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

[cyprinella]

There was a book I read the beginning of once (I am very bad at reading nonfiction that isn't about bees) that was about philosophy and quantum mechanics that to me did a really great job of talking about how it all came together. However, I was also taking physical chemistry at the time and was learning the multivariable calculus used to describe how it all worked so of course it all made sense. Sadly I can't remember the name of the book.

[kate_nepveu]

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

But there's a lot of modern physics that has actual experimental data supporting it. Admittedly I'm biased because I'm married to an experimentalist who wrote two pop-science books, one on quantum mechanics & one on relativity, though I should note that the relativity one relies particularly heavily on images.