Author: Michael Nielsen

December turned out unexpectedly busy, so I’ve been away from blogging for the past few weeks.

This blog is still an experiment on my part. I haven’t yet found a voice I’m completely satisfied with, but I’m content to keep playing around with the blog as a hobby, at least for the time being. One thing I do know – I have greatly enjoyed the thoughtful commentary provided by many commenters over the past few months!

No blogging for the next week, as I’m in Melbourne for a conference.

Renowned particle physicist Steven Weinberg has an interesting article about doing research in this week’s issue of Nature. Link here.

Kevin Drum recently posted a list of Bill Clinton’s purported “Twenty-One Favourite Books”. (Yes, Hillary makes it.) Reading the comments reminded me how much fun such lists can be.

Here’s a few of my favourites, by category. Suggestions appreciated in all categories.

History

Norman Davies’ Europe is a heck of a fun book: big, bold, and opinionated. Jen and I have been reading it aloud together, on and off for a couple of years. Endless food for thought.

Biographies

Walter Isaacson’s Ben Franklin inspires emulation and admiration of a great man, without ever making one feel smaller.

James Gleick’s Genius, a biography of Richard Feynman, gives you a sense of contact with an unusual mind.

Science fiction

Most scientists seem to read a lot of science fiction, especially in their teens. Except for a little Asimov, I missed out, and discovered it in my twenties. I’ve made up a fair amount of ground since. On my admittedly scant evidence I’m inclined to agree with Marvin Minsky’s assessment that science fiction will contribute a disproportionate share of the twentieth (and 21st?) century fiction that anybody remembers in 200 years.

Among current writers, Vernor Vinge is, in my opinion, the best. His last three books (A Deepnees in the Sky, A Fire Upon the Deep, and Across Realtime) are extraordinary “sense-of-wonder” stories.

Carolyn Cherryh’s Cyteen is a superb story about individual identity, politics, and paranoia. Cherryh is, apparently, a trained archaelogist, and her professional insight shows.

It’s an odd fact that Lois Bujold is one of the best-selling science fiction authors today. It’s odd because, while large parts of her books are genre fiction (usually mystery, military, or romance) there’s little science fiction in them, except as window-dressing.

It doesn’t matter. The genre parts of her fiction are usually fun, fast, and well-done. Even when they’re not particularly memorable, they’re rarely less than enjoyable and easy-to-read.

And when Bujold is writing about things that matter to her – motherhood, hardship, integrity, love – she can sometimes write very well indeed, in ways that transcend genre.

In rough order, her best work is, in my opinion, A Civil Campaign, Memory, Mirror Dance, The Mountains of Mourning (a short story), and both Cordelia books (I forget the titles). Opinions vary as to the best order to read things in, and I won’t even try to offer an opinion.

On the covers: just hold your nose. I don’t know what her publisher is thinking.

Mainstream literature

I have a poor batting average with contemporary mainstream literature.

I’ve dipped into quite a few well-known contemporary or near-contemporary authors. To pick a few names at random, Nabakov, DeLillo, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Kafka, Eco, Hemingway, not to mention dozens of others. Some of the work is excellent – from that list, Lolita and The Old Man and the Sea bring back fond memories.

But a lot of extremely well-regarded works just seem plain dull to me. To pick two other works from that list, the only reason I finished The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby is because they were short, and even then it was a close thing. If that’s great literature, I’ll take the trash.

I will mention two classics that I love.

Hugo’s Les Miserables combines an enormous scope and sense-of-wonder with up-close individual stories better than anything else I’ve read. Wonderful.

Parts of Hamlet infuriate me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get goosebumps at the best parts of a good production.

Funnily enough, much of the contemporary mainstream literature I’ve enjoyed most is genre fiction in disguise. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Borges’ are good examples of science fiction attaining a measure of respectability by masquerading as mainstream fiction. I don’t enjoy these quite as much as Les Mis or a good production of Hamlet, but I’m certainly glad they’re reaching the wider audience that seems denied to works stuck in the science fiction ghetto.

In a related vein to the previous post, there’s an interesting fact I read in The Economist recently: the average person in the US has 2.11 children, while in Western Europe – I’m not sure which countries, exactly – the average is 1.45.

Aside from the sheer “wow” factor, that might create some interesting political differences in the decades ahead. I know the pressure on health care issues in the US is becoming enormous. Goodness knows what it must be like in Europe, and what it will become.

I’m sure this has been discussed to death in some circles, but my fiancé Jennifer and I had an interesting idea in conversation recently: a taxation system progressive with age, so that young people pay substantially less of their income as tax.

Politically, it’s difficult to imagine this happening, with the aging population. But adopting such a system might provide substantial help to people just getting on their feet. And it might fly as a way of helping people’s kids get ahead.

Another, possibly better and more politically viable variant, would have the tax rate rise gradually until a few years before retirement, and then plummet.

Of course, arguably the effect of the existing progressive system is not that different from these proposals. But my naive first take finds a combined system (progressive with both age and income) rather attractive. It would give a leg up both to people who are younger, and to people who are having trouble make ends meet. Both goals seem worthwhile to me.

On a note related to the previous post, Lance Fortnow has a recent post (“Editors Needed”, Nov 17, 2003) suggesting ways in which researchers can help make the best ideas in a research field more prominent.

One idea Lance suggests is for researchers to take time out to write review papers.

I’d like to add that not only is this a very helpful thing to do, sometimes it’s critical to the survival of a field.

I suspect there’s many once-thriving subdisciplines of science essentially lost to humanity because no well-written comprehensive review distilling the major ideas of the field was ever written.

In my own field, there’s an example where this could conceivably happen: the so-called “theory of entanglement”. This topic was very fashionable from 1996-2001 or so, with hundreds of papers, but lately interest seems to have cooled. Some reviews of parts of the field have been written, but no comprehensive, well-thought out review exists that I know of. I wonder what will survive in ten years time?

Poor exposition is far more common than truly difficult ideas.

(I wish I’d known this earlier when learning to read scientific papers and books!)

Physics is lucky in having a single “journal” in which nearly all new research is published – the eprint arXiv founded by Paul Ginsparg.

A problem with this fabulous system is coping with the firehose of information it produces. On a typical day more than one hundred new papers appear. Just reading the titles and abstracts would consume a fair fraction of your day.

How on earth are people supposed to cope with all this information?