| Billy Terwilliger (aka Twillig) is not your typical 14 year old boy.
True, he is beginning to get interested in sex and thinks that the
word "fart" is entertaining, but he is also a number theorist and the
recipient of the first Nobel prize in mathematics!
This novel follows Twillig as he gets accustomed to a secretive think-tank at which he has been hired. We learn that the goal of this research center (and the impressive scientists there from many disciplines) is to decode a brief message (a series of dots and dashes, like Morse code) that has been received from a distant source: Ratner's Star.
Not only does Twillig's area of interest (numbers he calls "zorgs") prove useful in this investigation, they also lead to a discovery in mathematical physics (all of which offends Twillig's view of math as beautiful and useless).
This passage is taken from the last chapter:
| (quoted from Ratner's Star)
Mainwaring edged his way to Billy's side.
"We used zorgs," he whispered"
"For what?"
"Identifying the mohole."
"Zorgs are useless."
"We used them," Mainwaring said.
"Practically nobody knows what they even are."
"Softly knows, doesn't he?"
"He's one of the few."
"Softly explained how we might use zorgs. I briefed my sylphing teams. Without zorgs we would never have found the mohole."
"Amazement."
"Except Softly wanted us to use them in tracking back the signal. But we didn't need them for that. We needed them for the mohole."
...
"A hole is an unoccupied negative engergy state," Mainwaring whispered. "Hole theory involves `pair creation' which is the simultaneous ceration of a particle-antiparticle pair. Holes move, just as moholes seem to move, just as a discrete partcile can separate iteself from a continuously dense array, leaving behind its antiparticle or hole. What Softly pointed out was that zorgs provide a perfect working mathematical model of hole theory....We had to learn to view zorgs as events rather than numbers, just as particles are events rather than things. The discrete-continuous quality of zorgs is what really helped us work out the necessary mathematics of Moholean relativity and made mohole indentification practically inevitable."
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Don DeLillo is a well known, and critically acclaimed author in literary circles. But, Ratner's Star, his attempt at mathematical fiction, did not please all of his fans. (See the reviews at Amazon, for instance.)
| Contributed by
Cassel Sloan
"This so called book is the worst
piece of junk I have ever read. It
barely has a plot, instead it repeats
the same stupid things over and over
again. The main character jumps to
completely unfounded conclusions.
All in all it is probably one of the
worst novels ever written." |
| Contributed by
luke
One of my all time favourites, for ever and ever. Constituting an almost unremarked break in the history of western narrative, Ratner's Star finds DeLillo freely borrowing and bending the structures of Lewis Carroll, sending little Billy Twillig through and down the post-contemporary Scientific-Industrial looking glass and bunny hole. The language is stunning and exquisitely wrought; so good I sometimes have to put it down to recompose myself, like staring at the sun.
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| Contributed by
jay I'm not sure how I stumbled across this book, but I read it in high school, when I was a nerd studying math history for fun. DeLillo had me convinced that he was quite a knowledgeable math afficianado, not only because of the variety of physics- and number-theory-related content, but also because of the way his characters related to and dealt with these issues.
Regarding literary sediment, I can't vouch that this book is anything more than a 'typical DeLillo' book, except that it speaks to the scientist in ways seldom found in fiction.
Regarding mathematical content, I'm surprised that the title includes no allusion to math (as far as i know..).
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