| It's not everyday that a mathematician of Penrose's calibre is listed
as a coauthor on a science fiction novel. Although he is probably
best known to the general public for the Penrose Tiling (a set of
tiles shapes which can be used to tile an infinite plane, but only in
a non-periodic fashion), Sir Roger Penrose's more serious work
on geometric methods in general relativity (the so called `twistor
theory' which has more recently found application in soliton theory,
my own area of research) has won him the Wolf Prize and the Rouse Ball
Professorship of Mathematics at Oxford. So, this book is definitely
worth mentioning here for his involvement alone. Unfortunately, I
must admit that I can't think of much else to recommend the book. Of
course, these comments reflect only my own taste and I would be very
happy for someone who liked this book to write some comments to
include here. For myself, however, nothing about the plot, writing or
even the scientific ideas in this book appealed to me. Penrose's
recent publications and lectures have focused on his theories relating
quantum theory to questions of human consciousness. Let us say, to be
as polite as possible, that I am skeptical of his claims in
this area. So it may be that my prejudice against these ideas which
come up in the book have had some effect. In the book, one character advertises Penrose's view that our mind is nothing other than a ``quantputer'':
| (quoted from White Mars : or, the mind set free : a 21st Century Utopia)
It happens that some people in the early days of setting up the Mars experiment thought there was another justification for it. These people believed that there has to be more to the human mind than what they refer to as "just quantputing". They reckoned that finding HIGMOs would lead us to a "mysterious something" which would provide a better understanding of human consciousness. Maybe I should use the term "soul" again here. There are still some people -- even some important people on the project, who shall be nameless -- who continue to pursue this sort of a notion....Our brains are just very elaborate quantputers. Maybe we do still have to tune a few parameters a bit better, but that's basically all there is to it. Even Euclid [a robot] would have a mind if he had been constructed with greater sophistication and better tuned parameters.
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In any case, there is
not really much mathematics or even mathematical physics here at all.
The HIGMO referred to above is a gravitational monopole, a real object of study in mathematical physics today (and since the 1960's), but there is nothing of any substance said about it in the book.
One important concept in the book is the Ng-Robinson plot, a way to
visualize the outcome of complicated experiments in particle physics:
| (quoted from White Mars : or, the mind set free : a 21st Century Utopia)
The Plot has given us a
wonderful method of displaying vast quantities of quantputer-generated
information. At the time when it was first employed, supercomputers
were already giving place to our QPs, or quantputers, to use their
full name -- much faster and more versatile machines. The computer
read off the mass of a particle along one axis, its lifetime along
another, and the q-factor along a third, all colour coded according ot
the various quantum numbers possessed by the particle in question --
charge, spin, parity, etc. And one of the crucial features
Ng-Robinson introduced is a key intensity factor which indicates the
probability of the detection being a reliable one. A very sharp
bright image indicates firm identification of a particle, while a
fuzzy one implies there may be some considerable uncertainty as to the
suggested identification of an actual particle.
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Using such a plot to search for the Higgs
boson (a quest of real physicists today), they find instead only a
smudge, This smudge defied
theoretical explanation until
| (quoted from White Mars : or, the mind set free : a 21st Century Utopia)
The theoretical breakthrough...A brilliant young Chinese mathematician, Chin Lim Chung, achieved a completely reformulated theoretical basis for particle physics as it stood at the time. Miss Chin introduced some higly sophisticated new mathematical ideas. She showed how a permanent smudge could indeed come about on the Ng-Robinson Plot, but the culprit could not possibly be a particle in any ordinary sense. It was a new kind of entity entirely. So from henceforth it was simply referred to as a smudge.
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I guess I can't help feeling that the amount of discussion of such technical issues as the plot and the smudge are going to bore people who are not really interested in math and physics, and the absense of any substance to the discussion is going to bore people who are! Couldn't Penrose have suggested what sort of theory Chin Lim Chung devised?
This same problem (not saying enough to please me but probably too much for others) arises again when the character says "Well, I don't want to go into details....but a hiden symmetry is a sort of theoretical symmetry which is dual in a certain sense, to a more manifest symmetry than might exist in theory. Such an idea goes back to some hypotheses popular late last century, although at that time the correct context for the hidden-symmetry idea was not found."
There is a one paragraph defense of basic research which I like enough to reproduce here:
| (quoted from White Mars : or, the mind set free : a 21st Century Utopia)
It is always difficult to justify curiosity-driven research in terms of its ultimate benefit to society. We can't tell ahead of time. Nevertheless the effect of such research, which seems entirely abstract to the lay person, can be tremendous. An obvious example is Alan Turing's analysis of theoretical computing machines done in the 1930s. It changed the world in which we live. We are on Mars because of it.
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The subject of the plot of the book is a colony on Mars and how it deals with the collapse of Earth's society under economic and environmental stresses. | Contributed by
Anonymous
This book is inspirational in as much as it demonstrates how the humanising of science and the rationalizing of humans is essential if our race ever wishes to acquire lasting purpose and 'happiness'. (a word as misguided as it is misused in its current state.)
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