Loose Threads & Loops 04.18
Iron's hot. Strike it.
I figure while I have the momentum, I’d try to keep the good times rolling by putting together an informal roundup of what I’m currently observing inside the Quantum Heap. I don’t expect to regularly publish more than a post a week (if that!), but I’d be doing myself a disservice not to capitalize on my own excitement for now.
## Some pseudocode representing my feeling since Substack has the feature to add code blocks.
iron = 'hot'
while iron == 'hot':
strike += 1Anyway, here’s a recap of what I’ve been up to lately.
Reading
🙈🙊🙊
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong
In this book, the Pulitzer Prize winning science writer delves into the way in which animals understand the realities in which they live. These are realities that us humans cannot sense ourselves, and often confound our own expectations. For instance, elephants can seemingly communicate over many miles using low frequency hums that we cannot detect without extremely sensitive recording equipment. This is a great popular science book that I would recommend to anyone craving easy to consume nonfiction.
🛰️☄️🔭
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity, by Carlo Rovelli
Honestly, I should have a reverse paid tier of the newsletter where I give you money to listen to me try and talk about the popular (as opposed to mathematical) physics books that I find so fascinating. In another life I would have formally studied some area of math, but I haven’t let that stop me from being curious to learn what I can about the types of discoveries and leading theories at the edge of science today.
Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is a lovely, compact overview of the history of physics from Anaximander to Einstein, followed by a brief section discussing where leading physicists are looking for new discoveries today, like attempting to combine (or make obsolete) the theories of quantum mechanics and general relativity. These two theories are currently our best models of understanding the universe, but inexplicable differences remain in their disconnection.
Rovelli speaks at the end of the book about loop quantum gravity, which is the theory that he finds personally most compelling and has written extensively about. I read and greatly enjoyed his book on the subject, but I the won’t even begin to try and explain any of it myself. You don’t want that, believe me. So let’s just leave it there.
When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamín Labatut
Even though Labatut’s novel is technically a work of fiction, by the time you have finished the first story only a single, short paragraph was untrue. By the author’s own admission, even as the creative liberties grow from start to finish, he was, “trying to remain faithful to the scientific concepts discussed in each of them.” That’s right, another science book.
Similar to the paradoxical concept of wave-particle duality in quantum physics, this extraordinary book is both a work of fiction and nonfiction. If you have any interest in the aforementioned Carlo Rovelli books, but you’d prefer something with more narrative and less direct discussion of the theories in favor of their real world consequences, you should absolutely read When We Cease to Understand the World.
As Ruth Franklin says in her review in The New Yorker, “it is as compact and potent as a capsule of cyanide, a poison whose origin story takes up much of the opening chapter—the first of many looping forays into the wonders and horrors unleashed by science in the past few centuries.”
I adored this book and learned so much from it. I also had fun doing research after certain chapters to try and suss out truth from fiction, not that it really matters for enjoying the book or trusting the science, as Labatut rightfully claims. I was thoroughly gripped by the first chapter, which mostly focuses on the chemist, Fritz Haber. To quote from Franklin once more:
Among the main figures is Fritz Haber, a German Jewish chemist who developed a process to obtain ammonia from nitrogen in the air, for use as fertilizer—an innovation that won him the Nobel Prize and, by staving off famine, has probably saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people—but who also pioneered the military use of chlorine gas, a chemical weapon responsible for some of the worst horrors of the First World War, as well as a hydrogen-cyanide pesticide that was a direct forerunner of Zyklon B.
Haber represents an extreme (but perhaps not so extreme) example of the duality of scientific advancements. The same intelligence that was directly responsible for the world having nearly 8 billion people today (there were fewer than 2 billion people alive roughly 100 years ago), was also responsible for for the deaths of countless lives in WWI and over 1 million lives lost from Zyklon B during the Holocaust. The book does a brilliant job exploring the lives and accomplishments of some of the most important scientific figures of the 20th (and somewhat 21st) century, crafting a narrative that remains exhilarating to read from the opening chapter to the final, personal (fictitious?) reflections of the author himself. I rarely re-read books, but this one already keeps making its way back off the shelf and into my hands.
Watching
♠️♥️♣️♦️
Anna and I recently watched all of Poker Face on Peacock. Director & Executive Producer Rian Johnson has clearly watched as much Columbo as I have over the last few years. Natasha Lyonne is fantastic playing Charlie Cox, a human lie detector turned accidental detective on the run from a casino boss she got on the wrong side of. As for the murder-of-the-week structure from episode to episode, the show really does lean into the influence of Columbo, specifically showing the murder unfold before Lyonne’s character arrives on the scene for one reason or another. If you like Johnson’s Knives Out movies, whodunnits (& howdunnits), and rumpled detectives, consider this for your next watch. And if you’ve watched Poker Face but not Columbo, what are you waiting for? And finally, if you’ve watched Columbo & Poker Face, let’s talk Easter eggs1.
Eating
🐑🐑🐑🐑
Speaking of Easter, thank you William, Denise, Amanda, George, Thomas and everyone else for welcoming us over for a terrific meal. My body is now 1/3 phyllo, 1/3 filo, and 1/3 fillo. I contributed biscuits, of course. Christos Anesti, y’all!
Episode 3 of Poker Face has at least 3 pretty obvious references to two episodes from Columbo’s third season, “Double Exposure” and “Any Old Port in a Storm,” and from the third episode of the second season, “The Most Crucial Game.” All three Columbo episodes are stellar if you’re looking for some place to start with the show.
Petition for you to plz explain loop quantum gravity to me, Ty.