September 2011 President's BookshelfRecently, I was walking by one of my overly stuffed bookshelves and an unread book called to me. Books tend to do that, both the ones I have at home and the books I walk by in book stores. The book was Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. This is not a new book. In fact, it was published in 2004. One of my sons gave it to me for Christmas that year, and I set it aside to read some day since it was a trifle daunting—541 pages in paperback, not counting the suggestions for further reading and the exhaustive index. Freshly reminded of its existence, I finally read the book and was rewarded with a deeper understanding of complex ideas like special relativity and the spacetime continuum and the wonders of quantum mechanics. However, I am not going to force you to read more about my delight at finally understanding a bit of modern physics. The point of this addition to my Book Shelf is to talk about some authors that I wish I could invite to dinner and talk with for hours. Some books read like rich conversations with someone who deeply understands some aspect of human nature or how the world works—someone you truly wish you could meet and get to know. Brian Greene is one of those authors. As I read his book on the cosmos, I wanted to interrupt him mid-page and ask a question or two about what he had written rather than wait for him to get around to answering that question a chapter or two later.
Another person I want to meet is Adam Bly, the founder of a web magazine called Seed and the editor of a book of conversations that pair scientists and artists called Science is Culture. Out of curiosity and having no idea what Seed was, I went online and found http://seedmagazine.com. The site is filled with a rich array of stories about science and society. I want to know how Mr. Bly thinks and how he put together the people whose conversations exploring rich and wonderful ideas about consciousness, dreams, time, concepts of design, the truth of fiction, and other wonders are captured in Science is Culture. Besides meeting the editor, I really wish I could join in some of the conversations captured in the book. As I read those conversations, I had some ideas I wanted to add to the mix, some questions I wanted to ask the people whose conversation I was enjoying as a reader. Lately, I have been enjoying really good, lively conversations about just about anything. I just wish I could meet some of these wonderful people and talk with them too. |
![]() |