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Saturday, August 21, 2004 Recent Reading Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces and an Expanding Universe by Dionys Burger. It is called by some, the "canonical" sequel to Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland, a Romance of Many Dimensions, and in a way they're right. In Flatland, we follow the adventures of A. Square who gets a visit by the evangelizing Sphere trying to convince Flatlanders of the existence of the third dimension. Flatland is also the social satire of the nineteenth century with class prejudices and the suppression of women represented by shapes that were Irregulars and the temperamental Lines respectively. Sphereland makes sense as the sequel because the protagonist is a Hexagon, the grandson of the Square in the original. The prose style of this book is also very similar to its predecessor. The Sphere also makes a return appearance and with further observations, the Hexagon realizes that Flatland isn't really flat. The social commentary of Sphereland, however, is somewhat weak compared to Flatland, and the numerous Flatland versions of well-known fairy tales told by the Hexagon doesn't help either. Like Flatland though, the protagonist is ostracized for ideas ahead of his time. Flatterland: Like Flatland, Only More So by Ian Stewart. This is literally a mix of already passé pop culture references, puns, and Alice in the Wonderland. The social commentary is minimal. The protagonist this time is A. Square's great-great-granddaughter, Victoria Line, who is a temperamental and rebellious teenager who would rather do subversive math than date boys to her parents' chagrin. After decrypting a code she finds in her ancestor's Flatland account, Victoria summons the devil-horned Space Hopper who whisks her away to the Mathiverse to teach her not only about three dimensions and four dimensions, but one and a quarter dimensions, hyperbolic spaces, quantum mechanics, black holes, and string theory. It's not really a story, per se, but a primer to introduce the casual reader to concepts mathematicians and physicists are grappling with today. The Doctors' Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignác Semmelweis by Sherwin B. Nuland. In the eighteenth and early half of the nineteenth century, the understanding of the causes of disease still suffered from misconceptions originating in the philosophy that health was dependent on the balance of body humors. Most people, including doctors, thought that disease was caused by bad atmosphere called miasma which they blamed on city pollution, crowded spaces, gases from the earth and even God. In the mid-nineteenth century, an epidemic was sweeping Viennese hospitals--pregnant women were dying of childbed fever. The directors of the hospitals at the time attributed the outbreak to everything except the medical staff themselves. Ignác Semmelweis, a doctor at one of these hospitals, realized what the problem was after close observation--the doctors did not wash their hands between dissecting diseased cadavers and examining live patients. Unfortunately, Semmelweis got little recognition for his discoveries during his lifetime. Nuland argues that this lack of recognition was not due to forces beyond Semmelweis's control--as previous biographers have suggested--but that Semmelweis precipitated his own obscurity by his self-destructive personality. Semmelweis was a "failed genius" who ran away when he was finally offered a prestigious university position, failed to write up his clinical observations in a timely manner, after one poorly executed experiment refused to perform any further experiments, and even refused to take the next step to observe specimens under a microscope. Sure, there were plenty of people in Semmelweis's life with political and personal agendas against him, but his uncooperative and accusatory manners also alienated people who could have helped him. Altogether this is an interesting look at the doctor who pioneered hand washing although, as the author observed, young doctors today have absolutely no idea who he is. Current reading: Besides the books which I have mentioned in previous weeks that are still stewing on the back burner, I am reading Ian Stewart's Does God Play Dice? which is on chaos theory. I don't think readers need to be mathematicians to understand it, but it would help if the reader has at least taken some higher math. Also from this book, I realize why Neal Stephenson is calling his third book in the Baroque Cycle The System of the World (maybe I totally missed it when I read the first two books). It's from Newton's third book on the laws of motion where he says: "I now demonstrate the system of the World." Anyways, I also got a hold of Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe. Now I can see for myself whether the author explains anything about theoretical physics or goes overboard on the metaphors. [posted by S. Y. Affolee on 5:53 PM : ]
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