Anathem

If you read cosmology books for fun, you’ll have plenty of fun reading Anathem, by Neil Stephenson. It also helps if you like wordplay, language, and philosophy. I liked this book so much I was actually a bit relieved that I didn’t fall in love with it, because a 900 page book could mean some [...]

The Self-Aware Universe

Like Programming the Universe, I got one key idea from The Self-Aware Universe, by Amit Goswami: that the probabilistic realm of quantum potentia is the same thing as the unitive consciousness of mystic experience. Unlike the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, this book conveys a good introduction to both quantum mechanics and the unitive consciousness. I just [...]

GTFH: The universe

The most interesting parts of God: The Failed Hypothesis is not what the book has to say about god, but about science and morality (which I’ll save for a post next week.) In chapters four and five, the book tackles why there is something rather than nothing, and why our something is the way it [...]

God: The Failed Hypothesis

I like messing around with God, or gods, or Cosmic Muffins, but that doesn’t mean I believe in any sort of god. So I was interested in seeing how God: The Failed Hypothesis, by Victor J. Stenger would apply the methods of science to the hypothesis that God exists. Like The Fabric of Reality, it [...]

The Fabric of Reality – Part II: What I didn’t like

As I mentioned last week, The Fabric of Reality is a thought-provoking book, but sometimes it’s just provoking. The book spends too much time blasting away at theories that aren’t useful and misrepresenting theories that are commonly accepted, not enough time crossing over some of its logical leaps, and no time at all discussing valid [...]

The Fabric of Reality – Part I: The Good Stuff

Back in June, I wondered how long it would take me to read The Fabric of Reality, by David Deutsch. Well, it took just about a week. This is not a book to tackle at the end of the day. The book is so challenging, it’s physically tiring to read and think about and react [...]

A quick note about The Big Rip

Today’s episode of Quirks & Quarks ends with a discussion of The Big Rip, the driving idea behind “Last Contact.” And I’m trying to write an inchoate story about Mars, so I was also interested in their discussion of the Phoenix Lander, due to land on Mars next Sunday.

Cosmic Jackpot

A good book you might wish you had read before tackling “The House Beyond Your Sky,” is Cosmic Jackpot. In clear, entertaining arguments, Paul Davies works his way through the various flavors of theories attempting to explain the “Goldilocks” problem. That is, there are a small set of critical constants that have to be within [...]

The House Beyond Your Sky

Some science fiction reads like popular science writing dressed up in story. “The House Beyond Your Sky,” by Benjamin Rosenbaum, is a story you really can’t understand unless you already know some science. The references to cosmology–like simulated universes and critical constants–go completely unexplained. And you know what? I like being treated as an adult.

Our Cosmic Origins

The second cosmology book recommended in Spin is Our Cosmic Origins, by Armand Delsemme. A slender book, it gives a good summary of the origins of the Solar System, but skims over a lot of explanation. Understanding and accepting it is largely dependant on reading other books. Being a cometologist, he goes into fascinating detail [...]