For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself.
On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of Jell-O and disappear into those bottomless pits of nothingness known as black holes.
On the other side is the Einstein who, starting in 1905, laid the foundation for quantum mechanics, the nonintuitive rules that inject randomness into the world — rules that Einstein never accepted. According to quantum mechanics, a subatomic particle like an electron can be anywhere and everywhere at once, and a cat can be both alive and dead until it is observed. God doesn’t play dice, Einstein often complained.
Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.
I loved Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel, “The Hero of This Book,” and hate to deprive people of the chance to dive unknowingly into something wonderful. So feel free to stop here and pretend I am pressing the slim hardcover into your hands, saying, “Don’t look at the jacket copy; just read.”
If you’re the sort who needs more information to commit, I will warn you that the book is hard to categorize. It doesn’t have a splashy hook, and it purposefully defies genre. Page by page, it’s the quiet story of an adult child mourning a parent. As a whole, it’s a map of how to love someone.
The narrator’s iron-willed discipline over her teenage diet and her adult drive to be annihilated by drinking or sex are the same. They are the hope of losing yourself in something bigger, and thereby exercising temporary command over what we cannot control and will inevitably destroy us. Being a woman who loves unsuitable men is simply a conduit. On one of her dispiriting childhood visits to the nursing home, the narrator recalls, she saw a garden rose “so powerfully pink, with drops of dew clinging…that tears came to my eyes and all I could feel for one brief moment was the pure potential of life.” But then, she tells us, “I remembered where I was and who I had just seen, and knew again that the image I so longed to perceive meant nothing, was nothing.”
Lev AC Rosen channels the old-fashioned private eye novel and the locked-room mystery while delivering a tense character-driven story about gay life in 1952 San Francisco in “Lavender House.” While the search for a killer lays the foundation of “Lavender House,” Rosen delves into homophobia, the need for connection and the secrets that motivate believable characters in this historical mystery.
Every now and then, somebody somewhere will publish an Everest book. I don’t mean a book about Mount Everest, although there’s not exactly a shortage of those. I’m talking about books for which the brief is so impossibly ambitious that the reasons for even making the attempt are not altogether clear. Just as Mallory, when asked by a reporter why he wanted to climb the world’s highest mountain, replied “because it’s there,” so I imagine the creators of these books must take on the challenge out of a combination of sheer bloody-mindedness and some deep-seated desire to attempt the apparently impossible.
Such must surely be the case with Ocean: Exploring the Marine World, a huge, 2.5kg tome published by art book specialists Phaidon. The book, says the blurb, aims to take readers on “a journey across continents and cultures to discover the endless ways artists and image-makers throughout history – extending over 3,000 years from ancient Greece to today – have been inspired by the world’s oceans." Yup, you read that right: a survey of the entire visual culture of human civilisation as it pertains to oceans. Like I say, bit of a tall order.