leads to me believe it's very little. There's a confusing mishmash of evolution, quantum theory, quantum computing and classical computing that get mixed up with the arguments about what is science, and that's a bit frustrating, as these are easily my favorite part of the book, and I would have preferred the scientific arguments be laid out in one half and the philosophy be done in another half.
But man, these scientific arguments are fun! Deutsch lays out a lot of consistent arguments for the many-worlds theory. There's a discussion of what free will means in many worlds, which he interprets as a statistical cross-section across many universes (I usually eat dinner == In most universes, I will eat dinner tonight). And many worlds has a consistent interpretation for the absolutely baffling kinds of results we can get from double-slit experiments. But the best is quantum computing.
Given that Shor's algorithm can factor a number of arbitrary size in linear time (needing just one qubit per binary digit), and that the number of operations to factor a large number is on the order of 'takes more memory than the universe has sub-atomic components', Deutsch says that quantum computing is the friendly cooperation between universes to solve problems. This is a *very* interesting idea, and I like it because it seems testable. Shor's algorithm is not deterministic, and perhaps that's because some universes would stop helping as they drop out of the computation pool--can we make it work 100% of the time by computing twice as long as required? (in fact, we can--from wikipedia: Using what might appear to be twice as many qubits as necessary guarantees that there are at least N different x which produce the same f(x), even as the period r approaches N/2.)
So, interesting stuff, and to be taken seriously. But I'm still not convinced. All of this comes down to the idea that in quantum mechanics, no element of physical reality can be involved in some of the results we find. There's just too much information for that to be the case. But does that imply that we're interacting with millions of alternate universes? It's not incompatible, but it just doesn't follow naturally in my mind. However, the theory should have testable predictions, and even if many worlds isn't true, if some explanation compatible with it is, we could get rid of the ridiculous Copenhagen interpretation once and for all. Wouldn't that be nice?
The book, as I said before, sort of winds about from topic to topic and ends with the idea of infinite computing resources and immortality as the universe collapses. It's an exciting time to be alive--nobody bothered to think up information theory before Bell Labs in the 50s, because nobody expected such a thing would have so many answers to physics, but there it is.
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
December 7, 2008 - 00:05 — bhugaFunny enough, I suppose.
About 2 years ago, I picked up Roach's Stiff, which is all about what we do with dead bodies these days. That was written well and quite informative; there really is a whole world of cadaver activities. Bonk is just as funny, but I found the content less useful. Roach's in-between book was some sort of survey of what happens when we die, which I naturally skipped. One gets the feeling that she's plucking out topics that are easy to write about in an entertaining way. She does it pretty well, though, so we can forgive her her subject choice.
Combining the history of sex science, some of the personal histories of the researchers themselves, and some meta-writing on the process of researching the book itself, Bonk tries to cover the gamut of modern sex science. While no 5 pages is particularly badly done, the book as a whole feels fairly flat. We spend 20 pages on Roach's hunt for some sort of Penis camera used in a study 20 years ago, and what feels like half the book on erectile dysfunction. Meanwhile, the history of female orgasm, admittedly an episode of science that would be hilarious were it not so sad, is about 4 times as long as some much more interesting modern stuff--'thinking off' and training paraplegic women to masturbate by giving them a feedback loop to their cervical muscle contractions. Roach submits to in-lab sexual imaging with her husband, which is quite interesting. But this episode goes on and on and on, and less than 10 pages are spent on a lab doing research on what makes sex good as opposed to clinical. We learn that gays and lesbians seem to be having more fun, but that's about it.
Roach repeats over and over that this field is really more or less unknown--nobody's studying it. She mentions the problems for finding grant money to answer basic questions about sexual response, then glosses over the results of the few studies that have found that cash. I just kept feeling there was meat missing here.
I can't say this book was a waste of time, but I was pretty disappointed in the shallow coverage of a lot of topics here. I would read another one of Roach's books if she wrote on a topic I know little about, but I'll pass on most anything else.
The best American Science Writing 2008
October 12, 2008 - 15:26 — bhugaWay worse than last year's.
The Best American Science Writing 2007 was great, filled with a wide variety of topics, and all of them well written. A particular account of the most recent intelligent design trial will always be a favorite of mine, and I'd have never found it without that collection.
2008 needs a new editor. All but 3 or 4 of the entries are on the topic of health care, and many are a far cry from qualifying as top-tier science writing. Some are little more than press releases. The only topics that are not health care are environmental. Not that I disagree with the conservation stance per se, but the collection has a definite 'left wing' feel to the selection of 'best writings' that greatly disappointed me. The topic of pharmaceutical advertising comes up several times.
There were 3 very worthwhile articles here, including a fantastic one on the ongoing development of a world seed bank, in which the countries of the world are attempting to safeguard the genetic diversity of the world's crop species. It's a very good tale, and great science writing, complete with a few yarns about the people involved, well-written background stories, and the like. I'm quite glad to have read it, actually, because there are some topics there that libertarians, a political philosophy I've been leaning more and more towards, need to discuss. In particular, it's a pretty trivial argument to say that genetic diversity is a common goods issue, a problem not well solved by libertarians. Who's responsible for preserving the genetic diversity that saves us from an eventual crop monoculture extinction?
Good entries notwithstanding, I wouldn't recommend the book if someone asked and won't be buying next year's. Some of the entries are gob-smackingly bad writing, cleary lifted from newspapers. And the worthwhile stuff is not any better than hundreds of articles of equal caliber written daily and posted on the web for free.
