Heady reading from a polymath popularizer, but exhilarating nonetheless.
What’s bad and—surprise—what’s good about noise, explicated by fuzzy-logic/neural-network doyen Kosko (Fuzzy Thinking, 1993; The Fuzzy Future, 1999).
He begins with the bad: Noise as damager to hearing, trigger of stress and causer of birds and whales to change their tunes. He even provides chapter and verse on the laws governing public nuisance and trespass and proposes that cities generate noise maps in steps toward prevention. Then comes an exegesis on information theory, launched by Claude Shannon’s 1948 paper describing communication as the transmission of a signal, with the goal that the receiver gets the identical signal the sender sent. Shannon’s insight was to change analog signals, such as smoothly varying waves, into smoothly varying probabilities that the receiver gets the binary bit of a 1 versus a 0. So began the digital revolution, which challenged scientists to find better ways to preserve the integrity of the signal. To explain the various engineering feats used to improve signal-to-noise ratios, Kosko begins with the abstract: the concept of “white” noise, composed of all sound frequencies of the same magnitude. But since that would represent an infinite rage of frequencies requiring infinite energy to achieve, it is an ideal. Instead, variations of “colored” noise can be modeled, associated with probability curves. Examples include the leftover thermal noise of the Big Bang and the Brownian motion of molecules. Engineers get around unwanted noise by developing selective noise filters and using signal sampling methods. The kicker is that Kosko explains how injecting noise (within certain parameters) can actually improve some signal transmissions. Along the way, he tells the story of how Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil patented a method for coding signals using frequency “hopping” (perhaps because teenager Lamarr absorbed much from conversations her first husband had with Nazi officers). All this discourse builds into a last chapter on “stochastic resonance,” which the author defines as a noise benefit in nonlinear systems. At the nano scale, SR might have launched life, he suggests, via the Brownian motion of molecules driving molecular motors in primal cells.
Heady reading from a polymath popularizer, but exhilarating nonetheless.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03495-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both...
Italian theoretical physicist Rovelli (General Relativity: The Most Beautiful of Theories, 2015, etc.) shares his thoughts on the broader scientific and philosophical implications of the great revolution that has taken place over the past century.
These seven lessons, which first appeared as articles in the Sunday supplement of the Italian newspaper Sole 24 Ore, are addressed to readers with little knowledge of physics. In less than 100 pages, the author, who teaches physics in both France and the United States, cogently covers the great accomplishments of the past and the open questions still baffling physicists today. In the first lesson, he focuses on Einstein's theory of general relativity. He describes Einstein's recognition that gravity "is not diffused through space [but] is that space itself" as "a stroke of pure genius." In the second lesson, Rovelli deals with the puzzling features of quantum physics that challenge our picture of reality. In the remaining sections, the author introduces the constant fluctuations of atoms, the granular nature of space, and more. "It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy—or in our physics,” he writes. Rovelli also discusses the issues raised in loop quantum gravity, a theory that he co-developed. These issues lead to his extraordinary claim that the passage of time is not fundamental but rather derived from the granular nature of space. The author suggests that there have been two separate pathways throughout human history: mythology and the accumulation of knowledge through observation. He believes that scientists today share the same curiosity about nature exhibited by early man.
An intriguing meditation on the nature of the universe and our attempts to understand it that should appeal to both scientists and general readers.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18441-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science...
Bryson (I'm a Stranger Here Myself, 1999, etc.), a man who knows how to track down an explanation and make it confess, asks the hard questions of science—e.g., how did things get to be the way they are?—and, when possible, provides answers.
As he once went about making English intelligible, Bryson now attempts the same with the great moments of science, both the ideas themselves and their genesis, to resounding success. Piqued by his own ignorance on these matters, he’s egged on even more so by the people who’ve figured out—or think they’ve figured out—such things as what is in the center of the Earth. So he goes exploring, in the library and in company with scientists at work today, to get a grip on a range of topics from subatomic particles to cosmology. The aim is to deliver reports on these subjects in terms anyone can understand, and for the most part, it works. The most difficult is the nonintuitive material—time as part of space, say, or proteins inventing themselves spontaneously, without direction—and the quantum leaps unusual minds have made: as J.B.S. Haldane once put it, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” Mostly, though, Bryson renders clear the evolution of continental drift, atomic structure, singularity, the extinction of the dinosaur, and a mighty host of other subjects in self-contained chapters that can be taken at a bite, rather than read wholesale. He delivers the human-interest angle on the scientists, and he keeps the reader laughing and willing to forge ahead, even over their heads: the human body, for instance, harboring enough energy “to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point.”
Loads of good explaining, with reminders, time and again, of how much remains unknown, neatly putting the death of science into perspective.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0817-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK TO SCREEN
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