Björn recenserade On the Origin of Time av Thomas Hertog
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4 stjärnor
I have a huge amount of respect for people who spend their professional lives in theory. Whether it's physics, mathematics, philosophy or even theology; the idea of spending every hour of your work simply figuring it out, not through practical experimentation but by crunching the numbers, thinking over the contradictions and trying to get to something. Personally I get bored writing an e-mail.
But then, you have to come back and explain it to the ones who haven't spent decades in that rarified air. From what I've read of his, one of Hawking's great talents was his ability (and, I suppose, his necessity) to explain the endlessly complex in terms that people could, at the very least, feel like they understand. Hertog, for all his enthusiasm about the subject, isn't the great communicator. Taking it upon himself to be the executor of Hawking's last will and scientific testament, he …
I have a huge amount of respect for people who spend their professional lives in theory. Whether it's physics, mathematics, philosophy or even theology; the idea of spending every hour of your work simply figuring it out, not through practical experimentation but by crunching the numbers, thinking over the contradictions and trying to get to something. Personally I get bored writing an e-mail.
But then, you have to come back and explain it to the ones who haven't spent decades in that rarified air. From what I've read of his, one of Hawking's great talents was his ability (and, I suppose, his necessity) to explain the endlessly complex in terms that people could, at the very least, feel like they understand. Hertog, for all his enthusiasm about the subject, isn't the great communicator. Taking it upon himself to be the executor of Hawking's last will and scientific testament, he wobbles back and forth between writing for physicists and ordinary readers, explaining some things at length and others hardly at all. And above all, I find myself wondering... just how revolutionary is something that does sound as simple and obvious as the aging Hawking's top-down perspective? Yes, he lands in something very likable - a model of the universe where the observer is an inextricable part, one who has to take responsibility for the questions they ask of it - but I honestly can't tell where the math ends and the philosophy begins.
But then, his point is that we're not above all. We are stardust, billion-year-old carbon. I'm sure I don't understand half of this, and that my understanding of half of the rest is shallow at best. But it makes me want to.