The Wonder of It All

When I was a young boy my classmates at school knew what I was going to be when I grew up before I knew.  When it was my turn to tell the class, they answered for me: "Scientist!  He's going to be a scientist!"  They reached this conclusion, I believe, by the following logic.  (1) I could read better than anyone else in the class.  (2)  Therefore I must be smart.  (3) The smartest people turn out to be scientists.  (4) Therefore he's going to turn out to be a scientist.  While their logic had some errors, their conclusion turned out to be correct.  I did become a scientist.

I don't believe the other kids knew that I had my first microscope and my first chemistry set before I was nine years old.  But they might've known about my "How-and-Why Wonder Books" if I brought one of them to school.  I got some of them from school book fairs, and some at the local shopping center in Levittown (later Willingboro), New Jersey.  I remember books on rocks, and coins, and dinosaurs, and stars.  No doubt reading these books sparked my curiosity and instilled a sense of wonder that would guide me as I grew up.

Awakenings

When I was about 12 years old, my parents enrolled me by mail in the Science Fiction Book Club. After getting the initial set of books that came with membership, every month a flyer would arrive and I would peruse the books that were available. Through SFBC I read Asimov's Fantastic Voyage, J. G. Ballard's eerie novel The Crystal World, Fred Hoyle's October the First is Too Late, and D. F. Jones' Colossus. Colossus was my first exposure to the concept of artificial intelligence. In this story the eponymous computer, responsible for U.S. defense, becomes self-aware and very dangerous to its creators.

Since the time Colossus was published there have been many science fiction stories and novels of self-awareness arising from the collective action of otherwise simple "non-intelligent" components of a system. Recent examples include M. M. Buckner's Watermind and Frank Schatzing's The Swarm, as well as Daniel Suarez's Daemon and its sequel, Freedom. While we have yet to actually see true self-awareness arise in real life, there are many real-life examples of self-organization, a concept of key importance in the work of Ilya Prigogine (see last post). Self-awareness is the ultimate example of self-organization as an emergent property.

So what have I done? You guessed it. Bought another book, Robert J. Sawyer's WWW: Watch. This is the sequel to WWW: Wake, in which a form of consciousness arises across the millions of nodes on the Internet and only a blind girl is witness to it. Enjoying the first book as much as I did, I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Discipline, as in, "a lack of discipline in buying books"

Because of a severe case of bibliophilia, I have never succeeded for very long at any disciplined way of buying books. I always have more than I can read. I always find another I want. But perhaps there's another possible cure: force myself to blog on every book I buy. So here goes.

Today, at a local Half Price Books store, I bought the following.

Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. I've read virtually every piece of fiction Calvino has written that has been translated into English. My favorites are his more surreal works, like If on a winter's night a traveler and Invisible Cities. This collection of lectures addresses the question, "What should be cherished in literature?"

Hart, John. The Last Child. This mystery simply looked interesting to me.

Prigogine, Ilya. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. Prigogine was a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. I enjoyed reading (and trying to understand) his book From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences as well as Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. If you want to impress someone by being able to discuss nonequilibrium thermodynamics, read Prigogine's work. (And the answer is no, I can't explain it. Just appreciate it.)

Wondrous Strange: The Wyeth Tradition. In recent years I've come to appreciate famous illustrators, especially Frank Frazetta (discussion of whom I will save for a future posting). There's something exciting about N. C. Wyeth's work - it says so much about adventure.