Fred Hoyle: A Life in Science by Simon Mitton

I picked up a copy of this book on a quick visit to the local library but was not expecting very much from it: I had already read Hoyle's own autobiograph 'Home is where the Wind Blows' a few years ago and don't remember being particularly impressed by it.

The first chapter of 'A Life in Science' with its somewhat cloying details of his childhood tended to confirm my low expectations (but maybe this is because these details are derived from Fred's own writings). But then Hoyle gets to Cambridge and the book suddenly takes off as he meets Arthur Eddington, P.A.M. Dirac, Rudolph Peierls. Then he goes off to Portsmouth to do war work. He stays with Herman Bondi and Tommy Gold: during the day they work on naval radar, during the evenings they talk astrophysics and, start generating new ideas and papers at such a rate that the RAS papers secretary can hardly cope.

After the war Hoyle returns to Cambridge and becomes one of the central figures in astrophysics for the next three decades. I had not really appreciated the key role Hoyle had played in the understanding of stellar structure and the creation of the chemical elements. Mitton covers all of this in just enough depth for me to follow and to want to find out more about these subjects. He also covers the controversies that Hoyle got involved in, for example that with Martin Ryle, and tries to give a balanced view, pointing out where Fred was being unreasonable or paranoid.

Over the years I had got the impression that many British professional astronomers and astrophysicists regarded Hoyle with a mixture of fondness and awe. After reading Mitton's account I now understand why.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

A collection of translated short stories, essays and (very) short parables by one of the leading Latin American writers.  The essays and parables I found hard to read and uninteresting.  It looks as if they were just included as padding, or else for reasons of completeness. However, the short stories are marvellous, almost little nightmares; some (eg: The Immortal, and The Circular Ruins) have the atmosphere of paintings by Beksinski, others are steeped in cabbalism, and arcane philosophy and theology.  The Library of Babel and The Lottery in Babylon remind me of Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker in their  scale, but what took Stapledon 250 pages to do, Borges does just as effectively in less than 10.  I am also sure that Umberto Eco must have been influenced by Borges cabbalistic stories when he came to write Foucault's Pendulum.

On the whole, Borges gives the distinct impression of having spent too much time in dusty old libraries, but I am glad that he did, and I will certainly be keeping my eyes open for any more of his short stories.

Update on Sat 2005-09-10 by Tristram Brelstaff

Would-be purchasers should be aware that Penguin Classics has also  published 'Fictions' which  appears  to contain  the same material as 'Labyrinths' without the essays and parables.

Birds of Sardinia

My daughter Zoe is spending a week staying with her cousin in Alghero in Sardinia.  She reports seeing griffon vultures, bee-eaters, and a probable golden eagle.  And here am I stuck in Reading, with Canada geese, ducks and pigeons!

A Quotation on Object Identity and Time

... Not only was it difficult for him to comprehend that the generic symbol dog embraces so many unlike individuals of diverse size and form; it bothered him that the dog at three fourteen (seen from the side) should have the same name as the dog at three fifteen (seen from the front). ...

From Funes el memorioso by Jorge Luis Borges.

How Mumbo-Jumbo conquered the World by Francis Wheen

A sort of 'Brief History of Bullshit' which does for modern politics, economics, and popular culture what Martin Gardner did for pseudosciences in his 'Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science'.  Almost every major Bitish and US figure of the last 25 years is subjected to Wheen's demolition job: Reagan, Thatcher, Blair, Clinton, Bush Snr, Bush Jnr, Al. Gore, Lady Diana, Noam Chomsky, the barons of industry, economists, journalists, post-modernists, etc;  they are all shown up as liars, cheats, self-deceivers and manipulators.  This is really quite an impressive display of Swiftian invective.  However, as when I read 'Fads and Fallacies', I found the whole thing rather depressing.  The ills described are rather overwhelming and it is not until the last chapter, when he gets onto the relationship between the West and Islam that Wheen seems to offer anything positive of his own.