The "Strange Doctrines" Undercroft

Book Recommendation

My plane had to sit out on the tarmac for an extra 40 minutes while we waited for a gate to open up. Which was perfect, because it allowed me to finish Simon Singh's Big Bang. I highly recommend the book with a couple of caveats.

First, it contains a lot of exposition of the background astronomy and cosmology, which takes up something like the first third of the book. Singh's account of the scientific dialectic that took us from pre-Ptolomaic cosmology and astronomy to Galileo is quite interesting, but arguably unnecessary to recounting the big bang dialectic.

Second, because Singh spends so much time prefacing the era of the big bang paradigm, he gives short shrift to the many open questions that remain. To be fair to Singh, his explicit agenda is to recount how the big bang went from (seemingly) hopelessly untestable cosmological speculation to proven scientific fact, and he does that brilliantly and accessibly. Yet there is scarcely any mention inflation, dark energy or dark matter (just examples). These are fairly central to our contemporary understanding of big bang cosmology, and I might have expected more detail  given the size (and title) of the book.

For all that, the book was a pleasure to read. Go get it.

Friedman's Metaphortitude

Amusing review of Thomas Friedman's new book (The World is Flat) by Matt Taibbi, here. A taste:

In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? []

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

The Confabulation of Meaning

Dale Peck identifies the literary upshot of human pattern-seaking: "Here’s criticism’s trade secret: you can find meaning in anything if you look hard enough."

Or, as I like to say, "thinking" can lend a deep gloss to even the shallowest ideas.