Que l’humanité se débrouille sans moi

Review: Scum of the Earth by Arthur Koestler

By the end of his flight across Europe, Koestler had coined this rather telling (and desperate) motto: Let humanity get by without my help.

This is a staggering book about his experiences in France during the first year of WWII as he was pushed around by bureaucrats, interned and generally made to understand he was the scum of the earth. His first book in English, I’d give anything to write with his mastery. Born into wealth in Hungary, he lived through Hell both before and after the war, chalking up among his experiences a death sentence during Spanish Civil War. This amazing book (despite chapter titles such as Agony, Purgatory and Apocalypse) manages to convey stoic-ness (is that a word?) and even humour. The book is dedicated to comrades of his ilk (intellectuals, authors and idealists) who for the most part did not manage to endure their conditions and succumbed to suicide.

And the cleverness of the title: who are the scum of the earth? The idealists who fled from fascist Europe to expected safety in France or the French authorities and their minions who betrayed them?

Unputdownable. Much of the book had me reflecting on the experience of refugees in Ireland in this 21st century, whose experiences must at least reflect his to some degree.

 

 

Robert, Charles, … et al

Review: This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson

I don’t go in much for celebrities or hero worship though I’ll admit a few scientists and mathematicians have earned my grudging regard. However, Captain Robert Fitzroy of HMS Beagle has now joined my personal Pantheon.

This delightful book claims to be an honest, fictionalised telling of his life and its intersection with the life of Charles Darwin and a whole host of mesmerising people including the first (Tierra del) Fuegians to arrive in Britain and Argentina’s first dictator. Apart from skippering the Beagle, Fitzroy was Governor of New Zealand and the creator of the British Meteorological Service. I’m cynical enough to feel that the author loved his subject too much to display all the warts but trusting enough to feel the truth is nevertheless there in his work. Darwin is painted more critically and comes across as very smart but also very vain and somewhat cowardly.

Promoted to his own ‘boat’ at 23, Fitzroy eventually makes it to rear-admiral, but his career and life are a series of failures (at least in his eyes). A dutiful man, he is burdened with a humanism that brings him into regular opposition with the world. When his superiors don’t ‘do the right thing’, he does, at his own expense, and so eventually bankrupts himself. He chose Darwin as a companion and though bright enough to share Darwin’s insights, he could not reconcile them with his religious beliefs. He sea-trialed the Beaufort scale for his friend Admiral Beaufort. A scientist in his own right, he produced charts of Patagonia, Chile, Tierra del Fuego and the Falklands and studied weather patterns, believing that weather could be forecasted.

This is a stunning adventure novel, which happens to be true. It will take pride of place beside Childer’s Riddle of the Sands on my bookshelf.

 

Absurd Science

Review: The Quantum Astrologer’s Handbook by Michael Brooks

Jerome Cardano was a 16th Century mathematician who, among other things, was the first to look at probability theory and make sense of imaginary numbers. He oscillated from poverty to riches and back, was fêted in royal courts across Europe and, like Galileo, fell foul of the Inquisition. He defended but failed to save his simple son from execution for murder. He has been much maligned in any previous history I’ve read concerning him.

This book is written by a Quantum Physicist, not a Mathematician and it treats him much more sympathetically, warts and all. Brooks is a scientist, but he is perfectly happy to tolerate some of Cardano’s crazier beliefs (e.g. astrology; he wrote a horoscope for Jesus) since he himself defends some rather strange quantum ideas including String Theory.

This book is a very accessible introduction to the craziness of Quantum Theory and how Cardano laid some of its foundations. It requires little or no physics or mathematics knowledge. Its great value for me was how it uncovers how every age has its ideas that seem bizarre in retrospect and how we should show respect for those ideas and wait to see where they lead.

Surreal Mathematician

Review: Genius at Play by Siobhan Roberts

When I’m drowning in the desire to read “something different” but have no idea what the subject might be, I go to Books Upstairs on D’Olier Street.  Last week they didn’t disappoint me when I stumbled upon a biography of one of my great heroes, John Horton Conway, which I hadn’t known existed.

I’ll accept that unless your NQ¹ is fairly high, you have possibly never even heard of JHC but I’m here to tell you that you’re all the poorer for this. He is perhaps the most quirky, playful and creative professor of mathematics to ever to grace the halls of Cambridge and Princeton.

Alert!!!     Don’t switch off

For “mathematics” read “GAMES”

So how would an ordinary mortal come to hear of him?  Well he sprang to prominence when Scientific American’s equally nerd-adored Martin Gardiner published article after article describing his Game of Life (play it here); what Conway calls a zero-player game. The biography reveals that although he revels in the fame it brought, he also bemoans how it has cast a deep shadow over his other accomplishments.

Like Einstein in 1905, he had his annus mirabilis in 1969 inventing ‘Life’, describing the Monster Group (… don’t go there …) and inventing what I think he will eventually be best remembered for: the Surreal Number which I like to call 𝕊.  Don’t get me going on them; I won’t stop.

So why am I bothering to write this up and attract your witty rejoinders?  Because this is laugh-out-loud biography. Conway is a (deliberately) larger than life man, who claims never to have worked a day in his life and he must be, by far, the most entertaining educator ever. It’s so interesting to see also the complete (artistic!) freedom that academia awards to someone like him to “waste” countless hours playing and fooling-around in, no doubt, the confident belief that genius has its own path to follow.

I read this 400-page biography in 3 days; it’s un-put-downable. This is a book about the full expression of creativity and his biographer adopts his quirkiness in her presentation of him. To her credit, she shows him warts and all but at the end, warts aside, I still revere him!

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^{1. Nerd Quotient↩}

The Exception to the Rule

I love mathematics and, above all, I think I love the negative proofs.  For instance, I’ve just finished reading a biography of Évariste Galois who proved it is not possible to find solutions to polynomials above the 4th degree by radicals.  I know, boring.  Furthermore, you’ve all heard me go on about Kurt Gödel and his Incompleteness theorems which effectively showed that any mathematical system can have true statements which are unprovable and false statements which cannot be debunked.  Gobsmackingly beautiful if you can surmount the notation.  (I’d be pleased to recommend readable texts).

You’ll be pleased to know then, that I, personally, have finally achieved my own theorem-falsifying summit by finding a case which falsifies a theorem. The ‘theorem’ in question is our very own Asynchronists-100-Page-Test™. I call it Dons Complete-It Theorem.

Review:  The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo by Robert Quinn.

Yes, 100 pages in and I was ready to consign this one to the wastepaper basket as trite and over-blown.  Thankfully, I persevered and can now recommend the book as unimportant but enjoyable summer reading.  The journalistic style is a bit over the top (if surprisingly thorough) but it is the cast of characters who make the book ultimately worthwhile.  Charles Wells was a curious, charming scoundrel who produced a number of laughably ridiculous scams which succeeded in hoodwinking numerous people.  A clear message from the book is hoodwinked fools are scoundrels too.  Charles and his ‘niece’, (i.e. girlfriend 30 years his junior) are just two members of a delightful cast of Victorians and Belle-Epoquians (is that a word?) who gradually took my fancy and persuaded me to put an end to the 100-Page-Test™.

Well maybe I’m just suspending it this once.

50 Shades of Enlightenment

Napoleon the Great by Andrew Roberts
The Dream of Enlightenment by Anthony Gottlieb
Two Fine Men by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

We often imagine we live at the most exciting time in history where change is constant and succeeding generations have entirely different life experiences. In previous centuries, change was slow. However, that’s not what my reading of the last several months tells me. I’ve become obsessed with the Enlightenment, an amazing time when the modern world was invented, where human rights mounted on the stage and science replaced religion. I’ve been reading it as philosophy, as history, as biography and even as adventure novel.

Gottlieb’s book is a decent roundup of the enlightenment thinkers, indispensable for me as I knew so little about them.  Pérez-Reverte’s novel describes two gentlemen travelling from Madrid to Paris in 1780 to buy all 28 volumes of Diderot’s proscribed Encylopédie and the efforts of the establishment, whose social and cultural hegemony was threatened by new ideas, to thwart them.

However the most daunting (800 pages) but immensely satisfying of the three books is Roberts’ amazing biography. Where I expected to be affronted by wild ambition, cruelty and arrogance, I encountered Enlightenment Man.  Yes, he was a military genius, but that’s of little interest to me. He was that thing, a benevolent dictator, which probably cuts little ice among 21st century liberals.  The thing is: he lasted long enough (16 years) to establish the ideals of the French Revolution which had been subverted in the Reign of Terror so that even after the restitution of the monarchy, they couldn’t be undone. This book makes it clear it was the genius of Napoleon and his ability to be interested in the minutiae of his world that allowed him create a legacy that endured. The most amazing discovery for me was his charisma and generosity. I liked him, most of the time.

So when we plan our Christmas lunch and do that “who from history would you invite?” thing, I want Napoleon there.