Book Review: Why Does the World Exist?

Spoiler alert: Why Does the World Exist? doesn't really answer its title question. Rather, the point is the journey, as you might expect from an author with a philosophy background interviewing various intellectuals and putting it together at a "magazine" level of detail. Most of the arguments I had heard before, but Holt allows the physicists and philosophers to use their own words and engages them like a student in one of their classes would. He also lets you know what he thinks about their arguments and why he finds many of them unsatisfying. I learned two things about myself from this book: 1.) My own impression that the anthropic principle is pretty powerful is indeed backed up by a large number of the intellectuals in this book, in their own ways. Although I don't think Holt is hard enough on the multiverse claims. 2.) I naturally resonated with the only two intellectuals with a theistic leaning: Richard Swinburne and John Updike. Probably confirmation bias, which shows why this is such a hard topic to explore semi-objectively, but I appreciated their inclusion in this book, and would have liked to have a few more chapters from those like them. There's a couple of simplistic swipes at theology but not too many.

I really do think theism is dismissed too readily by the modern mind because we assume that personality must be complex. The idea that a universe came from a personality rather than a mechanism is the key dividing line for me. I just don't have a problem with that. I think the irreducible part of the universe is more about personality than mechanism, and lo and behold, the theists make sense to me.  Holt is clearly on the other side of this. Is it that I tend toward stoicism and Holt toward epicureanism?

This book succeeds not because it is completely balanced, but because it is unbalanced, from Holt's point of view and with his questions and his life driving him on. The interplay of life and work is what makes this book succinct. It's not really a detective story, but it's more of a memoir at heart. That makes it work.

Book Review: The Night Circus

It's true that I both completely enjoyed this book and yet found it a bit of a letdown. The problem is that I was expecting it to be a completely envisioned historical tale like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. That's not unreasonable, since both are historically set and involve magicians in the real world. In this case, author Erin Morgenstern tells of a mysterious traveling circus that only opens at night, with multitudes of lavishly realized tents and an interesting collection of characters, as well as a clandestine contest with unknown rules lying behind it all. It's fun to explore the tents and to see what Morgenstern's imagination will come up with next. The plot that unfolds is a complex dance of characters, with unexpected outcomes and satisfying conclusions. But where this goes for theme-park-like atmosphere, Jonathan Strange went for palpable realism. I felt like the Night Circus was just an authentically magical Disney Park at times, and the characters were not true turn-of-the-century characters but 21st-century people dressed up in 19th-century clothes. The story feels current, when it shouldn't. This book gives you a magical circus, while Jonathan Strange gives you a magical world, a whole space-time continuum in perfect period prose. I have the hunch that if I encountered this on its own terms without the comparison to Jonathan Strange (one of my favorite novels), I would have enjoyed it much more. Don't get me wrong, this circus is worth a visit, but it's a fine weekend trip. I don't intend to run off and join this circus anytime soon.

The Lost Continent Under the Indian Ocean

There is a lost continent under the Indian Ocean. It's old -- Precambrian, to be precise -- and it's fragmented, but some nifty chemistry helped make the connections that it must be there. Here's the story. Key to the narrative is the fact that they found very old sand on a relatively new island beach nearby. This very old sand is from an ancient continent shattered on the seafloor. The scientists have named it Mauritia, but I think it should be called Numenor. Oh well, I went into the wrong field for naming lost continents.

The reason this is a blast from the past for me in more ways than one is that I just found a self-bound book I wrote in the 5th grade titled Bendiana Stretch and the Lost Continent. It's, um, not very good, but it does show that the romantic notion of a lost continent has all-ages appeal, and it's a funny coincidence.

Book Review: To Change the World

To Change the World is a difficult book to critique. It's broad in scope, arguing that the Christian Right (Dobson & co.), the Christian Left (Wallis & co.), and the Neo-Anabaptists (Hauerwas & co.) have all basically got it wrong. Rather than "a pox on all your houses," James Davison Hunter argues that Christians should look to Jeremiah 29 in the context of exile and adopt a posture of "faithful presence" in positions throughout the culture.

The difficulty with a book like this is that it is of necessity so large that to be readable it can only criticize summaries, and summaries are going to be straw men in one way or another. As far as the political Right and Left, Hunter makes a very good argument that the very politics they practice underwrites the political assumptions that create the sense of injustice and aggreivance they feed off in the first place. A vicious feedback cycle that gets us nowhere. They need their enemies, and some among them idolize their own ossified positions. I'm with Hunter on this -- hence the irony and tragedy in his subtitle.

Hunter's criticisms of the neo-Anabaptists are more problematic to me. That's quite a diverse group, especially because Hunter includes people like Richard B. Hays, who don't truly belong. Hauerwas does belong, but Hauerwas has produced such a large body of work that I can't help but feel that Hunter is cherry-picking in what he quotes. For instance, if you're going to say that neo-Anabaptists are all about disengagement, you need to look at the counterargument that is Hauerwas's Gifford Lectures, in which he adapts natural theology to his own framework. This and Hauerwas's State of the University are the best things I've read by him, I'd say, and they're not about disengagement by any stretch of the word. So my favorite writings of Hauerwas are nowhere to be found, but how could they be? There's only 300 pages here, and I'd be complaining if there was much more. The truly wrong -- as in, that's just wrong -- quotes come from other "neo-Anabaptists," none of whom I have read. How influential are those?

And yet ... I have the feeling that Hauerwas is indeed incomplete without other people showing where he's not quite all that, and I did find this section one of the most interesting parts of Hunter's book. Just like G.K. Chesterton and Hauerwas create sparks and tension, I'm happy to have other sources of that. I like sparks. Dissonant chords are interesting.

I have to conclude that Hunter's underlying thesis is not wrong. I do think "faithful presence" indeed comes closer than the other three positions as described in this book, and that's what I want to focus on. Mainly, I find elements of "faithful presence" in the non-extreme positions of the other three "wings" of Christianity, in a mere Christianity kind of way. I'll bet Hunter would agree, and I appreciate the positive agenda those two words start to write for us. So this book does just what it can do. It doesn't slay the giants, but I don't think it sets out to. It does point out that changing the world is hard, we can't do it alone, and relying on God with patience, perseverance and wisdom is what's really important. I can appreciate that, and reading this book, I did appreciate it.

From Maureen Dowd to MOOCs

Maureen Dowd just published a column on Sheryl Sandberg's attempt to go from Facebook exec to feminist working-mom icon through her "Lean In" book-web-marketing push. Dowd's words may apply as well to the "online education" evangelists, pushing the Massive Online-Only Courses (MOOCs) mentioned earlier on this blog. Substitute "online education movement" or "MOOC professor" for "Sandberg"/"herself" and "education" for "social movement" and "social idealism":

Sandberg ... doesn’t understand the difference between a social movement and a social network marketing campaign. Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.

People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down. Sandberg has co-opted the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.

She says she’s using marketing for the purpose of social idealism. But she’s actually using social idealism for the purpose of marketing.

I think it's fitting to switch around the nouns on this passage because the underlying question is what technology can truly accomplish. It can do a lot. Online technology has great promise for expanding education, but it can not supplant the college experience.

Thousands of "students" in a MOOC imply that the teacher of the MOOC must be better than other teachers -- but what it really means is that the prof in front of the MOOC is at a more-elite, more-connected institution, and, yes, may be a better scholar. But do we really think the best scholars are de facto the best teachers? Was Einstein renowned for his large lecture courses?

Take heed, MOOCs: "Connecting" people is not "reaching" people.

A Little Green Meteorite from Mercury

It's not quite the shade of the aliens from Toy Story 3, but it's close:

This odd rock is definitely from outside our planet, and the best hypothesis right now is that it's from Mercury. Its color comes from chromium and there's a lot of magnesium and calcium in it, but the weirdest thing is that it is almost completely devoid of iron. Iron is the most stable nucleus possible and there tends to be a lot of it in our rocks and normal asteroids. Although there's a lot of it around here, there's not a lot of it closer to the sun. Mercury is the best candidate for this profile of elements in the local environs (taking "local" somewhat loosely, of course).

So do we have a piece of rock that reflected traveling light ages ago -- a fragment of the messenger of the gods? Not sure yet, but there's several chemical tests to find out, detailed here. More to come ...

The Periodic Table of M&Ms

M&Ms are so fundamentally elemental -- the round shape, the bright colors, even the different things in the middle -- that they lend themselves particularly well to a periodic table parody. This is apparently on the wall at the new M&M store in London:

Cute and local, but not much truly periodic about it. I give it a B. Let's see some more ...

And more periodic table parodies can be found here.