Holiday Reading

Managed to finish a couple of books during the holiday break.

Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything is a really, really wonderful book. I've been wanting to read James Gleick's Chaos since college, but never managed to get hold of a copy. His Faster doesn't disappoint though. In a world where everything is moving faster, he asks us to slow down and think about what and why we're rushing for.

We have microwave ovens, but we still get impatient waiting for the "Ding!" One-hour photos are not fast enough; it has to be processed by 30 minutes. Pulse phones gave way to touch-tone phones. Now touch-tone phones need to have speed-dial. The gaps of silence in between CD tracks are shortening. Even fastfood stores have express lanes and drive-thrus. We switch channels with the commercials come on. We don't wait for the credits to finish rolling anymore. We press the Door Close button on elevators and Walk button at street corners way too many times, even if subconsciously we know those are just placebos. Time is too slow, so we buy our jeans prewashed, prefaded, and prepatched at the knees.

You can't hurry love. You can't hurry a souffle. It's still 9 months before you can make a baby, but nobody said we can't multitask. Our TVs have picture-in-picture, allowing us to watch two channels at the same time. We telecommute at the nearest Starbucks shop. We have waterproof shower radios, car phones, magazine trays on exercise machines, TV dinners and Energy Bars, Quick&Hot faucets, etc.

In closing, the author has this to say: "Saving time is a complex mission. Some of us say we want to save time when really we just want to do more. To leave time free, it is necessary to decide...to leave time free. It might be simplest to recognize that there is time - however much time - and we make choices about how to spend it, how to spare it, how to use it, and how to fill it." "Death may be an absolute but time is not. Our ancestors may have considered time to be divine property, but we know better - we who have created jet lag, slow-motion instant replays, methamphetamines, the International Date Line, the relativity of physicists, leap years, and leap seconds. Even if you feel yourself rushed by the sheer plenitude of things, even if you eat when the clock says to, you can remember that time is defined, analyzed, measured, and even constructed by humans. It may help to think of time as a continuous flow, rather than a series of segmented packages. Or to find aggressive ways of squandering the time you save. Or at least to recognize that neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had. It is what you live in. You can drift in its currents, or you can swim."

I also finished Quantum Theory for Beginners and Newton for Beginners. Sounds like heavy reading, but they're not. The books are filled with illustrations and anecdotes and humour, which makes understanding the complex ideas easier. (Not saying I'm now a quantum theory guru.) In Newton for Beginners, the book started off by introducing us to the scientific ideas put forth by Zeno, Archimedes, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, etc. It was then up to Isaac Newton to sift through all the accumulated knowledge of centuries, toss out the mistaken beliefs by mathematically proving them wrong, and single-handedly make enormous advances in mathematics, mechanics, and optics. The book also shows the little-known side of Newton - the terror of coin forgers as England's Master of the Royal Mint, an alchemist, and a secret heretic. He learned Hebrew and retranslated the Bible from original texts, where he discovered that Athanasius doctored key passages in the Bible during the 4th century. The falsified text elevates Christ on a level with God and the Holy Spirit in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, when Christ is simply another prophet like Moses.

In Quantum Theory for Beginners, the book gives us a step-by-step tour of how quantum theory came about. It's a wonder quantum theory is even formulated given how long classical physics has been entrenched. It's a good thing there were still some experiments and phenomena that can't be explained by classical physics, such as the blackbody radiation, the photoelectric effect, and bright line optical spectra. These were separately explained by Planck, Einstein, and Bohr by assuming that energy came in discrete quantities (quanta). Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Dirac would later build on these initial concepts to make Quantum Theory what it is today.