Don Quixote

(Borrowed from blog.multimedia.com)

It might be hard to believe, but at the same time as I was reading Black Holes and Time Warps I've also been reading Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes.
And what a story! It's considered the first novel ever written. And on length alone that statement must be true. It's a monster of a book. But it's also so fantastic! I almost don't even know where to begin. From a literary history aspect it is brilliant because it is the first epic-length book about a totally fictional person. I believe there were other short stories, myths or legends that were told in a fictional manner before Don Quixote, but none that....blatantly based a several hundred page book about them. That took effort, and frankly, some cajones.
And it is hilarious! That has to be a first. I mean, do you think of the early 1600's as a particularly funny time? To be honest I was skeptical that people back then even had a sense of humor, much less one as perfectly developed (and still relevant) as Cervantes. But holy...cheese and crackers! He is one funny dude! He's like the Mark Twain of Spain in the 1600's.
I am only half way through, but already I've laughed enough to last me six months, and I've contemplated my perspectives on lot's of things that I wouldn't have otherwise, and formed some surprisingly new opinions on life. And all of this from a book written in 1605. That's pretty amazing to me.
I don't think I've ever described a book as a "gem" before, and I don't think I ever will again. But this book is a gem. It really is. The story itself is entertaining and amusing, but in addition you can almost feel the experimentation and evolution in writing style as you go through the text. In spots there is too much misplaced information, in others too much reiteration, but it's so....enchanting kind of.
I know there was a movie made. A musical I think. Peter O'Toole was the  Don, and Sophia Loren was Dolcenea. I might have seen it, but I don't remember anything about it. From what I recall O'Toole was a good choice, Loren was not, unless she only played the part of the "Dulcinea" that Quixote imagined....but I don't remember if that was the case or not.
Either way, in my reading they are my mental images of the characters, and it's pretty fantastic.
All I'm trying to say is that it is totally worth the read if you are into fiction and have a sense of humor. The historical education is an added bonus. But the story itself is great. And don't worry if you don't have time to read the whole thing, even reading half of it is worth while!

Black Holes and Time Warps

Last month for book club we read Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne. It was a behometh of a book. 500+ pages. I confess I didn't make it to the "time warps" part. I got to about page 400.
It was an excellent book in the sense that it gave a more than comprehensive history of black hole research. The book also included a pre-history as it were of astrophysics, a detailed description of the world-wide scientific community, it's complexities, and tendencies during the 1920's right up through the 1990's. It discussed Einstein, the Cold War, the Soviet versus American race to make the biggest most destructive bomb ever, and vignettes into the lives of scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Stephen Hawking, , Karl Schwarzchild, and Borisovich Zel'dovich.
The historical accounts were easy to read, and very interesting. The parts that actually delved into the  physics of black holes and neutron stars etc. was a little bit more difficult to get through. That being said, it's not on account of the math on which most of the subject is based. In fact, that may be the greatest triumph of this book! For as mathematical as the subject is, there were very few equations in the book. Awesome!
That being said, the concepts (on which the math is based) were pretty...out there. No pun intended. Any time you are dealing with relativity, space, time, space-time, and all that, things get pretty weird.
I can't explain everything in the book, but I'd like to relate a few anecdotes that I think every one should know about black holes. Ha ha...

Black holes and breakfast at the Cafe!

One of the most surprising things to me was that the idea of a black hole didn't come about from people looking out into space. It seems like they would have been discovered by astronomers, but that was not the case. The first inkling of a black hole actually came from calculations done by physicists in the early part of the 20th century when they mathematically tried to describe what would happen to a large star once it exhausted its fuel and began to collapse. Their calculations were telling them that  a star above a certain mass, would collapse in on itself, and then keep collapsing down to a super small, super massive point that would curve the space around it so much that it would cease to exist in the observable universe!
At the time, most physicists figured that their calculations were wrong. But as time passed it became more and more clear that it wasn't the math that was wrong. Eventually technology caught up to the equations and optical, X-ray and gamma-ray telescopes coroberated the existence of black holes.
The second, and last thing, I will try to explain is the relationship a few of the cool things concerning mass, space and time. E=mc2. But what does that mean? It means that anything that has mass (i.e. you , me, a chair, the earth, the galaxy) can be described as energy. Mass and energy are sort of two different expressions of the same thing. I'm simplifying this a bit (because of the c (which is the speed of light) squared) but that's pretty much the gist of it. How weird and cool is that?
And that the larger the mass of an object the more it can literally distort time! Black holes swallow up everything in their path, and shove it all down to a thing called a singularity. And that super massive teeny-tiny point creates a almost infinitely deep and narrow pucker in space-time that does some really freaky things. The one I will mention is that it bends space-time in such a way that if you had two people observing it, one outside the hole and one (unfortunate soul) descending into it this is how it would play out:

Space, seen from my patio.

To the person going into the hole, they would approach it, pass through the event horizon, and be strung out atom by atom into the singularity. BUT from the perspective of the person outside, it would look like they approached the event horizon, and then froze just on the edge of it forever (well, almost forever)! From the perspective of the outsider, in a less curved part of space, time moves so fast that they cannot detect even the slightest movement from their counterpart. Again, I am so...baffled by that I don't even know if I could ever hope to explain it any better than I just have.
If you find this interesting then I would highly suggest you read this book to get a more inclusive and scientific account of all the things I'm saying. If you don't, well then, know that I am NOT making this stuff up. Black holes are real, they happen, there is one at the center of our galaxy, and it warps space and time. Bwaa-haa-haa. Cool.