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Leonard Mlodinow |
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Authors@Google talk on YouTube
New York Times Interview
New York Times Essay on the Need for Control
Wall Street Journal Essay on Wine Ratings
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Wall Street Journal Interview
LA Times Magazine cover story on Randomness in Hollywood
Newsweek cover story on Star Trek
Wall Street Journal Drunkard's Walk Randomness Quiz
Forbes article on The Meritocracy Paradox
BOOKS BY LEONARD MLODINOW
How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves? Over twenty years ago Stephen Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time, about where the universe came from, and where it is going. But that book left some important questions unanswered. Why is there a universe - why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why are the laws of nature what they are? Did the universe need a designer and creator? It was Einstein's dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. Physicists in Einstein's day hadn't made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature to make that hope realistic. In recent years the development of M-theory, the top-down approach to cosmology, and new observations such as those made by satellites like NASA's COBE and WMAP, have brought us closer than ever to that single theory, and to being able to answer those deepest of questions. And so Stephen and I set out to write a sequel to A Brief History of Time to attempt to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The result is The Grand Design, the product of our four-year effort. In The Grand Design we explain why, according to quantum theory, the cosmos does not have just a single existence, or history, but rather that every possible history of the universe exists simultaneously. We question the conventional concept of reality, posing instead a "model-dependent" theory of reality. We discuss how the laws of our particular universe are extraordinarily finely tuned so as to allow for our existence, and show why quantum theory predicts the multiverse - the idea that ours is just one of many universes that appeared spontaneously out of nothing, each with different laws of nature. And we assess M-Theory, an explanation of the laws governing the multiverse, and the only viable candidate for a complete "theory of everything."
From the Fortune Magazine Review of The Drunkard's Walk:
If you're strong enough to have some of your favorite assumptions challenged, please read the Drunkard's Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, a history, explanation, and exaltation of probability theory... [Mlodinow] thinks in equations but explains in anecdote, simile, and occasional bursts of neon.
From Stephen Hawking's Amazon Review of The Drunkard's Walk:
In The Drunkard’s Walk Leonard Mlodinow provides readers with a wonderfully readable guide to how the mathematical laws of randomness affect our lives. With insight he shows how the hallmarks of chance are apparent in the course of events all around us.
From the Kirkus Review of The Drunkard's Walk:
Forget about planning for the future: Chaos is king, the random reigns and no system can beat the house odds. So one might conclude from onetime Caltech physicist Mlodinow's spry look at the rising field.
As he writes, affectingly, his mother, who survived the Holocaust, subscribed to the forget-planning school after her careful sister was consigned to death. Her experience, he writes, "has taught me to appreciate the absence of bad luck, the absence of events that might have brought us down, and the absence of the disease, war, famine, and accident that have not-or have not yet-befallen us." Small comforts, perhaps, but the case studies he assembles point strongly to the essential vanity of human wishes, whether they be efforts to beat the odds at Vegas or to predict the chartbusting potential of a screenplay.
Mlodinow, who knows his Hollywood, quotes a studio executive who once remarked, "If I had said yes to all the projects I turned down, and no to all the other ones I took, it would have worked out about the same." Thus randomness, which plays havoc with probability and makes it devilishly hard for ordinary mortals to discern trends and, moreover, exceptions to trends. Mixing hard science with an easygoing approach that makes liberal but not annoying use of pop-culture references, Mlodinow ventures onto conceptually strange ground: the law of the sample space, for instance, which is supposed to apply "only to outcomes that are equally probable" but manages to find, yes, exceptions. He delights in finding the limits of probability, as with the elderly French woman who mortgaged her desirable apartment to a young lawyer who was to take it over after her death, then proceeded to outlive him-indeed, to attain the age of 122, skewing all the statistics. A science geek's delight, and useful reading for the inveterate gambler of the house.
Review from Physics World:
Feynman's Rainbow by Leonard Mlodinow is spot on when it comes to the self-examinations that Caltech can dole out to a young scientist. In the book, Mlodinow - a former scriptwriter for Star Trek - documents his troubled first year as a postdoc at Caltech in 1981. He recounts how he wrestled with his own fears of being at Caltech merely by fluke and of how he thought he might never produce another bit of important physics again. Through several encounters with Richard Feynman, a lot of martinis, marijuana, and conversations with Ray the garbage man, Mlodinow eventually found his way to a sound and healthy life. I enjoyed this little book, which makes for a couple of good nights of bed-time reading. Caltech is no ordinary institution with ordinary expectations and pressures. It is a place of research and discovery - and a hefty amount of peer envy. One need only look at the roster to sense something strange in the air: 275 professors, 562 postdocs, 1181 graduate students and 939 undergraduates. With 29 Nobel-prize-winning faculty and alumni - 13 in physics. Most of the book, however, centers on Feynman's pearls of wisdom, and includes several transcripts from taped conversations with the oracle. However, there is enough character development apart from Feynman to get a feel for the department as a whole; what Mlodinow writes is therefore of historical interest.
Review from the Washington Post:
One of the strangest things in a cosmos full of bewilderments is the power of mathematics to explain the way things are. The universe, after all, in its superlative indifference, is under no obligation to be comprehensible, much less explicable by calculation. Yet to a remarkable degree, the history of science is the chronicle of humanity's increasingly sophisticated ability to describe and then predict mathematically the nature of nature.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in comprehending the shape of space. The pursuit originally called "geometry" when it merely concerned the Earth's surface is still at the brain-buckling frontier of research into four-dimensional Einsteinian "space-time" and even 10- (or more) dimensional superstring theory. As physicist Leonard Mlodinow puts it in this reader-friendly, high-spirited, splendidly lucid and often hilarious history, "Ever since the Greeks, mathematics has been at the heart of science, and geometry at the heart of mathematics." It took 2,600 years to arrive at our present condition. Mlodinow divides that progress into five "geometric revolutions" epitomized by Euclid, Descartes, Gauss (the guy who invented the "bell curve," thus becoming the patron saint of C students everywhere), Einstein and Witten. That last is Ed Witten of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies -- arguably the planet's paramount mathematical physicist and a maximum ayatollah of string theory.
Even those readers who would still prefer a tax audit to solving the Pythagorean theorem will find that Mlodinow unfolds the story of geometry in a most inviting context. The mathematical essentials are all here, painstakingly explained in concrete physical and visual terms. But so is a good deal of relevant (as well as frequently irrelevant but fascinating) historical garnish. Thus we learn in detail how the iron postulates of Euclid's "Elements" applied a logical rigor to two-dimensional space, and how his notion of parallel lines eventually became untenable. But we also discover that property taxes "were perhaps the first imperative for the development of geometry," and that the word hypotenuse comes from the Greek for "stretched against" because surveying was conducted by teams of rope-stretchers who formed triangles with knotted cords. Pythagoras, it is revealed, was so weird that he bit a snake to death after it attacked him, and that a thief, after breaking into the mathematician's home, "saw such bizarre things that he fled empty-handed." Aristotle's influence on the idea of latitude, Newton's role in the invention of the sextant, Charlemagne's ego ("In one monastery alone, Charlemagne had 300 monks and 100 clerks praying continuously for him, in three shifts, around the clock. He died anyway.") and Descartes' opinion that his contemporary Galileo had a somewhat disorderly mind -- all are here. So are dozens of delightful stories such as the one about German geometrician Georg Riemann, who at the age of 19 was given an 859-page tome on number theory by his teacher. Riemann "returned it in six days with a comment along the lines of 'It was a good read.' "
Many of these tales -- for example, Einstein's legendary underachievement in school -- are familiar. Others, such as the fact that Albert Michelson (of the eponymous Michelson-Morley experiment that killed the theory of "ether" in the universe) lived in madcap Virginia City, Nev., during the gold-rush mania, or the shocking anti-Semitism of some 20th-century Nobel laureates, may surprise even some science buffs. But the focus of the narrative always remains on the central issue: how science gradually moved from the conceptually magnificent certitude of Euclidean space to the non-Euclidean, "elliptical" geometry that, paradoxically, was so hard to understand and yet described empirical physical reality so surpassingly well. The basis of this evolution, as Mlodinow notes, is familiar to "any parent who has ever tried to wrap a round ball with flat gift wrap." That is, trying to map the real three-dimensional world by Euclidean methods is bound to fail.
In Euclid's reckoning, the angles of a triangle always add to exactly 180 degrees. But picture a triangle on the Earth's surface with corners at the North Pole, Ecuador and the Congo. Its angles total about 270 degrees. Non-Euclidean concepts become particularly essential in depicting reality as uncovered by modern physics. That is the basic subject of the last two sections of "Euclid's Window." The general theory of relativity describes how mass bends space and time, and thus puts enormous demands on conventional views of geometry. Mlodinow handles this material with special care, including spectacularly cogent descriptions of the key concepts of relativity.
String theory -- the idea that all elementary particles such as electrons or quarks are really just different vibrational modes of invisible strands about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a meter long -- requires not only non-Euclidean geometry, but an additional six or seven dimensions as well. This is the only place where the general reader may find tough going. Not only is the subject complex and intrinsically forbidding, but the amount of space Mlodinow allots to explain it is simply too small. Nonetheless, it is more comprehensible than nine-tenths of what one reads in the popular press. As a result, by the end of this superbly imagined book, even the most math-averse will have experienced Mlodinow's -- and science's -- ultimate goal: "the joy of understanding."
Latest Book:
October, 2011
Prior (solo) Book:
a New York Times bestseller, editor's choice, and notable book of 2008
Amazon.com "one of the Ten Best Science Books of 2008"
Shortlisted for Royal Society Science Book Award
Fortune Magazine review of Drunkard's Walk ("mind-bending")
Barron's review of Drunkard's Walk ("intriguing and well-written")
New York Times review of Drunkard's Walk ("writes in a breezy style... a readable crash course in randomness")
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