Recent reading
May. 2nd, 2006 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chickenfeetI've been reading quite a lot recently. The list has included:
Lisa Randall Warped Passages. Randall is a Harvard physicist who has taken a stab at writing a survey of modern physics that is accessible to the layperson without being patronising. This is a book that someone with essentially no math background could read though a reasonable knowledge of quantum theory and relativity definitely helps. I think she does a fine job of presenting what we "know" and what we "don't know" in the murky world of sub-atomic physics. It's no fault of the author that the theories start to look increasingly arbitrary and artificial the further one gets into the book. The whole project of reconciling the undoubted problems raised by the Standard Model start to look a bit like the intellectual machinations that medieval astronomers went through to reconcile an earth centric view of the cosmos with astronomical observation. Personally I don't have much of a problem with theories of extra dimensions but when the extra dimensions have to bounded "just so" to meet one problem and a bit differently to meet another my Platonic hackles rise. Similarly with theories that posit a sort of sub atomic apartheid in which inconvenient particles are banished to braneships outside our city to stop them interacting with respectable particles. Anyway, read the book and form your own opinions.
Roger Penrose The Road to Reality. This is penrose's attempt to present all the maths and theoretical physics one needs to know to understand what modern physics is about and all that in a mere 1000 or so pages. Penrose claims that his book can be read by someone with limited mathematical education. Don't believe him. I'm a quarter of the way through and I'm struggling. I tried skipping the more technical passages, as Penrose suggests, but found I was losing far too much in the process. I think this will ba book I work through in chunks over time. I wish I could go faster because I know from previous encounters with Sir Roger that he isn't going to be satisfied putting forward kluged up situation specific models à la Randall. His pure Platonic heart would break before he would perpetrate such a sin against Truth and Beauty, It just wouldn't be good Form.
Francis Pryor - Britain BC and Britain AD, It was really satisfying to turn back to history. It is so much easier to get one's mind around how people behave than to internalise the weirdness that is the virtual graviton. Pryor writes well and makes a convincing case for a longue durée approach to the pre-history and early medieval history of the British Isles. He argues, largely from the archaeological evidence, for the idea that many aspects of British society (not least the DNA of the inhabitants) have their roots in the very distant past, say around the time the North Sea came into existence. He argues (convincingly) against the notion of waves of invaders or other incomers which used to be the default explanation for any cultural or material change, however minor (landed at Thanet and overran Britain with fire and the sword). Instead he posits the existence of two zones; one covering lowland southern and eastern England that was in more or less constant contact with the European mainland and was highly susceptible to changes in fashion, (One might argue that excavations of Islington wine bar sites might help clarify this thesis) and another, much more conservative, cultural zone covering the largely highland north and west. The more populous and trend setting zone would, in time and with accretions, become England and the periphery would evolve into Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Definitely worth reading for a readable account of what is rapidly becoming the consensus about British origins in academic circles. Also good for delightful snark about people who can't explain a small change in pottery style without hypothesising an invasion!
C. Warren Hollister (ed) The Impact of the Norman Conquest. I read this book mostly in the bathroom which is about what it deserves. It's a collection of papers and extracts dating from the late 19th century to the 1960s on the "controversy" about whether "feudalism" was introduced to England before or after 1066. To my mind this is history at its worst. The controversy is largely meaningless since nobody ever seems to define their terms and just goes off to assume that the characteristic feature of "feudalism" is some persnickety point about the legal form in which the crown raised troops from the land. The typical argument takes a tiny fragment of documentary evidence and erects on it a superstructure of conjecture, unexamined assumptions, political prejudices and personal invective to come to a sweeping conclusion that really is of no consequence. The 19th century historians EA Freeman and JH Round are particularly egregious. The sad thing is that it is blindingly obvious that the evidence shows, even to a layman such as myself, that kings raised troops of a similar kind, in very similar numbers, from the same estates and settlements both before and after the Conquest. Over time the legal forms involved somewhat but the substance remained remarkably constant. Quelle surprise! I guess a student of historiography might find something of value here but there's precious little for the student of history.
Lisa Randall Warped Passages. Randall is a Harvard physicist who has taken a stab at writing a survey of modern physics that is accessible to the layperson without being patronising. This is a book that someone with essentially no math background could read though a reasonable knowledge of quantum theory and relativity definitely helps. I think she does a fine job of presenting what we "know" and what we "don't know" in the murky world of sub-atomic physics. It's no fault of the author that the theories start to look increasingly arbitrary and artificial the further one gets into the book. The whole project of reconciling the undoubted problems raised by the Standard Model start to look a bit like the intellectual machinations that medieval astronomers went through to reconcile an earth centric view of the cosmos with astronomical observation. Personally I don't have much of a problem with theories of extra dimensions but when the extra dimensions have to bounded "just so" to meet one problem and a bit differently to meet another my Platonic hackles rise. Similarly with theories that posit a sort of sub atomic apartheid in which inconvenient particles are banished to braneships outside our city to stop them interacting with respectable particles. Anyway, read the book and form your own opinions.
Roger Penrose The Road to Reality. This is penrose's attempt to present all the maths and theoretical physics one needs to know to understand what modern physics is about and all that in a mere 1000 or so pages. Penrose claims that his book can be read by someone with limited mathematical education. Don't believe him. I'm a quarter of the way through and I'm struggling. I tried skipping the more technical passages, as Penrose suggests, but found I was losing far too much in the process. I think this will ba book I work through in chunks over time. I wish I could go faster because I know from previous encounters with Sir Roger that he isn't going to be satisfied putting forward kluged up situation specific models à la Randall. His pure Platonic heart would break before he would perpetrate such a sin against Truth and Beauty, It just wouldn't be good Form.
Francis Pryor - Britain BC and Britain AD, It was really satisfying to turn back to history. It is so much easier to get one's mind around how people behave than to internalise the weirdness that is the virtual graviton. Pryor writes well and makes a convincing case for a longue durée approach to the pre-history and early medieval history of the British Isles. He argues, largely from the archaeological evidence, for the idea that many aspects of British society (not least the DNA of the inhabitants) have their roots in the very distant past, say around the time the North Sea came into existence. He argues (convincingly) against the notion of waves of invaders or other incomers which used to be the default explanation for any cultural or material change, however minor (landed at Thanet and overran Britain with fire and the sword). Instead he posits the existence of two zones; one covering lowland southern and eastern England that was in more or less constant contact with the European mainland and was highly susceptible to changes in fashion, (One might argue that excavations of Islington wine bar sites might help clarify this thesis) and another, much more conservative, cultural zone covering the largely highland north and west. The more populous and trend setting zone would, in time and with accretions, become England and the periphery would evolve into Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Definitely worth reading for a readable account of what is rapidly becoming the consensus about British origins in academic circles. Also good for delightful snark about people who can't explain a small change in pottery style without hypothesising an invasion!
C. Warren Hollister (ed) The Impact of the Norman Conquest. I read this book mostly in the bathroom which is about what it deserves. It's a collection of papers and extracts dating from the late 19th century to the 1960s on the "controversy" about whether "feudalism" was introduced to England before or after 1066. To my mind this is history at its worst. The controversy is largely meaningless since nobody ever seems to define their terms and just goes off to assume that the characteristic feature of "feudalism" is some persnickety point about the legal form in which the crown raised troops from the land. The typical argument takes a tiny fragment of documentary evidence and erects on it a superstructure of conjecture, unexamined assumptions, political prejudices and personal invective to come to a sweeping conclusion that really is of no consequence. The 19th century historians EA Freeman and JH Round are particularly egregious. The sad thing is that it is blindingly obvious that the evidence shows, even to a layman such as myself, that kings raised troops of a similar kind, in very similar numbers, from the same estates and settlements both before and after the Conquest. Over time the legal forms involved somewhat but the substance remained remarkably constant. Quelle surprise! I guess a student of historiography might find something of value here but there's precious little for the student of history.
