Another pleasing popularization of science from an old hand.
Define the universe, and give two examples.
If that kind of challenge makes your head hurt, then science explainer and Cambridge mathematician Barrow’s latest excursus into the unusual (The Constants of Nature, 2003, etc.) will send pain receptors into overdrive. Infinity is a hard enough notion to grasp, the kind of thing that set many a smoky dorm room into far-out reveries back in the day. But what if there are multiple infinities? What if there are many different series of things that have no end, mathematically and logically? What if, as the Indian mathematician once said, below the seemingly endless chain of turtles that held the world up in the sky there were simply more turtles? That’s the kind of talk, Barrow writes, that once “made mathematicians very nervous about infinities. It is easy to see why infinity was regarded as a form of logical plague that destroyed the reliability of everything it touched.” Yes, it is, for infinity is a great underminer of certainty. Barrow has more questions for us to entertain: “Does the Universe have an ‘edge’ or is it simply unbounded in size?” “Is infinity just a shorthand for ‘finite but awfully big’?” Mathematicians, logicians, cosmologists, philosophers and physicists have been preoccupied by such conundrums for a very long time, and some of them, such as the 19th-century German scholar Georg Cantor, became “corrupters of youth” (as one of Cantor’s enemies charged) by showing that infinity was not just a potential but a process—and one, incidentally, that might lead to the doorway of God. (God’s infinity, Cantor said, was different from mathematical infinity and physical infinity. Let the headaches commence.) Mathematicians now take the idea of infinity/infinities for granted. Barrow is a lucid and sometimes even lyrical explainer, and nonspecialist readers with a liking for the history of science and the progress of human thought will find these pages to be most accessible. Prospective time-travelers, too, will want to brush up on the math toward the back of the book.
Another pleasing popularization of science from an old hand.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-42227-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
