milino

This was a good book. For a popularization, this had some pretty heavy science in it. I'm a pretty smart guy and will have to re-read it to really have a better understanding. Greene really is a good writer, because even when you don't quite understand what he's talking about, he gives you enough of the broad overview so that you can go to the next section and feel that you haven't missed anything critical. The section on "quilted multiverses" was pretty straightforward and I can claim to have understood it. The next few parallel universes were a bit trickier, but I was with the program. When I got to multiple dimensions and the "landscape multiverse" with so many possible shapes to the extra dimensions that "kazillions" doesn't even begin to cover the number, this was something I wasn't quite so sure that I could explain to my wife. I'm not sure I want to challenge Brian Greene on any scientific question, but the one point I would have some questions about were the simulated multiverses (as in the movie "The Matrix"). I think he may be shortchanging Goedel and Turing. I'm not convinced that a simulated multiverse sufficient to model all the creatures on our planet would not consume so much energy that it would be in effect less probable than an actual universe. My experience as a programmer is that the complexity of programs and the resources needed to design them go up exponentially with the size of the program. If that is the case, creating a universe might actually take less energy than modeling one. We would need to automate the process of computer design, but this essentially can't be done, and that's the point of Turing's thesis. There may be a practical upper limit on the size of simulated universes that we (or future super-intelligent beings in our universe) could ever design. This may be my confusion, but I'd like just a little more explanation here. So, this book is recommended, and I hope to come back to it. One final thing: though the book never utters a word about it, Brian Greene is a vegan. That anybody this smart is a vegan says something, I think, about where we should be headed as a species.

2023-07-26 17:41