Idiots in science: TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN

Father-daughter memoirs have an inherent appeal, especially when the father and daughter are on an almost preposterous quest. There’s such a quest in “Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn”: to uncover the nature of reality. It all began when Warren Gefter, a radiologist “prone to posing Zen-koan-like questions,” asked his 15-year-old daughter, Amanda, over dinner at a Chinese restaurant near their home just outside Philadelphia: “How would you define nothing?”

Idiots in science: TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN 0302-bks-Henig-master180

Idiots in science: TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN 0302-bks-Henig-master180

Warren Gefter had been thinking about this for a while, he told his daughter. He defines “nothing” as a state of infinite, unbounded homogeneity. “Think about it,” he said. “A ‘thing’ is defined by its boundaries. By what differentiates it from something else. That’s why when you draw something, it’s enough to draw its outline. . . . The edges define the ‘thing.’ ” What thrilled him about this insight was that it simplified the search for how the universe began. It transformed the cosmologist’s eternal conundrum — how something could emerge from nothing — and made it potentially knowable, recast as a search for the boundaries themselves.

More crap here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/trespassing-on-einsteins-lawn-by-amanda-gefter.html

Idiots in science: TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN

Idiots in science: TRESPASSING ON EINSTEIN’S LAWN

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