Brian Greene "The Fabric of the Cosmos"

As a belated Valentine's Day date Bill and I went to see Brian Greene speak. There was something very Victorian about walking through the darkened and cold streets to see a lecture on the most modern of science ideas. The lecture was at the Town Hall, which as soon as we got there we realized had been the setting for Seattle Convergence. Needless to say it looked a little different filled with tons of science enthusiasts instead of filled with Goths. The lecture was very good, easy to understand, despite the concepts he was talking about, though as always happens at these things the moderator was quite annoying. I found it especially bad that he had to bring up God in his last question, what Brian Greene thought of religion with what he was studying. His answer was one of the best I've ever heard. He said that whether or not god existed was an unquantifiable phenomena, something that couldn't be proved or disproved and therefore was something that was totally uninteresting to him. That there were many more things that could be proved that were much more interesting and he thought relevant. I thought that was a perfect answer. We bought both of Brian Greene's books and had him sign them, he pronounced Bill's hair to be "cool". It was a most enjoyable evening. When we got home Bill started reading The Elegant Universe, the book that nova made into the great show about string theory and I started reading his latest, published just this past month, The Fabric of the Cosmos. Which I finished this weekend.

I've always enjoyed physics, it was my favorite science at school, but for GCSE's we didn't get into quantum realities at all, instead just focusing on the basics. So I felt there were a lot of theories I just hadn't ever understood and felt like there were lots of things that I didn't understand. Brian Greene's book took the last 20 or 30 years of theoretical physics and tried to explain them so people like me would be able to understand the strangeness and mysteries of it all. It makes me really happy to know that there are scientists out there who have the patience to try and explain things to the general public. And who also have the faith that the public will be interested in such things. I think most people need more science in their lives. I have to say Brian Greene does quite a remarkably good job at this. Of course this is the first book on physics that I've read like this so I can't say how it compares to other books, but I found it immeasurably helpful and interesting.

The book focused mainly on the concepts of space and time, and how they build the universe around us. Starting with the concept of space and how that's changed over the years, then time and how that's changed and now the concept of spacetime, and then the universe itself. A large part of the book was used trying to explain, "time's arrow" why things go forward but never backwards, why entropy is always greater in the future and never the past. It was all very interesting. At times I did get a bit lost, though not that often, but I feel now I have a much better understanding of a lot of modern physics concepts and ideas, for example I know understand Pbranes user name! I never really understood the big bang, that the universe was expanding, not that things were just getting flung further out into space. I think inflationary cosmology is neat. (even if it doesn't tie everything together). The chapter I enjoyed the most I think had to be looking at the teleportation and possibilities of time travel in the future. It was definitely more on the what if end of physics, but it was very interesting and I really enjoyed his explanations for why there would be no paradox.

But it's definitely a book I'd recommend to anyone who is interested in learning how the universe might work, and how in a lot of ways it does. It made a nice change for me to read a book about a subject I know so little about. While I cannot therefore give an expert opinion about it's accuracy, it was fascinating and I feel like I understand the world a lot more now.

The Neanderthal's Necklace

As part of my continuing search to learn more about Neandertals I picked up Juan Luis Arsuaga's book The Neanderthal's Necklace. I read it over the past couple days, and found it fairly enjoyable though really only about half of it was the information I was looking for. The book had been translated from the original Spanish, and I feel that there was something lost in the translation. Several paragraphs seemed a bit disorganized and it felt like it might have made more sense in the original.

The first chapters were about the history of hominids, where they started when they diverged, interesting to go over again but not all that much that was new. The first Neandertal chapter was interesting, looking at where their similarities with Cro Magnon were and where they were different, looking at how you can figure out differing brain sizes and why this is important. There was then a divergent into looking at the flora and fauna in Spain and how this had changed over time, and about the different game available during the ice age, which I admit to skipping. The last third of the book was devoted to understanding more about Neandertals. Arsuaga looked more at the life span of Neandertals and the great trouble in figuring it out from the fossil record but several ways it was being done. He also looked at language, how the Neandertals physiology affected their ability to speak. And the reasoning behind that. He also looked at their use of fire, and the fact that they buried their dead.

There was one very interesting part where he talked about Sima de la Huesos (the bone pit) which was a 300,000 year old burial pit containing over 2000 skeletal remains, from so far what is estimated to be around 30 people. (though the numbers are growing). The skeletons were taken and put into a cliff in a cave. From the excavations they determined that most of the people there died around the same time and perhaps were victims of a natural disaster. Arsuaga then went to tell the sad story of the people who had been victims of drought or some other form of starvation who wandered to the area where the caves were, with the older members dying on the way, only to have most of the group die of hunger or exhaustion when they got there.

Another interesting thing that I would have liked a lot more detail on, was talking about the necklaces found at Neandertal sites in France. Apparently these necklaces were only found at sites that had been shared with Cro Magnon. Neandertals that lived isolated from Cro Magnon never developed necklaces on their own. (Apparently France has just always been a more fashionable place to live.) The conclusion being that they borrowed the technology from the Cro Magnon. I wish more was know about the time 10,000 years that the two lived together in Europe and how much interaction they had. One of the interesting things talked about was how Cro Magnon would have appeared "Cute" to Neandertals, in that sense that babies and young animals look cute to mammals with bigger eyes and softer foreheads.

Arsuaga's conclusion seemed to be that while Neandertals had the capacity for speech and thinking they did not have the talent for story telling and abstract communication that our ancestors did, and this led to their demise. This seemed a little abstract to me, how you could accuse their lack of creativity as their downfall and how exactly they showed they were uncreative. Even if they didn't independently develop their own body decorations they did bury their dead, often with grave goods, which would seem to imply to me some level of creative thinking. A belief in something more, or at least a need for something.

The author talked about the work of Erik Trinkus a lot, apparently he's the leading expert on Neandertals at the moment, which made me wish his book had talked more about them and less about the history of evolution. But perhaps he's written another I should go and check. Still I did learn a few interesting things from this book it is one I'd recommend. Though my search to learn more continues.