Book reviews, with links to order

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The Life Of The Cosmos by Lee Smolin

Rating: 8.5 of 10

This book is most interesting for Smolin's multiple universes theory, introduced in chapter 7. The theory holds that black holes, far from being cosmic dead ends, are the birthplace of baby universes, and these generations of universes evolve as generations of biological creatures do. He doesn't give the theory a name, so I call it U-evolution.

He makes a good but not compelling case for the theory. The theory has been criticized for allegedly being unfalsifiable, but Smolin describes in both the text and the appendix several ways it could be falsified, as well as a decent bit of circumstantial evidence.

You'll want to read the appendix as carefully as the text proper, because Smolin relegates some important discussions to it: The question of whether larger black holes are more "fertile" than smaller ones and some of the supporting argument for his theory.

Occasionally, Smolin does not quite explain himself but simply plunges ahead. For instance, much of his argument is predicated on the idea that the theoretically possible sizes of fundamental particles should fall in a "random distribution", but he leaves the reader to guess that by a random distribution, he means a linear random distribution between 0 and the Planck mass.

Equally fascinating is Smolin's discussion of the structure of galaxies. They are more complex than you probably realized, and Smolin explains it well.

In chapter 20, Smolin takes on the Everett's Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He doesn't like it, but his reasons don't seem to be good ones IMHO. This surprising in lite of the kinship between Many-Worlds and Smolin's own big theory.

Smolin also takes on several other Big Idea In Physics, including spin networks, the anthropic principle, relativity, and quantum mechanics.

All in all, I liked this book, but I wished it made its points more carefully.


88 Songwriting Wrongs And How To Right Them, by Pat and Pete Luboff

Rating: 9.5 of 10

This is a very practical book about songwriting. I don't mean that it's full of contact addresses to send your demos to. I mean that it covers all the important aspects, and covers them well. This is advice you can use.

It's easy to read, liberally sprinkled with excellent examples of actual songwriting mistakes. Each chapter is 2-3 pages long, explaining and correcting exactly one well-defined mistake. The sections are:

  1. In the beginning (Creativity)
  2. What In The Word? (Lyrics)
  3. Making The Music (Music, largely melody)
  4. Once Written, Look Twice (Rewriting)
  5. Two Heads Or More Are Better (Collaborating)
  6. Getting It On Tape (Creating demos)
  7. Allow Me To Present My Song (Pitching your stuff)
  8. Making Disconnections (Negotiating to sell your stuff)
  9. The Final Vinyl (After your song is released)

350 Fabulous Writing Prompts, by Jacqueline Sweeney, and
145 Wonderful Writing Prompts by Susan Ohanian

What these books are are collections of short items that have the effect of launching you into writing an essay. For example: Do you own an object of great value, even though it isn't worth a lot of money? Describe it.

It's not obvious from the amazon.com description, but these are books both intended for children in grades 4-8. Non-US, that means 9-13 years old.


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Tom Breton