Istanbul 1830 and a mystery surrounding the disappearance of four young guards officers.
Our investigating duo are a Polish Ambassador without a country and a middle-aged eunuch without his testicles. Their words.
The author summons up an almost touchable atmosphere of what the old city must have been like.
Intimate details of life in the harem and how our heros pass their time is all quite fascinating.
The rubbish that man reads.
He is an author with a wide range of interests.
His book about jazz saxophonist Stan Getz was a good read.
The one about photography.i thought,unreadable.
Will give that a go.
The writing is pretty good, short chapters covering different sections and personnel of the carrier. I wish that there was (much) less search for humour in every situation which was directly related to the writer and his pass history.
I’ve been reading Brian Greene’s book, which covers time among a range of other issues. I haven’t reached the chapter on loop quantum gravity yet, (Looking ahead, I see it is the final topic and Greene does not go into it in depth, instead referring to a book by Lee Smolin.)
I read Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” years ago.
I ordered Carlo’s book on LQG yesterday entitled “Reality is not what it seems”.
When you consider that effectively they are abandoning Euclidean and even Einsteins distortion of it, and time itself in favour of loops forming spin networks it really does question reality. The loops are10**-44 m!
Even string theory sticks with Einstein.
His theory puts more emphasis on order than strict time, and that order is the one perceived by a notional observer!
Phil
Been a good while since I posted on here so it’s nice to be back. I rarely read consecutive music related books but with a backlog of 17 I seem to have hit a rut or a run depending on your perspective. So, I have just finished this, which was light and enjoyable…
… and I’ve just embarked on this, which is showing signs of being interesting but possibly hard going.
Given that the next one is a certain very large Joe Boyd book I am hoping this isn’t too much of a grind. Suspect I’ll still be reading the Boyd when the football season starts, which means another conversation with the bag searchers and a bit of a weight to boot.
I enjoyed Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles so And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music goes on my reading list. Thanks for mentioning him.
I have read Lee Smolins book about quantum loop gravity a few years ago and his “Trouble with Physics” should be somewhere around. Maybe I should reread it now.
After getting an understanding of the symmetries of particle physics and having some interest in the associated standard model and string theory, I now hope for a different understanding that explains more with fewer inexplicable parameters that are used to confirm agreement with experiments. The latest triumph is the anomalous g-2 of the muon (heavy electron).
The models (Standard and Strings) are based on Einstein’s special and general relativity view of spacetime. Particle physics stops with the proton and electron because they are intrinsically stable. The vacuum energy of spacetime is there to support the virtual existence of all the known fermions and bosons (the so called force carriers). Loop Quantum Gravity is there to make spacetime as important as particles.
I would be very happy if particles could be explained as vibrational modes of loops. One recent conjecture by Professor Ok is that dark matter is a proton with an electron so close as to almost cancel out the ‘electric charge’. It would be a rare mode of neutron weak decay that emits only a neutrino. Clearly the neutral proton+electron is very stable and does not react with the electromagnetic field. The justification for this new decay mode is that it can explain the difference between the decay time of the neutron in two different types of experiment. The problem of the new decay mode is that both particles are almost undetectable!
I would like to explain baryons (protons and particles comprising three quarks) as closed ‘spaces’ a bit like bubbles. This provides the asymptotic behaviour required of quarks preventing them escaping from the proton. However, all the particle symmetries can’t be materialised in four dimensional spacetime. However, LQG is without spacetime dimensions.
I love the logo of girls in research.
Phil
