Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace

[lightreads]

Euclid's Window : The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace by Leonard Mlodinow

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


History of math more than actualfacts math, with a minimally annoying authorial voice as these things go. Except for the teeny weeny culture/race centrism problem – I’m neither a historian nor a mathematician, but even I know it’s pretty freaking suspect when your history doesn’t include the advancements of, um, the Arab world, the South/Central American empires, or, you know, Asia, except for that one paragraph that one time. I mean, write a history of European geometry, by all means, I did like it, but let’s maybe call it that next time so as to look less like clueless Eurocentric twits, yeah?

Anyway. Last third of the book swung into modern physics, and convinced me yet again that in the absence of advanced math, it really does sound like these guys are just making shit up. I mean, vibrating strings? Oh rilly. Shame I stopped at calculus, because no matter how many metaphors you throw at me, I still have a hard time taking this stuff seriously without the fundamental grocking I don’t have the tools for.




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Comments

[cahn]

Well, string theory is, I believe, effectively unfalsifiable, so yeah, it basically is just making shit up.

Heh, this.

Quantum mechanics sounds like people are just making stuff up, but some of the math (linear algebra) is not too hard to follow, although probably not with a high-school math background. Still, as Kate says, it's the experimental data that's important (and QM has that, so does relativity) -- one can make up fancy mathematical models all day long, but unless experiments back it up, it's just playing with making stuff up. (Nothing wrong with that! It's what mathematicians do every day! But I don't know that it should be called physics.)

[lightreads]

Yeah, once upon a time I dated a serious math geek (well, technically, engineer, which is an entirely different animal, but he had hobbies). And I had just enough math at the time for him to get me through big picture quantum mechanics and relativity by my fingertips and a prayer with that sense of ah, yes, now I see. Could never duplicate it now, I'm sure. But whenever I read pop science now, I keep reaching for that feeling again, and when all I've got is the author's pretty metaphors, I don't feel it, you know?

I like seeing behind the curtain, how things work. At work, we have these massive collated charts we've developed over decades of practice, with distilled technical knowledge. But 90% of the time I skip past them and look at the actual law, because that's just how my brain has to do it. Same thing, I think.

[cahn]

hee, yeah, I know both the engineer non-geeks and the engineer-math-geeks. Yes. I understand completely -- as we've sort of talked about before, this is the thing that totally annoys me about pop science.

The only pop-math books I can think of off-hand that are actually awesome in this regard are Journey Through Genius, which I read, oh, more than twenty years ago now, but it obviously made a huge impression on me, and Prime Obsession by John Derbyshire, both of which try to explain the math behind them.

I'm not sure I've read any pop physics that does the same thing. (Haven't read Chad Orzel's books; they might?) I do know a wonderful PDF free set of notes on quantum information theory, but that might be too technical?

[lightreads]

*bookmarks for a boring day at work* thanks!