Ntuple Indemnity

This week’s selection: The Scientist as Rebel (2007) by Freeman Dyson.

In brief: This collection of book reviews, lectures, and other essays by one of the great twentieth-century physicists is an outstanding guide to his thought, most notably on the ethics of science and the nature of war. Dyson makes a persuasive case for optimism about the future of our species, provided we learn from our past.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Scientist as Rebel, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Childhood’s End (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke.

In brief: Clarke’s compact story of a benevolent alien takeover of the Earth asks hard questions about whether the human species would ever lay down its natural curiosity for the promise of utopia. Its brisk pace and multigenerational scope make it difficult to get a sustained picture of any of the human characters, and the absence of causal explanation for the rapid transformation of human society into a stock Golden Age directs our attention toward the consequences and away from the how-and-why, but none of this obstructs the philosophical ambition of the piece. I, for one, welcome our new species-civilizing Overlords.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Childhood’s End, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (1999) by Matt Ridley.

In brief: A dense but concise tour of the twenty-three chromosomes of the human genome, Genome is better consumed as a chapter-by-chapter survey of modern genetics than as a unified book-length argument. All the same, Ridley’s primer advances a responsible optimism toward genetic science in a manner that openly resists sensationalism.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Genome, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: The Dispossessed (1974) by Ursula K. Le Guin.

In brief: A straight-up Cold War allegory constructed as an offshoot of an added twist—the arrival of a revolutionary theoretical physicist from an isolated anarcho-communist moon colony—makes for an outstanding novel of political philosophy that examines not only the relationship between the individual and the state, but also the effect of the state on the advancement of science. We often think of science fiction as an investigation of how science reshapes society; Le Guin’s opus begs us to consider the reverse.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Dispossessed, keep reading below.)

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This week’s selection: Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language (1997) by Douglas R. Hofstadter.

In brief: What begins as a comprehensive study of poetic translation evolves into a treatment of human empathy and intercultural understanding, a refutation of John Searle’s Chinese Room argument against artificial intelligence, and a solemn remembrance of the author’s deceased wife. With its exclusive focus on language, Le Ton beau is a substantially less technical and more streamlined tome beau than Gödel, Escher, Bach; the mathematically averse may find it a more accessible point of entry to Hofstadter’s thought, as there is no talk of recursion or formal incompleteness in sight. Those who prefer their poetry devoid of metre and rhyme will take issue with Hofstadter’s conservative aesthetics; those who prize pattern, structure, and wordplay will rejoice.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Le Ton beau de Marot, keep reading below.)

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