Tuesday, October 14, 2014

The Little Prince - Antonie de Saint-Exupery

I saw "The Little Prince" mentioned in the list of top books by a close friend in one of those facebook chain posts (it is interesting how some things never seem to die!). There were a quite a few in her list of ten that I had not read. Some did not interest me much, others did. This one lied in the latter. Co-incidentally she had borrowed the book from a colleague and I borrowed it from her before it was eventually returned.

I am not too sure whether this book is for children or adults. But then that is probably what distinguishes a great book from the lot. Every age that you read it, you have a different understanding of it. There are layers that you unravel with time and experience. "The Little Prince" is one of those books that I wish I had read as a kid. In the book, de Saint-Exupery shows the world through a child's eyes. The world of adults and what they (we) hold dear and how pointless and funny it seems to a child. He also talks about love, its pangs, and death which give an eeire dark side to the otherwise light story.

The narrator finds the little prince in the desert while fixing his crashed aircraft. The little prince asks a lot of questions but answers very few. The narrator manages to reconstruct the little prince's story from the bits and pieces he gathers during their conversations. The prince lives on a planet with two active volcanoes and a dead one, and a flower which is the most beautiful in the universe. He loves to see sunsets and keeps his planet free of baobabs. The flower's vanity and demanding nature make the prince leave his planet to explore the universe. He visits six other 'small planets', each inhabited by ridiculous 'adults' and finally ends up on Earth where he meets the fox which teaches him the meaning and importance of love, and the snake which promises him a passage back to his planet and his beloved flower.

This book can easily be finished in a single sitting, but 'we adults' are in such a haste to complete! I imagine it as a bedtime story that one could read to a child. Though I did not mind it much, the book seemed a little random in the way it is structured and I liked almost everything about this book, especially the paintings that accompanied the story. It was an extremely delectable read.


Monday, October 13, 2014

The Trouble With Physics - Lee Smolin

This one came up during a discussion with a colleague about random things during the night on the train to Goa. I think we were talking about thinking out of the box and perspectives. He had said that this one offered a fresh perspective on Physics. I have always been passively interested in Physics; it used to be my favourite subject of study in school. It is now, many years later, that I fully grasp why it was so. Anyway, I ordered the book upon return and took it up a few months later.

"The Trouble With Physics" is a brief recap of what has happened in Physics since Einstein. More specifically, it is an analysis of the biggest fad that Physics saw in this period, the 'string theory'. Smolin recaps how 'string theory' promised a revolution (or the end of it) in the 1980's and how a quarter of a century later, there was still no inkling of that revolution. The book is written in a language fit for an enthusiast. The language does get technical at times but mostly it is something that a layman can easily follow. There were two things that I specially liked about this book. One was that it introduced a lot of ideas that have been worked on or that came up and failed. Writings of this kind tend to trigger one's brain in directions that one does not think in usually. It makes the reading slow and interesting, propelling you in tangential directions. The second was the bit where Smolin explores what science is and how it should be done. Ensuing was a general discussion about what is wrong with the way power is distributed within the academia. This brought me back to my university applications a few years back and reminded me how the entire process had made very little sense to me. As another tangential offshoot, it resulted in this.

Smolin begins with Einstein and the 'revolution' that he had triggered with his relativity theories. The quantum theory was advancing in its own right but a unification was lacking. This unification was the primary target for this revolution to end. Enter 'string theory', a promising and enchanting young candidate. Smolin does a quick tour of the more important ideas that arose as a result of the academic world jumping into 'string theory'. He then tells us of the problems that have ensued, like poor distribution of resources, cult formation, etc. Towards the end, Smolin expresses what he feels to be wrong in the academic community; how and why such problems arise and how they can be averted or rectified. He says that there are more than one kind of scientists : the ones who bring a revolutionary idea and the ones who progress it. He talks about a few of such revolutionaries in the making and tells us that all is not lost.

The book was extremely well written for a book on Physics. Moreover, it presented an objective point of view on the subjects that the author touched. The author presented a few facts, his opinion on the matter and left it on the audience to decide what they would. There was no definitive judgement, which is what I like in books of science. By the end of the book I had a list of three topics that would interest me ("The Fabric of Reality", "The End of Time" and quantum computing). However, I don't think I would like to read this much of Physics at a go. I will leave those for sometime later.