Breathe in

I have just taken delivery of a pair of books from Amazon. The first is ‘God created the integer’ by Stephen Hawking and the second is ‘The road to reality’ by Roger Penrose.

These are not the usual popular science type physics books that I tend to read – A brief history of time would typify that genera. These are fairly hard core; complex calculus, Riemann surfaces, n-manifolds and the like are exposed in all their squiggly beauty. Sort of a mid point between popular science and text books.

I am at the point of having gone as far as possible I my understanding of modern physics with out getting into the true language of it – the math. That and the fact that I am worried about loosing my ability to understand much of the mathematics that I used as a student engineer. By delving into the hard core I hope to revise my appreciation of the beauty of the equations while learning a bit more about the universe.

I flicked through the books last night and it is daunting. Some 2400 pages of reality stared back. I haven’t made up my mind on the order yet. The Penrose book looks more exiting; hard core physics with the math to support it. The Hawking book is a good revision for the math – it examines the great mathematicians and their contribution from Euclid to Shannon. I will probably go with the latter first.

So I look upon these books now with the same sense of determination that a marathon runner has just before the starting gun. It will be a struggle and I’m not sure if I am up to the challenge – my mental fitness is at an all time low. My goal is to finish them before the end of the year while interspersing a few novels and the usual collection of magazines.

Ready, Set, Go.