William X. Adams (Author of Reluctant Android)

William Adams rated a book did not like it NFL Ultimate Beginners Guide: A Basic Guide to Learn and Enjoy the Game by Edward Weber	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Minimum information You be from Mars if you don't know this info. Badly written badly edited. Useless pix. Get a different book. ...more
Jan 18, 2026 05:59PM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book it was ok The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Abrams’s surprisingly well-regarded defense of animism presents the views of traditional indigenous cultures with appreciation. Modern “Western” ideology has separated us from nature. That’s bad. Indigenous cultures, especially those with oral tradit ...more
Jan 15, 2026 03:18PM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book liked it The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It would be hard to write a bad book about such an interesting topic. Cells are fascinating and mysterious, and that sense of wonder comes through in the first hundred pages. After that, the writing settles down to formulaic descriptions of different ...more
Jan 03, 2026 03:50PM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book liked it Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures by Carl Zimmer (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
It’s a survey of the most common parasites. The first 50 pages emphasize the “eeuw” factor, how creepy parasites eat the living flesh and organs of their hosts. That tone was annoying but probably good marketing. If you’re grossed out by biology, may ...more
Nov 30, 2025 03:21PM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book liked it Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Neoliberalism is a sloganeer’s term seldom defined. This book gives a good account of the term’s origins and development. For that alone, it is worth the read. However, much of it is uninformative ranting. The first 50 pages in particular can be skip ...more
Oct 26, 2025 10:26AM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book it was ok The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships―A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution, Expand Your Understanding by Nathan H. Lents (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The subtitle is revealing: “How 500 million years of sex, gender, and mating shape modern relationships.” That tells you the book will be yet another tedious exercise in sociobiology and psychobiology. Those ideologies presuppose tacitly, without exa ...more
Oct 14, 2025 10:27AM · 2 likes · like · see review
William Adams rated a book it was ok Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War by Stephen R. Platt (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864 is called “the” Chinese Civil War in this history book. But even from what little I know of Chinese history, I doubt it was the only civil war. Mao overthrew the national government in 1949, for example. Surely t ...more
Sep 21, 2025 10:52AM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book it was ok Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The problem is how we treat each other. If you have power, you can exploit those with less. Or you could use your power to share resources, educate, and care for others. Parents, teachers, ministers, physicians, some government employees, and many ot ...more
Sep 04, 2025 01:44PM · like · see review
William Adams rated a book liked it Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean by Matt Strassler	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Space is not an empty frame in which objects bang about, as Newton conceived. According to Strassler, “everything” is made of energy, manifest as waves, wavelets, and wavicles (posing as particles). Energy waves, like photons, move at the speed of li ...more
Jul 24, 2025 02:14PM · 2 likes · like · see review
William Adams rated a book really liked it Solaris by Stanisław Lem	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Published in 1961, Solaris is one of Lem’s first first-contact stories. What if the alien had an intelligence so unlike our own that we could not find a way to communicate? Modern sci-fi stories have some auto-translate gizmo and instantly the proble ...more
Jul 07, 2025 09:21AM · like · see review

William Adams rated a book did not like it

NFL Ultimate Beginners Guide by Edward Weber

NFL Ultimate Beginners Guide: A Basic Guide to Learn and Enjoy the Game
by Edward Weber

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You be from Mars if you don't know this info. Badly written badly edited. Useless pix. Get a different book. ...more

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The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram

The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
by David Abram

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Abrams’s surprisingly well-regarded defense of animism presents the views of traditional indigenous cultures with appreciation. Modern “Western” ideology has separated us from nature. That’s bad. Indigenous cultures, especially those with oral tradit Abrams’s surprisingly well-regarded defense of animism presents the views of traditional indigenous cultures with appreciation. Modern “Western” ideology has separated us from nature. That’s bad. Indigenous cultures, especially those with oral traditions, especially those who believe some form of animism, are united with nature. That’s good.

Once you accept this unexamined dichotomy based on stereotypes and romanticism, the next question is, how did this division come about? Abrams’s answer is that the alphabet, especially Greek, is to blame. With written description, one can only imagine the reality described, without prompting from visual reminders such as might be given in hieroglyphics. At least a little picture of a bird gives you some “sensory” contact with birds. The word “bird” doesn’t even look like a bird, so it severs all links to the sensory world. That’s the first step on a slippery slope to separation of all thinking ("the bad") from sensory immersion of nature (“the good.”)

Imagine a malfunctioning elevator, wrong on every level. Do I need to draw a picture?

Linguistically and orthographically, Abrams fails to make his case. Signs are different from symbols, yes, but even schoolchildren can comprehend that difference. He presents no evidence and only dubious arguments for his notion that alphabetic writing separates thinking from sensory experience. His views of linguistics and orthography are very far out in left field. Nothing wrong with left field, but it does require the strong arm of consensus-based evidence to make a play at home plate.

Abrams’s thesis has too many doubtful assumptions to list them all, but here are some. 1. “The mind” is only the intellectual, symbolic mind of an adult. He neglects psychological and especially psycholinguistic development entirely, an omission that leads to strange views of sensation, perception, understanding, and reference. 2. He seems to believe that understanding of a thing or idea is entirely object-oriented, omitting the slightest engagement of subjectivity. That’s surprising, considering his name-dropping of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. 3. He fails to see language as intersubjective communication. Instead, he takes it as a puzzle or code with intrinsic meanings. Granted, that’s a common view in modern philosophy, but it’s still wrong. 4. He assumes linguistic reference is only denotative, ignoring connotation entirely. In any case, there is no generally-accepted explanation of reference, though he seems oblivious of that. 5. He assumes all indigenous cultures are the same, an egregious stereotype he repeats in consideration of Judaism and Christianity. 6. He assumes sensation is some kind of an Aristotelian wax-tabletism, a premodern and much debunked view. 7. He presupposes the primacy of biology and has very little to say about subjective or spiritual life.

I am sympathetic with North American indigenous cultural views, many of which are more accurately called something like “spiritual transformationalism.” Better books on animism and panpsychism are available.

Abrams, David (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous. NY: Vintage 196 pp. ...more

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The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
by Siddhartha Mukherjee

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It would be hard to write a bad book about such an interesting topic. Cells are fascinating and mysterious, and that sense of wonder comes through in the first hundred pages. After that, the writing settles down to formulaic descriptions of different It would be hard to write a bad book about such an interesting topic. Cells are fascinating and mysterious, and that sense of wonder comes through in the first hundred pages. After that, the writing settles down to formulaic descriptions of different kinds of cells and their pathologies. That’s also interesting but Mukherjee just reports, with little insight. The last 75% of the book is just a catalog of basic biological facts. The last 50 pages contain some concluding thoughts about cells, their pathologies and treatments, especially focusing on cancer. Overall, the book was mildly interesting but ultimately disappointing because it offered no new perspective or insight.

As for the writing style, I found it grating. I could have done with many fewer personal anecdotes and nonsequitur quotations from poets and philosophers. The middle 16 pages of photographs of “great men” (and it is 99% men) working in cellular biology does not add anything to understanding cells. A small thrill for me was the photo of Santiago Ramon y Cajal, the only photo of him I have ever seen. He looks exactly as I would have expected, like a man who has gone mad pursuing his passion. Instead of these photos though, I would have greatly appreciated a collection of cellular micrographs or line drawings.

I knew the book was going to be unsatisfactory for me in the beginning when the author emphasized (thumping like a bass drum) that cells are the fundamental units of human physiology and indeed of human beings. He gets that from his hero Rudolf Virchow, a physiologist of the 19th Century, but it’s a pernicious presumption. Atomism is not the only and probably not even the best approach to understanding complex systems like cells. Four hundred pages later, Mukherjee acknowledges that but despite himself cannot shake free of the atomistic assumption. His thinking is clearly limited by it but he is helpless to consider alternatives.

Despite these shortcomings that made the book ultimately disappointing, it is a treasure trove of interesting biological facts and worth reading for that.

Mukherjee, S. (2022). Song of the Cell. New York: Scribner, 473 pp. ...more

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Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures
by Carl Zimmer (Goodreads Author)

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It’s a survey of the most common parasites. The first 50 pages emphasize the “eeuw” factor, how creepy parasites eat the living flesh and organs of their hosts. That tone was annoying but probably good marketing. If you’re grossed out by biology, may It’s a survey of the most common parasites. The first 50 pages emphasize the “eeuw” factor, how creepy parasites eat the living flesh and organs of their hosts. That tone was annoying but probably good marketing. If you’re grossed out by biology, maybe you need a better basic biological education. After the initial blast of gross-out stories however, the author settles down into a non-systematic list of various parasites from all over the world and throughout history, focusing on their complex life-cycles and the evolutionary counter-moves their hosts make to mitigate them.

The coverage is detailed enough for the non-specialist to stay interested, though it is mainly anecdotal. A few scientific studies are described and those are the most interesting parts of the text. Sixteen pages of monochrome pictures are mildly interesting. The photos could have been better selected. They’re fairly generic and don’t add any real value.

The repetitive descriptions of uncategorized parasites become boring, though the diversity among parasites is wide enough to keep reading. Despite my general disappointment at the book’s lack of a thesis and its absence of a point of view, I thought it was above average for three reasons.

1. The sheer volume of parasites on Earth and their diversity gradually dawns on you, and you begin to realize that all of life, all of evolution, could be understood in terms of parasite vs. host. When you learn, as a child, that there are “germs” everywhere and though you can’t see them, they can make you sick or kill you. That changes your outlook on life, as did the “germ theory of disease” for most people in the nineteenth century after Pasteur and Semmelweiss. Our society and our medical system does not yet see "parasites everywhere” like we see germs everywhere, but we should. There are far more parasites on the planet than hosts. That realization is a paradigm-shifter.

2. The ongoing evolutionary “battle” between parasites and their hosts raises the question of intentionality. The Theory of Evolution lacks intentionality, direction, or purpose. It is merely the unintended consequences of random biological changes culled and filtered by random changes in environments. None of it intrinsically means anything and the apparent “battle” between parasites and hosts is purely a metaphorical interpretation applied to biological events. That’s the hard science of it.

But that view is very hard to hold after reading this book. It sure looks like the parasites are “trying” to exploit their hosts and that the hosts literally take “countermeasures” to stop them. Even though we know those moves and countermoves are merely our interpretation of random variations developed over many generations, it is impossible to see the evolution of parasite-host interactions as pure randomness. The book thus gifts us a philosophical head-scratcher.

3. The variety of parasites is so great that book makes you think more deeply about what a parasite is. Unfortunately, no clear definition of “parasite” is ever given, not even in glossary, where it might be expected. We are left to wonder if a human fetus is a kind of parasite, for example. Its life-behavior is not seriously different from that of a parasitic wasp or many other parasites described in the book. The author suggests without elaboration that all humans might be parasitic on the body of Gaia, the “living Earth.” That idea is thrown in as a mere titillation, but it highlights the lack of a precise definition of the book’s main topic. If everything is a parasite on something else, where does it end? Another conundrum to ponder.

Zimmer, Carl (2000). Parasite Rex. New York: The Free Press, 297pp. ...more

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Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism
by George Monbiot

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Neoliberalism is a sloganeer’s term seldom defined. This book gives a good account of the term’s origins and development. For that alone, it is worth the read. However, much of it is uninformative ranting. The first 50 pages in particular can be skip ...more

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The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships―A Provocative Look at Sexual Behavior Through the Lens of Evolution, Expand Your Understanding
by Nathan H. Lents (Goodreads Author)

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The subtitle is revealing: “How 500 million years of sex, gender, and mating shape modern relationships.” That tells you the book will be yet another tedious exercise in sociobiology and psychobiology. Those ideologies presuppose tacitly, without exa The subtitle is revealing: “How 500 million years of sex, gender, and mating shape modern relationships.” That tells you the book will be yet another tedious exercise in sociobiology and psychobiology. Those ideologies presuppose tacitly, without examination or question, that we are nothing but biological beasts determined by evolution.

It is a premise I reject, as would anyone not in thrall to doctrine. We are not hairless cave-persons mindlessly grunting at each other because of our evolutionary past. Nor are our lives and choices determined by hormones, neurology, and genetics. We are instead, self-reflecting beings, the authors of intentionality, agents of our actions—constrained by our biological vehicles of self-expression—and intersubjective collaborators in construction of values and meaning. In that view, how has evolution “shaped” modern relationships? Not much.

The whole book is based on an error in thinking known as the Naturalistic Fallacy. The error occurs when one fails to appreciate that there is no reasoned pathway from “is” to “ought.” Just because a natural phenomenon is this way or that, it does not justify the conclusion that it, or anything else ought to be so. But this whole book carries the opposite, erroneous message that we humans ought to be more diverse in our sexual attitudes and relationships because in nature, many animals are diverse.

The author is apparently aware of this fallacy but dismisses it, saying “the lines are blurry” between is and ought. He doesn’t say how or why, or to whom, or therefore what (p. 11).

Another egregious problem that plagues the book is poor definitions. “Sex” (the main topic) is defined as 1) “engaging” the genitals and physical arousal of one or more parties, also called “having sex,” and as 2) gender, “maleness and femaleness,” terms defined only as “biological sex,” and as 3) generation of sperm or egg cells, “gametic sex.”

Those are weak definitions (except the last one), but worse, all three are used interchangeably throughout the book, making it very hard to understand what the author is trying to say. For example, try to make sense of this (p. 34): “If sex is determined by our chromosomes, how can an animal possibly change its sex?” The book has no glossary, and the index is perfunctory.

To make matters worse, the author imagines himself a humorist, using undefined slang throughout the book, not an appropriate tone for a scientific book and more seriously, one that obscures understanding. We are left to guess the meaning and importance of terms like “avian hanky-panky,” and “straight” versus “gay” swans. We are informed that King James I of England “enjoyed” sex with women on occasion but “was clearly drawn to” sexual and romantic relationships with other men. What enjoyment of sex (any definition) has to do with evolution is unstated, as is the definition of “romance” in a relationship, and the point of the whole anecdote.

The main conclusion of the book is that more diversity in human sexual relationships is desirable because plenty of sexual diversity is observed in the animal kingdom. However that conclusion is a non-sequitur, rendering the book no more than a mildly interesting opinion piece.

Lents, N. H. (2025). The Sexual Evolution. New York: Mariner Books, 321 pp. ...more

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Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen R. Platt

Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War
by Stephen R. Platt (Goodreads Author)

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The Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864 is called “the” Chinese Civil War in this history book. But even from what little I know of Chinese history, I doubt it was the only civil war. Mao overthrew the national government in 1949, for example. Surely t The Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864 is called “the” Chinese Civil War in this history book. But even from what little I know of Chinese history, I doubt it was the only civil war. Mao overthrew the national government in 1949, for example. Surely that counted as a civil war.

The Taiping Rebellion was a militant political movement in southern China centered around Shanghai and Nanjing. It fought against rule by the Manchu government in Beijing. Why they rebelled is not entirely clear. They thought the Manchus were “foreigners,” ethnically distinct from most indigenous Chinese in the south. Is that sufficient reason for a civil war? Maybe.

The charismatic center of the rebels was an eccentric fellow who took up Christianity and believed himself to be the brother of Jesus. His aim was to establish a Christian society over the Confucian one. Are the delusional ravings of a madman (he later went insane) sufficient to start a civil war? Maybe.

Most civil wars have a basis in economics and social injustice. It was unclear from this history what dynamics underlay the Taiping Rebellion. The book starts with the rebellion under way and ends when it fizzles out. Not much wider historical context or analysis is given outside of that period.

This is old-style history, the kind many of us had foisted upon us in high school: Great politicians and generals did this, that, and some other thing, then repeated the theme with variations. The end.

Detailed descriptions of such events seemed pointless to me as a young student, and that style of journalistic reportage still seems pointless today. The grand question remains unanswered: Why should we care? What was at stake?

Historian Platt offers some higher-level analysis in terms of the British interlopers into the war. The British wanted profits, resource extraction, and self-aggrandizement. That’s the sad but well-worn story of colonialism, but at least it provides motivation for some of the actions reported. What the Chinese themselves thought is unknown.

The writing itself is easy going. It takes on the current style of creative fiction, adding bountiful imagination to character descriptions of the sort “Sweat dripped from his brow as he considered what to do…” That makes the prose novelistic in tone, yet adds no real value to the history.

Unlike the American Civil War, which took place at about the same time, the Taiping Rebellion didn’t alter the course of Chinese history one way or the other. The rebels were defeated, and the Manchus continued to reign as before. At least that’s the conclusion I take away from this history. So in the end, I’m not sure what the point of the report is, other than to document “what happened” just for the sake of history.

Platt, S. R. (2012). Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom. New York: Vintage, 470 pp. ...more

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Breaking Things at Work by Gavin Mueller

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job
by Gavin Mueller

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The problem is how we treat each other. If you have power, you can exploit those with less. Or you could use your power to share resources, educate, and care for others. Parents, teachers, ministers, physicians, some government employees, and many ot The problem is how we treat each other. If you have power, you can exploit those with less. Or you could use your power to share resources, educate, and care for others. Parents, teachers, ministers, physicians, some government employees, and many others choose the latter path. But many strive for exploitative power for selfish gain.

Modern life requires everyone to take both paths to some degree. Avaricious capitalists are no doubt kind to their children. Idealistic teachers have to go on strike. Analysis of social relations on the scale of politics, nation-states, social movements and historical epochs uses simplifications. The Marxist obsession with “class struggle” demonstrates that loss of detail across sweeping generalization.

Mueller is an avowed Marxist and seeks to convert non-Marxists. For this lefty, the conversion failed. I am surprised to learn there are still Marxist theorists. Most of us have moved on. The chapters of the book where nits are picked with other Marxists had very low interest.

The history of the Luddites was interesting because it is not well-known. Smashing looms in the 17th and 18th century was not motivated by fear of change and modernity (as the aspersion of Luddite connotes today), but by workers’ awareness that their jobs were about to become obsolete. Not just the jobs, but their economic standing, way of life, and the structure of social relations. Mueller makes that case convincingly, and that is the core of the book.

He also makes some provocative points about parallel movements in modern times. Was the civil rights movement of the 1960s precipitated at least in part by automation? Factory jobs were displacing unskilled workers in automobile assembly and elsewhere, and most of the unskilled were Black. I had never considered automation as an input to that social upheaval, so that was an interesting thought. He makes similar remarks about feminism in the 70s. Such ideas are provocative but only suggested.

When we get to current times, Mueller cherry-picks examples from internet automation to grocery store self-checkouts to suggest we are all Luddites,assuming we resent having to conform to automated processes. He doesn’t say we should break things at work (sabotage equipment and procedures that automate jobs), but he gives examples of people who do it. Not all the examples are convincing.

I don’t resent grocery self-checkout, though I realize it makes me do some of the store’s work. It’s a faster way out than standing in line for fifteen minutes. One could argue that the whole supermarket transfers retail labor onto the customer. I have to pick stuff off shelves myself? That’s outrageous! A clerk behind a counter should hand me what I want. (Actually, most stores have online ordering now). Self-serve gasoline pumping is also not the outrage Mueller suggests it should be. By trying to raise my “class consciousness” with such examples, he badly misses the point.

The point is not that automation of drudgery is intrinsically bad, but that so much of it is for the sake of exploitative greed rather than for relief from drudgery. What I resent is that of twelve traditional checkout stands, only two are staffed. That forces me to do self-check or waste my precious time. Same for bank tellers, car repair shops, government offices, health clinics, almost any retail service you can name. We are forced into most automation for the sake of profits, not for convenience.

Mueller does raise the issue of choice but frames it as worker autonomy. Factory workers (do we still have those?) hate their jobs because automation has removed their autonomy, he says, the consequence of Taylorism’s influence on capitalism. I’m skeptical. Workers don’t wish for freedom to tighten a bolt in some creative way. What they want is more time off (with pay). As long as they have to work, what they would like is respect.

Neoliberal capitalism, with its “greed is good” doctrine, has seemingly triumphed, in part due to automation. What it will take to change the status quo is not, as Mueller suggests, sabotage of work equipment, but huge systemic change, like war, global overheating, financial collapse, pandemic, water shortage. I have little confidence that “consciousness-raising” will do it.

Mueller, G. (2021). Breaking Things at Work. New York: Verso, 168 pp. ...more

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Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler

Waves in an Impossible Sea: How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean
by Matt Strassler

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Space is not an empty frame in which objects bang about, as Newton conceived. According to Strassler, “everything” is made of energy, manifest as waves, wavelets, and wavicles (posing as particles). Energy waves, like photons, move at the speed of li Space is not an empty frame in which objects bang about, as Newton conceived. According to Strassler, “everything” is made of energy, manifest as waves, wavelets, and wavicles (posing as particles). Energy waves, like photons, move at the speed of light unless the Higgs Field “stiffens” the medium in which they wave. That slowing becomes apparent to us as mass, ordinary objects, and ourselves. Therefore, everything in the universe is ultimately waves of energy.

It's a lucid description of quantum field theory, connected by analogy to cosmological theories, all the more remarkable because it does not use any mathematics. One could argue that quantum field theory IS mathematics and little else, but Strassler presents a more humanly intuitive point of view that will be welcome to the average reader.

Who that reader is supposed to be is unclear. At times, the author belabors the simplest points, like the difference between inertia of rest and inertia of motion, as if the reader was at square zero. But such a reader would never pick up this book, so such explanations, analogies and thought-experiments become tedious. Nevertheless, I appreciated most of his coverage of basic Newtonian physics in the first 125 pages, though the book would have been fine without it.

The writing tends to the obvious and repetitive, with a few annoying quirks, like labeling everything small as “microscopic.” Protons are “microscopic.” Quarks are "microscopic." That would be some special microscope.

The language is also not consistent. For example, he debunks the idea of the Big Bang as a cosmic explosion because there was no pre-existent space into which anything could explode. Yet he does not hesitate to discuss the speed of light in early cosmic inflation, without recognizing that “speed” cannot be defined without reference to movement in space.

The author is also blind to his own subjectivity and his own body, as are nearly all physicists. He seems to believe that an observation is an objective fact (about a “real” entity) if it comes from a scientific instrument but not from unaided biology. That’s because apparently, biology is individualistic, associated with individual psychologies, which are biased and easily fooled. Instrumental observations on the other hand, belong to nobody (or everybody) and are therefore free of bias, infallible, and objective.

He does not consider that every instrument was designed and build by individual humans, from a theoretical context, for specifically-targeted observations. The idea that instrumental observation is intrinsically unbiased is ludicrous. Further, every instrumental observation must be interpreted by a person with attitudes, theoretical precommitments, and biases (though subsequent discussion can produce consensus, which belongs to nobody and voila, the observation is objective again.) Such closed-minded thinking is is endemic in science, but since Strasser is keen on debunking scientific dogma, he should be held to a stricter standard.

Ultimately the thesis of a universe made of waveforms is plausible and interesting but flawed by inconsistent, circular, and self-refuting language, and a narrow band of ontological thinking. Perhaps that is the inevitable cost of presenting a mathematical theory without mathematics.

Strassler, Matt (2024). Waves in an Impossible Sea. New York: Basic Books, 370 pp. ...more

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Solaris
by Stanisław Lem

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Published in 1961, Solaris is one of Lem’s first first-contact stories. What if the alien had an intelligence so unlike our own that we could not find a way to communicate? Modern sci-fi stories have some auto-translate gizmo and instantly the proble Published in 1961, Solaris is one of Lem’s first first-contact stories. What if the alien had an intelligence so unlike our own that we could not find a way to communicate? Modern sci-fi stories have some auto-translate gizmo and instantly the problem goes away. In the movie “Arrival” the key to communication was graphical representations. But it’s not about language. What if the alien mind was really alien?

In Solaris, Lem explores the possibility of an ocean-covered planet that is an intelligent being. The astronauts on one of the few islands have never been able to understand it, yet it is clear the planet is intelligent because while you’re there, people appear from your memory, just as real as life, as if resurrected and reincarnated. But even they’re no help in understanding the intelligent planet. They’re just the people you knew, unrelated to the planet.

The story can be a metaphor for our understanding of our planet, and of each other. We understand neither. We may not agree that our planet is intelligent, but why not? It’s alive, growing, and changing. It interacts with us in important ways (such as supplying our food). What criteria should we use to decide if something is intelligent? As for understanding each other: Do we? Other people can seem like complete aliens, even with communication. Lem took up these questions again in his 1968 book, “His Master’s ‘Voice.”

The story could also be read as an inquiry into the nature of embodiment. We are physically embodied, and no intimacy could be closer than that between mind and body. Yet that relationship is almost void. The ending paragraphs of Solaris support the idea that the inquiry has been about the vast unknown “planet” of our own biology. Are our bodies intelligent in their own right? They often seem so, and yet are like aliens. There’s a long, horrifying, dreamlike passage in the middle of the text that suggest what it would be like if we could introspect the interior of our bodies the way we can our minds.

The scientific aspect of this philosophical novel mainly comes from the main character’s reading of scientific reports that have been written about Solaris, the mysterious planet. Those can be tedious going, and amount to massive “info-dumps,” which do not make good storytelling. Besides, the reports are deficient. For example, nobody can determine what material substance the planet was made of. Really? There are only 118 elements. Whoever these scientists were who “studied” the planet, they did a poor job. Likewise with attempts to ascertain the planet’s intelligence—they are unimaginative.

But the story is really about Lem’s philosophical musings in an overall scientific context. It’s not “hard” sci-fi, where the science really plays a large role. I like like the science to be more plausible.

The 1972 movie, “Solaris,” directed by Tarkovsky, is a beautiful work of art, well-worth seeing, but it doesn’t track the book very closely. Lem hated the movie. The 2002 remake with George Clooney could be skipped entirely.

Solaris is a classic for a reason. It’s evocative, provocative, and reasonably well written. Even if you’ve seen both movies, this book is a classic must-read.
Lem, Stanislaw (1961). Solaris. New York: Harper Voyager, 204 pp. ...more

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