Jason: “I can’t believe you’re starting the Harry Potter books again. What is this, the fourth time through the series? I’m going to send you to Harry Potter Anonymous.”
Erin: “I’d go! There’d be lots of good conversations!”
A rather interesting short interview with Neal Stephenson.
Three hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin was born into a world where electromagnetism, nuclear physics, and even basic germ theory were completely unknown ideas. Anton van Leeuwenhoek had only done his seminal work on germ theory a generation before, and Isaac Newton’s Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was fresh off the presses. All kinds of new discoveries could be made by the layman simply because humanity existed in an intellectual universe where there were undiscovered wonders under every rock and behind every tree.
The period from Gallileo to Einstein was an era of great scientific discovery as humanity first started to make major inroads into the wilderness of knowledge, and while 400 years may seem like a long time, it’s the blink of an eye compared to the tens of thousands of years that homo sapiens sapiens has been roaming the planet.
So along comes the first few generations of people born into a world that has the technology to begin delving into the universe in a truly “scientific” way. Copernicus used simple observations to deduce that the sun was at the center of our local neighborhood. Discovery. Gallileo ground up some lenses and saw the moons of Jupiter. Discovery. Brahe (old metal-nose himself) and his assistant Johannes Kepler built on this work to deduce the laws of motion. Discovery. Newton rolled all of these observations up into some useful mathematical tools that really set things in motion (heh). Just as soon as Newton’s Mechanics and Calculus became widely known, the pace picked up and suddenly all kinds of discoveries were being made: under this stump was uncovered the orbits of the planets, behind this boulder was the first thermodynamics, the principles of pneumatics and hydraulics and then electromagnetism allowed the construction of more useful tools for experimenting. These in turn fed on themselves to create even more methods of discovery. Eventually Einstein wrote down his famous equation and seemed to upset the whole thing. But wait! Einstein was only describing a larger universe that encompassed all of Newton (who had encompassed all of Copernicus before him). Soon Heisenberg and Feynman, et. al. would encompass even Einstein’s landscape in a gigantic theory of tiny things- quantum mechanics.
At every one of these stages it became more and more important to know what had come before. You couldn’t be Gallileo and royally torque off the Church without understanding Copernicus. Brahe built on the work of Gallileo (and Copernicus). Kepler built on Brahe (who built on Gallileo and Copernicus). Today, people like Steven Wolfram build on Hawking, who build on Feynman, who built on Bohrs, who built on Einstein, who built on Newton, and so on down the line to the first guy to bang two shiny rocks together and notice a tiny silver spark. We’ve journeyed a long way, and at each step scientists had to know and understand what came before.
The wonderful result is this: if you pay attention in an average well-taught high school physics class, you can come out knowing more about the world than just about any of the Really Smart People before, say, 1900. You might not be as good with the math or as insightful about the processes involved, but you’ll have a clearer picture of how the universe is put together than the men and women who fought through the initial discoveries. A little more study in college and you, yes, even you, could have an intelligent discussion with Einstein. Study a bit more and you could even impress the old coot. Think about that. The tools to understand creation- tools that were centuries in development and cost generations of intellectual muscle-are handed, sharp, shiny, and clean…. to a sixteen year old. These students then take the intellectual discoveries of Copernicus-Gallileo-Newton-Brahe-Kepler-Einstein-Bohrs-Feynman-Heisenberg-Hawking and use them to create some truly big tools:
That’s ATLAS, the main detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. It’s been called the single most complex object humanity has ever created. This 7000 ton, 80′x130′ monster is about half as big as Notre Dame cathedral. Pause for a moment and consider that.
In fact, the 17 mile diameter instrument is almost as big as Paris itself! (Faint red ring):
In many ways, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider and ATLAS represent the capstone of human achievement. You’re looking at the culmination of ten thousand years of technological development, folks, none of which would have been possible without knowing, and understanding, all of the discoveries that were painfully, laboriously unearthed over generations. ATLAS will be used to plumb the very bedrock of matter, and will hopefully give us some answers that are suspected, but not yet proven. Scientists hope the instrument will then open the doors to parts of the map where before there were only the ghostly outlines of dragons.
Four hundred years ago, if you wanted to discover something that had never been seen, the only tools needed were a ramp, a reasonably round object, and an accurate clock. Now, in order to make a new discovery, you need a tool that takes thousands of scientist, millions of man hours, billions of dollars, and the cooperation of dozens of nation-states. We’ve come a long way, baby.
So now what?
Let’s say you’re an aspiring scientist in high school who wants to work on the frontiers of discovery. You want to go where no one has been, dig in a place where the soil is undisturbed, and uncover something new. Write your own Principia Mathematica for the modern age. Here’s a pretty good map to the frontier:
• Spend the first five years of your life learning how to walk, talk, reason, and not soil yourself too often.
• The next twelve years of your life (in the American system of education, at least), are spent learning the basics. Language, arts, literature, and an exposure to introductory physics and math. Hopefully you’ll have some logic courses because they’ll be very useful later.
• Next, do your undergraduate studies. You’ll take some english and literature and maybe even a few courses in the arts, but the vast majority of your next four years will be spent learning to understand the scientific rules that govern how the universe works.
• Now, the work really starts. In grad school you start to focus a lot on the higher reaches of modern science. Advanced physics, higher math, relativity, the quantum universe.
• Your doctoral and post-doc time is spent specializing in one area and getting to know that area as well as humanly possible. Who made the big discoveries? Why are they important? Learn these esoteric theories completely and then incorporate them into your knowledge base. My friend Matt was kind enough to send along the following list of the courses required in order to get a fundamental grounding sufficient to make original contributions in String Theory (just one small subset of physics, though I imagine that there would be a lot of overlap if you saw a list of, say, particle physics or cosmology):
Here is a list of directed (graduate only) courses one needs to do string theory (I’m leaving off several topics that may not be be necessary, though they would be helpful)
PHYSICS
Classical Mechanics
Classical Electromagnetism
Statistical Mechanics
Mathematical Physics
Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
Special Relativity
General Relativity
Astrophysics
Cosmology
Quantum Field Theory
Gauge Field Theory
Particle Physics
Intro String/M-Theory
Conformal Field Theory
String Cosmology
(each would be 2-3 semesters if you actually took all of these classes… though most of us learn a lot of this by reading)MATHEMATICS
Complex Analysis
Linear Algebra
Ordinary Differential Equations
Partial Differential Equations
Topology
Abstract Algebra
Algebraic Topology
Differential Topology
Differential Geometry
Algebraic Geometry
Lie Group TheoryAt the graduate level, the above mentioned math classes should cover the basic ideas of the following, but you’ll need a fairly advanced knowledge of the following (in no particular order);
Group Theory
Differential Forms
Rational Homotopy Theory
Tensor Theory
Differentiable Manifold (Real and Complex Manifolds)
Riemann Surfaces
Kahler Manifolds
Characteristic Classes
Homology
Cohomology
Fibre Bundle Theory
Noncommutative Geometry
Representation Theory
Calabi-Yau Manifold Theory
Enumerative Geometry
Loop Theory
Knot Theory
Topological Quantum Field Theory
Topological String Theory
Conformal Group Theory
K-Theory
Kac-Moody Theory
Quantum Group Theory
Information Theory
The first third of your life is over and you’re just now ready to begin. Congratulations!
As you advance in school, the amount you learn is utterly dwarfed by the amount that is known. It’s like doing search-and-rescue. You start from a single point of last-known-location and begin to spiral out. Each step from the center of the circle dramatically increases the total area of the circle. To be a modern scientist at the frontier requires that you have a good understanding of as much of the circle as possible, but there are still areas of the landscape that will be forever unknown to you, simply because the circle of knowledge is so big that nobody can know it. Thomas Young is generally regarded as the last man to know everything and while “everything” is a tall order, good old Tom was well-versed in just about every major field of knowledge during his time: 1773-1829. He had a grasp on the overall map of science and made significant contributions all over the place. As a result of his contributions, knowledge soon grew too vast for one person to get the big picture.
Matt, a trained scientist and string theorist, told me that he had been in school for his entire life (minus the first five years). That makes an ongoing twenty year education. He’s just now getting to the point where he knows enough about his chosen field to make a serious contribution. Matt tells me that he didn’t really start to get a picture of how things fit together until he was well into his doctoral studies. Four hundred years ago, you could learn everything there was to know about a subject in a few years, then spend the rest of your life expanding the borders. A hundred years ago it took a bit more time to get to this point, but there was still enough of your lifetime left to make new discoveries (and more important, enough mental agility- most mathematicians, for instance, do their best work before the age of thirty).
When Columbus, Magellan, and Marco Polo set off on their great journeys of exploration, the world was largely unknown. Most people were born, lived, and died within sight of the same church tower, and “far away” meant the neighboring country. A mere one hundred years ago mankind hadn’t yet set foot on the highest place on the map. Or the lowest. Or either pole, for that matter. In the time of my grandparents there remained significant portions of the planet that were unexplored. Today, a simple visit to google earth can reveal any corner of the globe that you want to see, down to an amazing level of detail. Granted, we still don’t have a truly detailed map of the ocean floor, but to any reasonable degree we have “discovered” the surface of our planet. Writer David Brin puts it this way:
“Jungles crash to make way for houses. The world sweats in every pore the breath and touch of humanity. There’s not a single place left where you can go and say to a new part of the universe- “Hello, we’ve never met. Let me introduce myself. I am Man.”
David Brin Earth, p. 272
And yet! Even though each corner of the map has been photographed and measured, cataloged and recorded, there is still an unending amount of work to be done to see how it all fits together. Once the great Age of Exploration of the earth was over, we had really only just begun to see the world. We’re still only just beginning.
However, within a generation or so, the amount of scientific knowledge that will have to be known will be so great, the distance to the edge of the metaphorical map so vast, that the very brightest among us will have to study for literally their entire lives before their education will incorporate what they need to know to be sure they’re not just duplicating past effort. What will science do in this kind of world? Will we constantly be rediscovering the same rock or tree but from different directions? It’s impossible for physicists to keep up with everything that’s going on in biology or math, to say nothing even of their own field, so it’s not uncommon for a scientist in each field to discover the same thing from different angles. Usually they figure things out when somebody points out the similarities, but often these overlaps will go undiscovered for years. In a very real way, we might be approaching the time when new scientific discoveries end, not because there’s nothing new to be discovered (as John Horgan argues in his book, The End of Science), but because, like outer space, the next frontier might simply be too hard to reach. Indeed, particle physicists tell us that we could go on building bigger and bigger ATLAS’s, attached to more titanic Colliders, and still never reach the true foundation of matter, but at some point it becomes impossible to do so (I read somewhere that in order to reach the energy necessary to see the smallest subatomic particle, you’d need to build a particle collider the diameter of the universe. That’s most likely not a bid that would make it past the various budgetary committees.).
Now that we’re facing the possibility that our “local map” might become unmanageably large, how is the scientific community addressing it? How are we making sure that our finite resources are not being focused on overlapping priorities? What should we as a species do to insure that we’re making the most efficient use of the people at the frontiers? I have a few suggestions.
Communicate across disciplines. First, let me suggest that it’s even more important that we get the disparate fields talking to one another. Not only will this keep them from wasting resources by avoiding overlapping discoveries, but combining experts in many different fields can often spur new thinking that leads to new discoveries. The annual TED conference has been doing this sort of thing for over a decade, and has wisely started posting its famous (and famously expensive-to-attend) conferences for free on the internet. Get them direct from the website, or in podcast/vidcast format via iTunes. Some of the talks can be of a more artistic nature, and some are even silly (wonderfully so, sometimes), but there are plenty of examples of experts reporting back from their slice of the frontier.
Open up education. MIT’s Open Courseware project makes it possible to get an advanced education in many different fields. An MIT education, to boot. We need to encourage every university to do this, not only because it’s the right thing to do (and arguments about intellectual property and marketplace competitiveness are unconvincing- it hasn’t hurt MIT at all), but because it seems like a good way to raise the general level of education- the rising tide that floats all boats. Getting the “free” MIT education does come with some drawbacks, namely the inability to interact directly with the professor or students, but come on… it’s a free MIT education!
Leverage the internet: While still in its infancy, the internet is the single greatest tool for improving the human condition since soap. Google, with its amazing search technology and plans to scan every book in the library of congress, Microsoft’s Live Search, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, are all examples of technologies that leverage the capability of the internet to collate, organize, and search-enable knowledge. We need to broaden and deepen this technology to include every word in every language ever written, every picture and movie, every sound recording, and then develop ways to reliably translate between them all so that nothing that is discovered is forgotten and everything ever learned is as accessible as a simple search.
Develop better systems of analyzing what we already know: In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil argues that future artificial intelligence will spend its time collating and analyzing the discoveries that have been made, not making new ones. We need to begin this process by making access to discovery as open, free, and unencumbered as possible. If basic research (sometimes even basic research that has been paid for by public money) is locked up by very expensive subscription services, the pace of discovery and innovation will slow down and only be accessible to those with deep pockets. The technology mentioned above is the basic beginning. Next we need to figure out ways to start comparing what we know so that those of us not on the frontiers (the vast majority), can more effectively analyze what has already been discovered. Just finding a lost tree or valley is great but exploiting this new knowledge is where humanity is benefitted.
Revamp the broken copyright system: Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig have been tireless warriors in the battle against the completely broken copyright mess, but they need help. We need to completely overhaul the system and come up with laws that balance the right of the creators/copyright holders (not always the same entity) with the good of society. There are many creative suggestions that would address this balance, but so far money and political influence have stood in the way of real change. Why is this important? Can you imagine how hard it would have been to make real progress hundreds of years ago if every idea and discovery was locked down to a fare-thee-well with restrictive copyright? True, you can’t copyright a natural fact or discovery, but it only takes one creative lawyer to confuse “natural fact” with “method of doing business”. Once this happens it tends to scare off innovators who maybe don’t have the resources to fight the system. Case in point: your own genome might soon become the property of a drug company. Other companies will then have to pay to use the “natural fact” of a specific sequence of your ATTGATTACA’s in order to develop new medical treatments.
“An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.” (From the Budapest Open Access Initiative Web site at http://www.soros.org/openaccess/).
Capitalism is great, and I’m all for it, but I believe there’s a balance between the right of a guy to make a buck and the right of society to build upon past discovery.
Fix the educational system. This is a whole post by itself, and there have been intellectual wars fought over how to do this, but one thing is very clear: our educational system worldwide stinks. In some countries (America among them), you are highly unusual if you possess a high school diploma and college degree. MIT’s idea is a start, but we need to take education more seriously than just the latest demand by the entrenched teacher’s unions or political special interests. I spent five years getting an education degree and what this showed me was that there is a lot of work to be done in improving the system. To that end we need to develop ways to…
Optimize our brains: A recent Wired article interviewed Piotr Wozniak about Supermemo. Supermemo is a computer program that uses the latest cognitive research in learning theory to optimize your memory. Used consistently, Supermemo can help you remember things better. Enter something that you want to remember (Mozart’s dates, the mass of the hydrogen atom, or new vocabulary words), and Supermemo will become your perfect teacher, reminding you of these facts at neurally-optimal intervals. The program is still in its infancy and reportedly very user-unfriendly, but if we can develop ways to optimize how we learn then we can shorten the period of time it takes to get out to the frontier.
The human species is rapidly approaching a point where the quantity of knowledge is so great that we lose our ability to usefully learn anything new. When that happens, humanity may stagnate. It seems clear that we must soon take steps to change our current systems of learning and intellectual exchange so that we can continue to push our frontiers out a little farther.
Neal Stephenson has a new book out. Anathem looks like a thousand pages of reading fun. It’s getting good reviews. Can’t wait until it hits paperback!
Women and Science Fiction. (and that title is a lame attempt at visual SFX).
John Scalzi on the perfect level of fame. If you haven’t read Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” trilogy, it’s an excellent read. Highly recommended.
I spent some time cleaning out the library this afternoon. Our “library” is really just the pretentiously named fourth bedroom in our house. Instead of an extra bed there are four bookshelves, a computer, and a lot of other stuff that needed to be sorted, tossed, or re-filed into other categories and locations to be tossed later.
I went through some of my books (they multiply, you know) and came to my Science Fiction section. Had a lot of Asimov books, naturally, a few Brin, Card, Sheffield, and a whole bunch of Arthur C. Clarke. 2001, 2010, 2069, 3001, The Rama series, on and on. I decided that his stuff passed the threshold of keepability (meaning: too good to toss. I chucked some old or outdated or duplicate stuff). So I re-shelved them and thought “gee, I’m going to have to read some of those again soon”. Clarke is one of those seminal, always-present writers in the SF world. His books were a big, big part of my life growing up. He was really the very first science fiction author of any standing that I read in my youth and I always appreciated how his style of writing was clear and complex at the same time. He could get across some pretty intricate ideas in a way that was easy to understand, without talking down to a 12 year old. In spite of his annoying tendency to kill his main characters at the end of his books in order to Make A Bigger Point, I’ve always liked his style of writing.
Clarke made his biggest contributions during the 60’s and 70’s and has been floating serenely on his fame ever since while living in, of all places, Sri Lanka.
I was surprised and saddened to see that Arthur C. Clarke died in his home today at the age of 90. An era has ended.
5 reasons Science Fiction totally pwns Fantasy. link.
I think the author is going to get some serious hate mail out of this, but in principle I have to agree.
Got a couple of late Christmas presents today (courtesy the UPS guy and Amazon’s special “we’ll deliver it AFTER Christmas for you” service). Truth be told, I actually kind of like getting the card with the printout in it on Christmas day, then have the package arrive a few days later. It’s like getting an extra present. It extends the holiday, and the UPS guy stopping out front always makes me happy.
Anyway, Erin got me a 150 piece Dremel accessory kit like this one. Amazon’s supplier was out of stock so she cancelled the order and we got it from Lowes (same price… shame on you Amazon!). I immediately put it to work out in the shop tonight for a few hours. Say what you want about 3hp 240v cabinet saws and pneumatic tools, when the chips are down there ain’t NOTHING like a Dremel.
Erin also got me this book on stop action filmmaking. I’m looking forward to working through it. It’s very informative and well written. Neat!
Speaking of fun books, she got me this one as well. I’m planning on making a totally dangerous finger guillotine with a surgical steel blade. My neighbors are going to drive me out of the neighborhood.
England’s Times Online has an interesting article on the popular debasement of science fiction:
No other country is quite so contemptuous of the literary genre, though, in the movies, we happily accept SF as high art: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is rightly regarded as a great film, as is Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner. (If you want to see just how great Scott’s film is, the seventh and “final” cut has just been released in cinemas and on DVD. It’s visually enhanced and, says Scott, “tweaked”. It looks, and is, superb.) The further oddity is that fantasy – Terry Pratchett, Tolkien, Philip Pullman – is not embarrassing to us at all; indeed, it’s downright respectable. Perhaps this is because these are seen as children’s books that grown-ups can read, whereas SF is seen as irredeemably adolescent. This is to ignore the fact that it tends to be much more demanding and much bleaker.
I’ve dealt with this since I was a junior high schooler. I’ve always had a book tucked away in my bag, and it was, more often than not, a science fiction book. I’ve read everything from Asimov to Zelazny and am quite well acquainted with the world of SF, but throughout my life there has always been a feeling that I should keep those books hidden, or at least downplay them. And it’s not just imagined. In high school I had several teachers comment negatively on my choice of books, even going so far as to say that they were going to tell my parents what I was reading. Here’s the book that provoked that comment, by the way.
So the message that I heard was that SF was somehow shameful or inferior to “real” literature. But at the very same time (the late 70’s, early 80’s), science fiction was positively killing at the box office. Star Wars I, II, and III had phenomenal attendance, followed by spin-offs and wanna-be’s showing up all over the place. Nascent Futurism started showing up in everything from art to architecture, and shows like Beyond 2000 gushed about the kind of world we’d live in once the 1 clicked over to the 2. All this time, though, lovers of science fiction were still regarded as childish or immature. That’s starting to change a bit, but my old habits die hard. In spite of the fact that I’ve read over 50 Science Fiction books in the last few years I still feel the need to lay the book cover-down when I’m in public. I probably don’t need to do that any more, but the memory of my English teacher deriding me for actually, you know, reading a book, is strong.
And for the record, even though SF remains a staple of my diet, it’s not the only thing. In addition to those 50 SF books in the last few years I’ve read another 150 non-sf. It’s all about balance, but I would hate to give up the knowledge, sense of wonder, and sneaky second-hand science education I’ve earned from reading SF.
I’m sometimes ask people where they would go if they had a free ticket to anywhere in the world. Pick your destination and go, for a week, or a month, or a season. Where would it be? I get all kinds of answers- Europe, Russia, Hawaii. For me, the one place I would choose is Antarctica. Why? A couple reasons, really. It’s not on the way anywhere, so you’re never going to just stop off on a layover, there haven’t been that many people who have done it, but mainly because it’s just so different. Like a completely foreign planet. What must it feel like to be in a world that’s totally iced over year-round? Where a warm day is zero degrees? Where the windchill can get down to -100 fahrenheit? The alienness of that landscape fascinates me.
I picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica at the library last week and just finished it tonight. Like his Mars trilogy, Robinson uses the dramatic backdrop to weave a very literate and moving story of technocratic utopianism. Along the way, he delves into the history and mythos of Antarctica as well as, through one of his characters, a very zen-like appreciation of the austere and sere landscape. One of his main character is a mountaineer guide and I was impressed with how accurate he got not only the technical details of guiding, but also the emotional aspects of taking people out into the wild. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it made me want to go there even more.
Vagabonding, by Rolf Potts.
Rolf is a friend of mine from years ago. He and I spent a couple summers guiding wilderness trips in the Rockies. He then turned his peripatetic leanings into a travel/writing career.
Vagabonding is a pitch-perfect travelogue/guide about how to travel the world with minimal funds and minimal stress. Rolf focuses on the “why’s” of long-term travel as well as the “how’s”. Lots of good information, funny anecdotes, and inspiring reasons to hit the road.
Writer/blogger Will Collier has the final HP book delivered 4 days early and ebays it for a nice profit. Better yet, he get to… well, I’m not into spoilers, so you’ll just have to go read it. link.
Started a new book, The Last Colony, just after dinner tonight at 7:30. Little did I know it was one of those books. It’s 2:10 and I just finished it. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but insomnia and a lost earplug conspired to only grant me 4 hours of sleep last night. Even though I was positively droopy a few times, I couldn’t put it down book was that good.
Totally worth it. It’s the third book of John Scalzi’s trilogy of Old Man’s War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. Highly recommended.
Economist Juliet Schor estimated that for every hour of TV a person watches each week, he or she will increase his or her annual spending by about $200, according to a 1999 article in the Spokane, Wash., Spokesman-Review.
Yahoo has an interesting article titled “How to Earn $1 Million by Not Watching TV” wherein they posit that if you gave up TV, and all associated costs, and invested the money, you would make a million over the course of your lifetime. While I applaud the notion, I have to say that their estimate of $700/month for TV costs seems a bit excessive. Still, the article makes me feel all superior and all, so there ya go.
I only wish it were true! But giving up TV has resulted in something much more valuable than mere money. We’ve reclaimed time for ourselves (please insert obligatory disclaimer stating that we don’t hold it above anyone that we don’t watch TV. If you get enjoyment out of it, knock yourself out. Not making a value judgement for others here).
Last night Erin and I spent a delightful 4 hours or so not talking to each other. No, we weren’t fighting (that’s exceedingly rare anyway). We were each seduced by our own books. As part of my telescope research I plowed through the book “The Neptune Files” about astronomers William Herschel, John Couch Adams, and Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier and the discovery of Uranus and Neptune. I never knew there was such a fracas over who got primacy for the discovery. Herschel discovered Uranus the old fashioned way: by looking through a telescope, but Adams and Le Verrier both independently deduced the position of the next planet out, Neptune, by calculating the invisible hand of gravity on Uranus. This took over 10,000 pages of extremely dense calculations and will probably stand as one of the greatest feats of calculation by a single person (Matt, correct me here if I’m wrong). What’s more amazing is that both astronomers did the calculations independently with very little support (Adams’ brother did watch over the astronomer’s shoulder to make sure he didn’t make any basic math mistakes). In the end, both astronomers came up with very nearly the same answer, pointed their scopes at the sky, and found the distant orb. Well, there’s more to it than that, but you’ll just have to read the book.
Erin, on the other hand, is trying to plow her way through the Harry Potter books again before H-Day on saturday. We’re getting a special release day delivery from Amazon and we probably will have a rare fight over who gets to read book 7 first. 
I’m amazed at her pace through the rest of the books. She started at book 2 about eight days ago and is now in book 5. Last night, in a single sitting, she read 200 pages to finish book 4, got up, went upstairs, and came down with Order of the Phoenix twenty seconds later.
My point is that, two years ago, we’d have wiled the time away staring blankly at the tube (please see disclaimer above if you’re feeling like I’m getting all self-righteous on you). I much prefer this way of living!
But anyway, yeah, the article. I wonder if they calculated the added cost of buying books into their figures? I think that’ll more than offset the savings.
Just finished Old Man’s War by John Scalzi and The Crucible of Time by John Brunner. I went to Half-Price Books tonight (always a dangerous thing) and walked out with six, count ‘em, six books. The good news was that four of them were on the clearance shelf and I got them for $1.00 each, so very little damage done to the wallet (the others were only $4 and $7). I can’t remember the last time I bought a book from Barnes and Noble, even though I’ve been there dozens of times in the last year. But set me loose in a Half-Price Books and I’m guaranteed to come out of there with something.
I picked up Summerland on the advice of Barry who read it a few years ago. I’m looking forward to seeing what it’s like. I’m way behind in my reading this year, having only finished 10 of the 30 books I want to read. The studio build really set me back, but fortunately I’m back at it, so I should get in the mid-twenties by Christmas (don’t laugh, Scott and Katherine, some of us are slow readers!)
Frederik Pohl, “Chasing Science: Science as a Spectator Sport”
Great book so far! I picked it up at Half-Price Books a few years ago (if you ever wonder what to get me for a birthday or Christmas, a gift cert to HPB is a slam-dunk winner). Pohl has been a science fiction writer his whole career, but never a bona fide scientist. In his book he tours around the country and visits a bunch of labs and describes his love of science from a spectator’s viewpoint. He also talks about which labs a person can visit and tour (Leon Lederman’s wonderfully open Fermilab is at the top of my list). Like many people, I share Pohl’s outsider view of science. My relationship to the science world is a lot like a good amateur’s relationship with music. They may play an instrument with some proficiency, read biographies of Monk and Mozart, and even gig occasionally, but they make their bread in their “real jobs”. I dabble in science (and Mad Science!) but make my living as a, er, musician.
I have a friend who loves to go to music festivals and listens to all kinds of music (something that feels like work to me), but my idea of a perfect vacation would be to travel the country taking tours of various labs and talking/interviewing scientists about what they’re doing. Maybe my physicist friend Matt could show me around once he’s a rich and famous particle physicist/quantum theorist/prosthetic designer. That is, if he doesn’t forget me from all the fame and groupies.
SF classic Neuromancer, the book that started the whole cyberpunk trend. Read it in one sitting. A weird, wild, hallucinogenic story that reminded me a lot of “A Signal Shattered” that I read last year. Very weird.
The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. It was a birthday gift from Barry and I’m finally getting around to reading it. What a great read! Like Barry said, it’s the book “The DaVinci Code” wanted to be.
