I met J.D. Lewis in grad school and immediately fell in love with her writing. She was the writer I wanted to be--lyrical, witty, evocative. Over rounds of Trivial Pursuit and bad tween movie viewings I forced her to become my friend. I am tickled that she agreed to write the inaugural post for Dog-Eared Pages, a series about people's favorite books. I have been absolutely giddy to begin. There are some stellar recommendations coming over the next few Fridays. Hopefully some of them will make it to your summer reading lists. Without further ado, I present J.D. Lewis on Brian Greene's The Hidden Reality.
Living in China sometimes feels like living in a parallel universe. The stink of street vendors’ unnamable meats, the constancy of the heavying smog, the body language of people whose spoken words I can’t understand – I am surrounded by stuff that is familiar yet totally alien at the same time. This has never felt more true than on the recent humid evening I found myself stretched out on the bed, which is really two tiny beds pushed together, the plywood properties and gap area of which I have sort of gotten used to over the last six months, reading a real book. [English-language books tend to be very expensive or just plain do not exist in (this universe’s incarnation of) my city, so even having a physical object to read feels like winning a tiny prize.]
A subtropical chorus of improbably loud frogs burped along outside my window as I tried to absorb the following passage, from a chapter called “Eternity and Infinity”:
A subtropical chorus of improbably loud frogs burped along outside my window as I tried to absorb the following passage, from a chapter called “Eternity and Infinity”:
The best available cosmological theory for explaining the best available cosmological data leads us to think of ourselves as occupying one of a vast inflationary system of parallel universes, each of which harbors its own vast collection of quilted parallel universes. Cutting-edge research yields a cosmos in which there are not only parallel universes but parallel parallel universes. It suggests that reality is not only expansive but abundantly expansive.
“Kablooie,” said my brain.
The book is pop-sci writer/physicist Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. It was an impulse buy from a sleek employee-pick display at Village Books bookstore in Bellingham, Washington (recommended by, I prefer to imagine, some ultra-hip nerd named, like, “Chad” or “Dale”), which I visited in January during a US vacation. It leered down from the shelf, its colorful cover coyly suggesting that even a non-scientist like me could dip her toe into an intellectually foreign deep end. The back blurb promised the author wrote with “trademark wit and precision.” Wit! I thought, Sure. Can do.
Wit being a thing that turns out to be vital if an author wishes to invite laypeople to the parallel universe party, and Greene’s jovial voice delivers. In essence, his book gives an overview of current scientific research into the nature of reality. (In an infinite universe, some version of you already knows all this. Another version of you is the one writing this from China right now.) His conclusions involve coherent use of the terms “mathematical tapestry,” “spacetime,” and “probability wave”. He tracks competing theories, each stranger than the last, about the ways in which we can go about trying to define the word “universe” sensibly, about what we can know about what we know to be true.
It is Greene’s extraordinary gift for translating the secrets of the universe into something people who barely get LOLspeak as a foreign language can generally understand that is the most striking here. On the other hand, sudden access to the world of theoretical physics has a way of slowing a girl up; my usual pleasure reading is gluttonous, but I found myself putting down The Hidden Reality down, wandering out into the hazy twilight, and staring zombie-like into the middle distance for long stretches. Although the clicking in of a new concept is immensely satisfying whether you’re dusting off basic math skills or finally getting a cab driver to understand your kindergarten Mandarin, the challenge with this book, for the reader who finds these concepts challenging, may be picking it back up again once you’ve put it down.
In this universe, I think I need a cozy literary diversion for these periods of digestion. But what pairs well with string theory? For this question, the Chinese night frogs seem to have no answer. *
*This is a lie. Every living thing knows the answer is J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.
The book is pop-sci writer/physicist Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos. It was an impulse buy from a sleek employee-pick display at Village Books bookstore in Bellingham, Washington (recommended by, I prefer to imagine, some ultra-hip nerd named, like, “Chad” or “Dale”), which I visited in January during a US vacation. It leered down from the shelf, its colorful cover coyly suggesting that even a non-scientist like me could dip her toe into an intellectually foreign deep end. The back blurb promised the author wrote with “trademark wit and precision.” Wit! I thought, Sure. Can do.
Wit being a thing that turns out to be vital if an author wishes to invite laypeople to the parallel universe party, and Greene’s jovial voice delivers. In essence, his book gives an overview of current scientific research into the nature of reality. (In an infinite universe, some version of you already knows all this. Another version of you is the one writing this from China right now.) His conclusions involve coherent use of the terms “mathematical tapestry,” “spacetime,” and “probability wave”. He tracks competing theories, each stranger than the last, about the ways in which we can go about trying to define the word “universe” sensibly, about what we can know about what we know to be true.
It is Greene’s extraordinary gift for translating the secrets of the universe into something people who barely get LOLspeak as a foreign language can generally understand that is the most striking here. On the other hand, sudden access to the world of theoretical physics has a way of slowing a girl up; my usual pleasure reading is gluttonous, but I found myself putting down The Hidden Reality down, wandering out into the hazy twilight, and staring zombie-like into the middle distance for long stretches. Although the clicking in of a new concept is immensely satisfying whether you’re dusting off basic math skills or finally getting a cab driver to understand your kindergarten Mandarin, the challenge with this book, for the reader who finds these concepts challenging, may be picking it back up again once you’ve put it down.
In this universe, I think I need a cozy literary diversion for these periods of digestion. But what pairs well with string theory? For this question, the Chinese night frogs seem to have no answer. *
*This is a lie. Every living thing knows the answer is J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.
_________
If you are interested in writing a guest post about your favorite book for Dog-Eared Pages, please email me at amyleescott [at] gmail [dot] com. I would love to share!
0 comments:
Post a Comment