A Review of Our Mathematical Universe, by Max Tegmark

Knopf, 2014

432 pages

The book opens with a chiller: “A second later, I died.” What follows is not a murder mystery being narrated by the deceased victim, but a whirlwind explanation of cosmology, quantum physics, and theoretical evidence for the idea of multiple universes. Welcome to the world of Max Tegmark, professor of theoretical physics at MIT, whose brain roams across the entire history of human scientific inquiry into the ultimate question: what is reality?

Our Mathematical Universe is Tegmark’s first book-length project, following his publication of over 200 academic papers, numerous essays for popular science outlets, and appearances in TV and radio documentaries. While a book on such a broad, esoteric topic could easily veer off-track into Ph.D. jargon, Tegmark keeps his expansive, quirky voice focused, transitioning smoothly between topics and helping bring the average Joe impressively close to understanding his world with, ironically, as little reliance on math as possible. Full Review »

A review of Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts by Emily Anthes
256 pages
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

An unusual cat lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. Named Mr. Green Genes, he looks like your average orange tabby. But under dark light, he has a neat parlor trick: his eyes, nose, and ears glow green, Rudolph-the-reindeer style. This is because scientists tinkered with his DNA to include a jellyfish gene for fluorescence. Although a silly outcome, it was a serious study monitoring how the glow gene would express itself in foreign species.

In recent decades, other house cats have been subject to seemingly strange science experiments. They have been cloned, surgically altered to include microphone implants, and given pirate-peg-leg-looking prosthetics limbs. These feline Frankensteins offer a taste of the wild things people are doing to animals these days in the name of science, wildlife conservation, medicine, national security, consumerism, and animal love. In her riveting first book, Frankenstein’s Cat, Emily Anthes explores these colorful cats and a menagerie of other animals—from dogs to goldfish, dolphins to seabirds, goats to grizzly bears—at the forefront of this animal biotechnology explosion. Full Review »

A review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf.

If you bought a Windows computer in the late 1990s, perhaps you remember the system’s preloaded music. Beethoven’s “Fifth Symphony,” Bach’s “Brandenburg Concerto Number Three,” Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies”—Windows Media Player included them all, along with two songs created by Microsoft called “Passport” and “Canyon,” the apparent digital love children of elevator music and 1980s advertising jingles. Though any listener could recognize the classics’ melodies, each note sounded somehow mechanical, and certainly simplified.

In his first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier uses the birth of these songs as one example in his intriguing investigation into culture’s current relationship with technology. The songs use a programming strategy called MIDI to make music. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, which simplifies music’s complexity into discrete steps in pitch. Dave Smith, a synthesizer designer, devised MIDI in the 1980s, but we still find MIDI songs everywhere from digital alarm clocks to cell phone ringtones. Certainly, they are no longer the best available strategy, but, Lanier argues, they have become a “locked-in” design, an assumed and arbitrary rule in computer programming.

Lanier looks ahead a thousand years at a hypothetical descendant in a spaceship: “She will probably be annoyed by some awful, beepy MIDI-driven music to alert her that the antimatter filter needs to be recalibrated.” Full Review »