Physics
I’ve listened to Sean Carroll’s podcast, Mindscape, since 2019 and very much enjoyed his book on quantum mechanics, Something Deeply Hidden during the pandemic. Carroll is a philosophically minded physicist and his interviews run the gamut from scientists to philosophers to artists and more. Lately, I’ve started listening to more (four or five episodes a week) and reading more popular physics stuff (also re-learning the basics of calculus). It’s worth going through the entire back catalog of Mindscape. It got me interested in physics again, so here goes. (I’ve also found the YouTube channel of Quanta Magazine, and it’s pretty cool.)
Here are some of the books I’ve read recently.
Janna Levin, Black Hole Survival Guide, with artwork by Lia Halloran
A perfect and poetic primer to black holes—what we do and do not know about them and yes, how to possibly escape them (don’t hold your breath though). Readable in a day. The problem is, you’ll want more. I liked this one so much that I can’t wait to pick up her other books.
Sean M. Carroll, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself.
It’s all in the title and, frankly, he could have done a lot worse given such a title. The physics part is great, especially his lucid discussion of the relation between the arrow of time and the second law of thermodynamics. His “poetic naturalism,” which defends, on pragmatic grounds, the use of emergent levels of description of the universe, is compelling and kicks off the subsequent discussions of life, complexity, consciousness, and meaning. It’s a lot, and in the hands of most physicists this could have turned into a terrible book, but Carroll has a lot of respect for philosophy and delivers the goods.
Sean M. Carroll, The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion.
I’m halfway through this one.
The first volume of a three-part series based on Carroll’s video series he made during the pandemic.
The goal of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe is to bridge the gap between popular-science treatments of modern physics and true expert knowledge. This is the real stuff -- equations and all -- presented in a way that presumes no prior knowledge other than high-school algebra. Readers will come up to speed about exactly what professional physicists are talking about, with an emphasis on established knowledge rather than speculation.
Volume One, Space, Time, and Motion, covers the domain of classical physics, from Newton to Einstein. We get introduced to Spherical Cow Philosophy, in which complications are stripped away to reveal the essence of a system, and the Laplacian Paradigm, in which the laws of physics take us from initial conditions into the future by marching through time. We learn the basic ideas of calculus, where we can calculate rates of change and how much of a quantity has accumulated. We think about the nature of space and time, separately and together. Finally we are introduced to the mysteries of non-Riemannian geometry and Einstein's theory of curved spacetime, culminating into a dive into black holes.
It’s superb. Most popular science books dispense with the equations. Carroll didn’t want to. And he’s right. Everything makes a lot more sense with the math. No more than basic high school math comprehension required.
The payoff is supposed to be that you can eventually sort of understand what “Einstein’s equation” is about (no, not that one; the so-called Einstein Field Equations). Just don’t ask me now.
Einstein Field Equations in Leiden, Netherlands. (Wikipedia) I look forward to the second volume, on quantum field theory, expected this spring.
Literature
Currently reading
Émile Zola, Nana
Fun and lively, though expect a lot of obscene misery.
We read a lot of naturalistes in high school. By Zola, I had only read excerpts and one novel, the literally and figuratively heavy L’Assommoir. Back then I much preferred fellow naturalist Maupassant and realists such as Stendhal and Flaubert, whom I had read a lot more but also haven’t read in a while.
Octavia E. Butler, Bloodchild and Other Stories.
I don’t consume a lot of science fiction and had never read anything by her but knew I should. It’s not sticking with me yet but it’s interesting.
Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky.
Picked up while in Santa Fe, NM, last summer. Reading it very slowly. It’s not boring—it’s beautiful and witty—but it’s not exactly a page-turner and I’ve been absorbed by other things since then.
There are a few other books that are technically in the '“currently reading” pile but which I haven’t touched in months. Maybe I’ll finish them someday. Maybe not. they include:
Dostoevsky, Demons (for some reason a lot harder to get through than Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, which had been hallmarks).
Don DeLillo, Underworld (sprawling, weird, disjointed, often great).
Read recently
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.
I’m slightly embarrassed to confess I had never read any Austen novel. Better late than never, and indeed much better. I loved it. Hoping to read Emma or Persuasion this year.
I’m equally embarrassed to lack the words to say anything intelligent and precise about my feelings concerning the book, so I’ll leave it to Marianne (who is, of course, more sensible than she gets credit for):
I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning.
Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger.
A novella. From Wikipedia:
The narrative follows the course of a man's life from his schoolboy days to his adulthood. The son of a north German merchant and a "Southern" mother (Consuelo) with artistic talents, Tonio inherited qualities from both sides of his family. As a child, he experiences conflicting feelings for the bourgeois people around him. He feels both superior to them in his insights and envious of their innocent vitality. This conflict continues into Tonio's adulthood, when he becomes a famous writer living in southern Germany. "To be an artist," he comes to believe, "one has to die to everyday life." These issues are only partially resolved when Tonio travels north to visit his hometown. While there, Tonio is mistaken for an escaped criminal, thereby reinforcing his inner suspicion that the artist must be an outsider relative to "respectable" society.
The protagonist would probably strike a lot of people today as insufferably smug and perhaps even “cringe.” I like to think that’s, even 120 years removed, intentional on Mann’s part.
I enjoyed it, if only because it’s a quick read and yet filled with snippets of psychological insight and struggle with pessimism.
Philosophy and other nonfiction
Note: for obvious professional reasons, I am not going to list books by other philosophers that I read but did not enjoy very much.
Russ Roberts, Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions that Define Us
Life is made of tame and wild problems. The latter are the really hard ones, involving what the philosopher Laurie Paul calls “transformative experiences.” They include, for Roberts, decisions about whether or not to marry, have children, change jobs, move to a new city, and so on. Roberts is an economist but argues, a little like Paul, that standard rational tools such as expected utility calculations or cost-benefit analysis sometimes just don’t help. Such decisions require leaps into the unknown.
It’s very readable and doesn’t encumber itself with a wealth of footnotes and data. It includes some interesting illustrations. But it’s neither very original nor very deep. It feels rushed. A missed opportunity, I think. The discussion of Darwin’s decision to marry is enjoyable though, Roberts made me want to read more Adam Smith, and the book overall made me a lot more comfortable with shunning the pure rationalist mindset.
Elijah Millgram, Why Didn’t Nietzsche Get His Act Together?
A careful, original analysis of Nietzsche’s mature (and some earlier) works as the product of distinct authorial characters. Completely unlike anything I’ve read in Nietzschean scholarship.
Fascinating and insightful throughout. Millgram has a recognizable style that might rub some readers the wrong way after a while—it’s not, say, crisp and concise—but, and perhaps that’s a tacit nod to Nietzsche, the form and the substance may be hard to fully disentangle.
Josh Milburn, Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully
Review forthcoming in Utilitas. An excerpt:
Milburn brings welcome nuance to the discussion of animals’ political rights and stands out from an overwhelmingly anthropocentric literature on “food justice.” Few books in the field can provoke and engage readers from a wide range of persuasions like this one. Written lucidly, richly informed, impeccably structured, and conscientiously argued, it should be read by anyone interested in animal ethics, animal political theory, and food studies. A short review cannot do justice to the book's level of detail – Milburn’s evocative descriptions of many cuisines and traditional dishes worldwide – or the crisp and precise yet witty and lively style. Utilitas readers will not find much discussion of consequentialism to chew on, but Milburn makes his commitments clear from the outset – this is a book about justice and rights, in the liberal tradition. Yet I also find that Milburn sees, like John Stuart Mill, justice and making the world better as deeply connected.
Nick Riggle, This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive
I loved Riggle’s On Being Awesome, so much so that, back in 2019, I ran a January term reading group with a few students.
One way to describe the central premise of the book is that we don’t really understand what we mean by “YOLO” (You Only Live Once). Riggle wants to make sense of this silly motto.
While this book felt even more vibey than the previous one, and maybe that’s not to everyone’s taste, and maybe the pop culture references and hip style are a little much at times, it is a very enjoyable read. Riggle is a good chap bustling with interesting ideas and a pretty rad background (high school dropout, former professional skater turned NYU PhD). The discussion is rarely technical (that’s a compliment) yet keeps digging. It leaves you appreciating beauty and life in novel ways. It may not leave you with fully satisfactory answers as to whether and why this life, this one life you have and didn’t choose, is worth living.
Theron Pummer, The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism
The opposite of Riggle in terms of style and vibes, but that’s the beauty of analytic philosophy—contrary to prejudice, it features a range of different styles and approaches.
Pummer is a sharp philosopher. The book is a crisp, concise, rigorous, and original non-consequentialist defense of relatively stringent duties of beneficence. A welcome demonstration that effective altruism does not presuppose utilitarianism, even though a critic makes this mistake just about every week. The almost exclusive reliance on stylized cases and intuition is not my jam, philosophically, but it’s carefully executed here and, I think, does the job once you concede a few methodological assumptions.
I read it in preparation for my Effective Altruism class. I may not end up using much of it, though we’ll read something by Pummer, but it further convinced me that EA is a big tent.
The best part is that it’s open-access! You can download the book for free completely legally.
Larry Temkin, Being Good in a World of Need
Only recently started. An honest and serious engagement with “aid skepticism” by an early advocate of global aid and effective altruism. Promising so far and will no doubt provide fodder for discussions in my class, especially for the EA-skeptics.
Good Substacks
There is a lot of good stuff around here! Here are a few standouts:
Paul Bloom, Small Potatoes
Robert Long, Experience Machines
Helen De Cruz, Wondering Freely
Zvi Mowshowitz, Don’t Worry About The Vase
Dan Williams, Conspicuous Cognition
Also a plug for a cool initiative, the recently launched Why Philosophy?, a series of interviews by Céline Leboeuf asking that very legitimate question and more.
Random
Philosopher Michael Dickson on schizophrenia (via Brian Leiter)
Novelist Johannes Lichtman at the CIA (via Tyler Cowen)
Matt Yglesias against dentistry
Cate Hall, “How to be more agentic”
Lewis Bollard, “What could AI mean for animals?”
Philosopher Alex Worsnip on incoherence
In-depth feature, in Le Monde (in French), on the war against academic freedom in Florida (with a quote by me)
Thanks for the list...and for recommending the "Why Philosophy?" Substack!