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Review: "Properties Of Light"
So the formidable problem is this: reconciling quantum physics with relativity theory still awaits a solution.
You might be surprised that a writer could build a dark, cold, strikingly imaginative novel out of that dilemma. Or a bitter love story right out of the darkside of academe. But Rebecca Goldstein, an author of four novels (The Mind-Body Problem among them) and the winner of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, manages to turn physics into first-rate fiction.
It isn't surprising that physicists have captured creative imaginations for years, from Jeanette Winterson to Michael Frayn's shockingly successful Broadway play "Copenhagen," about the famed World War II Bohr-Heisenberg encounter (the two devoted ex-colleagues could never agree on what did or didn't take take place), the purpose of which has had physicists and historians buzzing for decades.
After all, physicists are seeking nothing less than the meaning, nature and source of life.
The book doesn't waste the mystery and importance of its subject -- it's part thriller, part tragedy, both lyrical and surreal. The story, set in a college that is obviously inspired by Princeton, revolves around two physicists, Samuel Mallach and his young colleague Justin Childs. The two scientists, in the tradition of physicist friendships, have devoted their lives to trying to reconcile the contradictory claims of quantum mechanics and relativity, but in this almost-eerie tale, their well-meaning collaboration is doomed. This, also, is a deep strain in the history of physics: oddball, brilliant seekers ignored, celebrated, obsessed, consumed by their determination to unlock some of the biggest secrets in the universe. No field of scientific inquiry has higher stakes, or greater or more complex minds trying to grapple with them.
Appropriately, this story plays around with time, and narrative, as signalled by Goldstein: "whereby particles, having once been subjected to quantum entanglement, will forever after continue to assert, even when widely separated, instantaneous influences over one another ..." This book has a brooding, knowing, almost poetic tone, even as the lives of the characters begin to unravel, and the writing about physics is both remarkable and accessible.
"In the beginning," says one academic in the novel, "there was the big bang, a moment of infinite singularity, into which we cannot probe. Our knowledge begins at ten to the minus thirteen seconds after ground zero; only then can we lift the heavy veil and take a peek. All moments before that one are cloaked from our scientific view, and it remains to others to imagine what lies behind the cognitive curtain: whether it is there that God's hand may be invisibly moving."
There's another point where the Olympian chair of the physics department, whose daughter was playing Mozart on a miniature cello when she was four, tears into Justin:
"You can't really say what it's all about, now can you?", he had demanded of Justin, staring at Schrodinger's equation for the evolution of the wave function, symbolized by psi. Erwin Schrodinger, who had won his Nobel in 1933, had demonstrated that the wave function, a precisely defined mathematical object, completely specifies the state of any quantum mechanical system. So perhaps the most likely answer to Professor Kreb's querulously put question "What's it all about?" is that quantum mechanics is about the behavior of wave functions.
Ultimately, Properties of Light is about the gripping power of physics to capture the interest and imagination of everyone, even those who will never come close to understanding it's mystical, surreal properties. This is a sad story, many of the characters destroyed by mistrust, betrayal and hatred. Despite what happens to their relationships with one another-- the third major character is Mallach's daughter Dana, who Justin falls in love with -- the three are all mesmerized by the special beauty of seeking some big truth.
You can purchase this book at fatbrain.
I'm a little confused. As I understood it, Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Chromodynamics already pretty much merge Special Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. Perhaps our protagonists are searching for a theory which would merge General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics? But if so, why not just use the standard name for such theories: Quantum Gravity?
I'm always suspicious of these kinds of books. IMHO you should be required to have a Ph.D. in the field you're writing fiction about :-). ObStory: A FOAF served as the math consultant for Good Will Hunting. He got the job when he overheard some of the players in a bar talking about a character pursuing the Nobel Prize in Mathematics, and was kind enough to let them know about the problem.
OTOH, maybe a degree from the venerable Bob's School of Quantum Mechanics would suffice...
I think that saying researchers can be very passionate is an understatement as well!
I don't know too many people doing serious academic research in any field who don't devote their lives to it. When you spend that much time working on the same thing it pretty much influences your every thought. I think the reason why the general public (and the media in particular) don't view researchers as passionate is because they don't approach the work of the researcher from the same perspective - most people just see it as a bunch of math/experimenting with little relevance to their lives in particular, while to the people doing the work it is a source of extreme fascination and unbounded possibilities.
Then again I'm sure the same thing can be said about any profession if the person is serious enough about it, but it just seems that people have always viewed scientists/mathematicians as shallow, robot-like people - a view that couldn't be any farther from the truth!
UBU
It that supposed to be a positive comment? I liked The Great Train Robbery and The Andromeda Strain was OK for a first book. But his half-educated preachiness should drive any intelligent person away. And he has no talent at all for Science Fiction. I mean, in Looker, he had computer-generated TV shows where the actors where software-generated but the sets were still physical entities.
Somebody else here accuses Hollywood of butchering C's work. Get real. All of his books are written for Hollywood. He even chooses the actors he wants to play the parts before he starts writing! In JP, all they did was censor some of the girl-bashing (he's really down on the fems these days!), remove the stupid diatribes against linear math, and graft on the mandatory happy ending. Even that stupid car-up-a-tree sequence came from the book. I would have sworn that was pure Spielberg!
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"...Light" sounds interesting, but not because of the critique ("..lyrical and sureal..."? oh please). I mean, kudos to the scifi authors for writing scifi, but writing a book with QM vs GR as a key plot point just seems kinda weak. I dug Cryptonomicon's portrayal of Turing and his buds, but that wasn't a main plot in the book, it was just food for thought.
C'mon, either pen some really esoteric SciFi, or let's hear a story about how Newton shafted Leibnitz on the differential calculus.
I'm a HUGE fan of Dr David Goodstein's "The Mechanical Universe" series, and the little skist they filmed about the individuals are fascinating. Like Galileo being persecuted (or Bruno, for that matter). Hell, Kepler's madness would make a great story too.
Instead, NBC makes miniseries after miniseries about the old testament instead of recounting the real and documented tragedies that occurred among the history of science.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Well, if you don't live in the US or England and don't play soccer (or football or whatever), a hat trick is what a magician does when he pulls something (like a rabit) from his hat.
this is probably what the reviewer means.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Sorry I can't offer much insight, since I haven't read the book, but IIRC another review pegged this as David Bohm's story in disguise.
Bohm was a Princeton prof who revived de Broglie's Pilot Wave formulation, showed that it made sense, and then at some point was McCarthyized and ended up in Britain, blacklisted from US universities.
In any case, I like Bohm. He stacks up as follows:
Reality is:
deterministic, nonlocal, nonjumpy: Bohm, de Broglie
nondeterministic, local but jumpy: Bohr, Heisenberg, most basic physics books
deterministic, local: Einstein, Simpson (Homer)
nondeterministic, nonlocal, solipsistic: New Age physics-interpretation gurus
(sorry, it's Friday, hard to dredge this stuff up off the cuff)
Another random note: Most people don't know that de Broglie actually came up with his wave theory of matter to reconcile special relativity and the primitive quantum ideas of the time. The waves were a compensating factor for the slowdown of "internal vibrations" due to SR as v approaches c. So, in effect, QM is already a reconciliation with SR. However he eventually discarded his "pilot wave" theory, not because it didn't work, but because it didn't fit his assumptions about reality.
For more info on Bohmian Mechanics, here is a link to some current research.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Nice that a author recognises that and puts it works it into a book. TV is so full of cops, lawyers, business people that they overlook the fact that scientific researchers can be very passionate about their lines of work, too. If it ever reaches the silver screen, let's pray they don't do a Jurassic Park on it, dropping all the good bits and giving (Here comes the suspenseful part, get ready!!!) away the good parts.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
If you see an 8-year-old girl holding a Quantum Physics book, AIM FOR THE HEAD!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
the term "hat trick" comes from ice hockey where the fans will throw their hats on the ice if you score three goals in one game. Outside hockey, it is still generally reserved for accomplishing three things, not one. Rebecca Goldstein may have scored a goal with this, an amazing goal, but it's not a hat trick.
"something to put with Crichton"? I don't know... have you read "Timeline" yet?
IMO, science is making a final transition in the mind of society from vocation to art. This book looks as though it would appease a wide variety of readers.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
I concur with Katz's review, and want to stress something he didn't say enough about: It's a great story. It's fascinating that Goldstein managed to make fiction out of quantum physics, sure, but what's amazing is that it's such great fiction.
A few of the things that struck me: The gothic tone. The fragments of conversation that surface and resurface throughout the story, unrooted from time. The struggle between ways of understanding, between mathematics and poetry. Betrayals, great and small, and the fear of being betrayed again. The web of fathers and daughters and mothers and sons.
When I finished this book, I turned back to the first page and started rereading it immediately. I haven't done that since I was thirteen.
I also recommend Goldstein's Strange Attractors, a collection of interrelated short stories. Two of the stories feature a young mathematician named Phoebe who "studies the geometry of soap bubbles". Again, the stories combine a love of the world of ideas with a grounding in the world of people.
The New York Times has a pretty useful review of Strange Attractors but I can't get a working URL for it so if you're interested you'll have to do the search yourself.
Do you think maybe we could start including the list price in the summary box at the beginning of each review? I hate having to make several clicks at times just to check to see what the price of a book is on the linked book site (thinkgeek,fatbrain,etc.). It would be highly useful to me in deciding whether I want to go purchase this book immediately or want to wait for the library to pick it up.
--------- Beware the dragon, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Hmm..
Not one to take chances... Dear Santa, this book, thanks, Me
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
About 2 seconds after it came out!
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I am also tired of every TV show being about corporate lawers and traders, we definately are missing media having to do with science.
It seems that science is 'out' and lawyers are in.
Don't get me wrong, I still like Matlock but everyone needs a little variety once and awhile.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Leave it to Katz to present what might be a decent novel about scientists into a sappy, self-absorbed, postmodernist work of literature.
Kids, here's a tip from Uncle 3735928559: if you want to read stuff about scientists that isn't a soap opera, go to the section in the bookstore labeled "science fiction/fantasy". It's seperated from the dreck for your convience, but you'll still have to do some filtering. Look for names like Greg Egan, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Venor Vinge. These guys are honest-to-god scientists, so they write about what scientists like to think about. No, not about kissing ass to get tenure, or who's screwing who among the faculty, no, what they like to think about: big ideas. Important ideas. Stuff that matters.
You know, stuff like the structure of universe, the course of human history, the rolling advance of technology, the reasoning of ethics, and the nature of existence. It's not always very serious, either. In fact, most of the time it's pretty damn fun! You won't find much self-absorbed whining to drag it down like in other books. These books are to the point and written with vivid imagination.
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Bush's assertion: there ought to be limits to freedom
Okay, I'll agree it's silly to claim that physicists are seeking "the meaning, nature and source of life", but to give Newton credit for this borders on absurdity. Certainly the Rules of Philosophizing described in the Principia are a good formal statement of the scientific method, but that method had been developing for at least 200 years before Newton's time. Furthermore, Newton didn't see science as dismissing such questions as the "meaning, nature and source of life"... indeed, toward the close of the Principia he expresses a hope that just those subjects will soon fall within the scope of scientific investigations, and a regret that he has not yet been able to account for them. "Natural philosophy" is a good description of what Newton did, and is (of course) the name he himself used for it.
If you really want to see where physics came from, first take a look at Archimedes and Ptolemy, and maybe even a little Aristotle, and then read Galileo, Copernicus, and Kepler and try to see what they're doing differently. Then, if you're up for something a bit more comprehensive, take a look at Francis Bacon's New Organon, which has as good a claim as any to founding the scientific method. Then, maybe, you'll be ready to tackle Newton.
(Sorry for that little outburst, I just hate to see intelligent people accepting the kind of oversimplified rubbish that passes for history in the schools. And yeah, I really would suggest reading all those things if you want to understand science, just as I'd suggest taking the time to learn your operating system thoroughly)
--Moss
--Moss
This is a
Now there are two of them.
There are two _____.
Well, for starters, all of mathematics doesn't... only some parts do, and those are usually chosen specifically for the task. And as to why: the most likely reason is that we ultimately derive mathematics from nature -- math (axiomatic systems, specifically) is developed through the application of logic, which is in a sense the refinement of natural language, which has evolved to describe the world around us accurately enough so that we can survive in it. It's not surprising that math explains the universe, it'd be surprising somehow if it didn't.
I think most of the mystical amazement at the fit of math to the universe is much like the amazement which comes when 1 + 2 = 3, and also 1 + 1 + 1 = 3... and it always works like that! (math simplified here, for the general public...) Sort of like the "anthropic principle" arguments regarding the values of the universal constants -- if they varied by even a little, the universe wouldn't support life! But if they varied a little, we wouldn't be here to notice it, either -- Doh!
Just because you can't see the structure underlying both mathematics and physics, doesn't mean that it's mystical... it might only mean that you're nearsighted, and keep being surprised when you run into things you didn't know were there, but were actually there all along.
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Politics is about making compromises. Religion isn't. --Michael Horton
> weirdness which has had so many physicists scratching their heads for years.
Here's an example of how John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation eliminates weirdness:
"When we stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been traveling for a hundred years to reach our eyes, but the advanced waves generated by absorption processes within our eyes have reached a hundred years into the past, completing the transaction that permitted the star to shine in our direction."
Oh yeah, that's perfectly non-weird, alright!
quantum physics isn't really fiction?
Only if you learn it and understand it. Only then do you collapse its truth equation, at which point it becomes either fact or fiction.
Until then, it's both... and neither.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
After all, physicists are seeking nothing less than the meaning, nature and source of life.
No, that is not physics; that is philosophy. You will recall that, although physics---and indeed science as a whole---was once termed `natural philosophy', a fellow named Newton came along and founded the notion of scientific method, thus putting science on a solid basis of empirical observation and experimentation, rather than metaphysical claptrap.
BH
Fools! They laughed at me at the Sorbonne...!