Readers may find this to be an overly ambitious attempt to provide a historical perspective to the scientific enterprise...
Gleiser (Natural Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy/Dartmouth Coll.; A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe, 2010, etc.) seeks an answer to the question, “Can we make sense of the world without belief?”
The author suggests that even scientific giants like Newton and Einstein depended on “intuition and personal prejudice” to extend their knowledge, knowing full well the limitations of their theories. Scientific knowledge has advanced since their groundbreaking discoveries, but so, too, has our understanding of its inherent limitations. Gleiser contends that although we can extend our understanding of how the universe works, our efforts to penetrate reality will always include an element of unsubstantiated belief. The author traces the history of science, including Aristotle's Earth-centered model of the heavens, which was upended by Copernicus and his successors. This led to the achievements of classical physicists such as Newton and James Maxwell in understanding gravity and electromagnetism and culminated with Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Then, Gleiser tackles current cosmological theories—e.g., the Big Bang, the expanding universe and the possibilities that it is only one of infinitely many other universes. For readers unfamiliar with the material, this will be a lot to comprehend, even though the author uses descriptive metaphors to make it more accessible. Gleiser also examines the anomalies of quantum physics, such as the odd behaviors of electrons or photons that appear to be particles in some experiments and waves in others, and he gives examples of electrons that appear to communicate instantaneously, a step back to Newton that Einstein criticized “as spooky action at-a-distance.” Gleiser ends with an examination of information theory.
Readers may find this to be an overly ambitious attempt to provide a historical perspective to the scientific enterprise that is more confusing than illuminating.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-03171-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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