Psycho

Book: Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater
Subtitle: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century
Rating: 8/10 … an excellent survey for the neophyte.

Here’s a little experiment to try out on yourself.  Go to a part of the bookshop you never visit and choose a book on a subject you’d never usually consider.  Last week I tried it out by accident and I stumbled on this little gem.  Actually, I wandered into the psychology rows, looking for a book, Musicophilia by Dr. Oliver Sachs. I’d heard his podcast and the book sounded interesting.  Having located it, it struck me as rather dry. I changed my mind, chastised myself for wandering in where I didn’t belong and then I stumbled on Lauren Slater.  Her book, that is.

This is a little book describing ten advances in research psychology, but from a very human angle.  She talks about the experimenters and their subjects (animal and human) and herself.  The experiments were often controversial, using methods on the ethical frontier, and the conclusions disputed.  Slater herself is often present in the narrative, evaluating her own reactions, drawing examples bravely and even recklessly from her own life, and experimenting with herself as guinea pig.  She meets many of the protagonists and is blunt (and sometimes indiscreet) in her judgement and reporting on them.  She is balanced and open-minded about the experiments, setting out the pros and cons and letting the reader decide.

I found the whole a delightful and easy read for an utter novice in the field and I’ll be roaming unfamiliar aisles in my bookshop in search of more surprises.

Whimsical hypothesis

Book: The Jesus Video by Andreas Eschbach
Translated from: German
Genre: Science Fiction – time travel
Rating: 8/10, highly readable impossible yarn

Nice idea! Archaeologists on a dig in Palestine unearth the users’ manual of a SONY Video Camera that is still only in design and due for production in three years time! They postulate that in the near future, a time traveller will head back 2000 years to capture Jesus Christ on video. Knowing that he cannot return to the modern age, he will hide the video to be picked up by his friends and he will remain to live out his life in ancient Palestine. Now the hunt is on for the scoop of the century!

This is an interesting take on the time travel paradox and it set me thinking. If it were possible for the archaeologists to find the camera … before [?] the leap back in time … then surely the time traveller’s friends, once they plan for him to travel in time, could immediately go and collect the hidden video he will [?] leave for them 2000 years ago, before he even travels? Just try writing that last sentence using the correct tenses. And once they have the video, why does he have to bother travelling; on the other hand, if he changes his travel plans, how could they have found a video he never left for them! If time travel is possible, it implies it may be sufficient to possess time travel technology to be deemed to have travelled … a ludicrous idea as imponderable as Schrödinger’s Cat. This is my cue to offer you this poetic summary of another paradox.

Alternatively, maybe the video only appears at the agreed place after the time traveller makes his journey and is then deemed to have been there for 2000 years. That is, history is rewritten, though the books are not changed.

So I speculate (tongue firmly in cheek) that time travel can change history, but only with effect from the moment when the traveller sets out! An interesting idea, but clearly it doesn’t explain more dramatic changes to history. For example, if he saved Jesus from crucifixion, history would record the crucifixion up until the moment he travels and would then promptly refute it, despite all the records!

What’s really cool about The Jesus Video is the way that Eschbach (the author) gives a glimpse inside his own thought processes. A key character is a science fiction writer who is supposed to do the detective work of figuring out where the camera is so he has to imagine how time travel might be achieved, how the traveller might behave, etc. He builds countless scenarios and tears them down and you get the real impression that Eschbach himself might use a similar approach in constructing his own plots.

Towards the end, the plot wobbles a bit with some unlikely coincidences which could have been easily handled more convincingly. The time traveller turns out not to be the obvious candidate but it would have been delicious if he had!

Accessible maths

A conversation about the widespread rejection of maths by almost everyone we know set me to thinking about what makes it accessible and I started listing books that took a fresh and entertaining approach to the subject.

To begin with with two novels:
A most beautiful novel about the search for mathematical truth (in a world undermined by Godel’s proof) is Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture by Apostolos Doxiadis and who could fail to enjoy Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. about a sad little accountant who gives his evenings over to simulating baseball games with pen and paper. Maybe not quite maths, but definitely an insight into the number-lover.

The next two recommendations, closer to real maths, and marred a little but not too much by rather flowery language, are:
A Tour of the Calculus and The Advent of the Algorithm both by David Berlinski. Long on mathematical culture and history and short on formulae.

Imagining Numbers by Barry Mazur explains the square root of -1 to anybody in a charming and poetic way.

Surreal Numbers by Donald E. Knuth is interesting and original for the way it walks through the invention of a number system, in this case John Conway’s surreals, using the classic device of the dialogue. The conversation can be occasionally cringeworthy, but this short book provides hours of intellectual stimulation.

However, if I could take only one book to the proverbial desert island, it would have to be Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. We can argue over whether it’s a maths book – it defies classification – but I can’t imagine a wannabee mathematician who wouldn’t adore it.