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| The Never-ending Days of Being Dead | 
 enlarge | Author: Marcus Chown
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: £9.99
Buy New: £2.82
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 5048
Media: Paperback
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0571220568
EAN: 9780571220564
ASIN: 0571220568
Publication Date: September 20, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 Inconvenient for the absolute layman, useless to the others October 13, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I purchased this book some time ago, but didn't read it until yesterday.
1) IMhO, the book is an overwarmed collection of essays written at different times, roughly stitched together and rushed to printing and publishing. The seams show.
2) Now, this Chown should know what he's writing about. If he really is a former astronomer (but of what kind?), and the New Scientist's
"cosmological consultant", he must -or should I say 'should'?- be competent. He cites a couple of papers that, if he was able to read and understand, as I think he did, put him in the class of lesser scientists, or at the very least, serious amateurs.
3) This said, the book doesn't show it. I repeat a question I sometimes ask myself: for whom is the book written? For the layman genuinely interested in science? Or for people interested in showing off with friends (but who, outside a very restricted community, talks seriously about these matters?) their 'knowledge' about some 'sexy' topics?
To the former, avoid like the plague (strange how customs change: were I to have written "HIV" instead of "plague" I'm sure I'd have been labeled an insensitive Neanderthal). To the latter: pick up the concepts you're interested in from better books, of which, with the cut and paste (rendered now so ridiculously easy by the current IT) epidemic raging in our midst, there must be hundreds. Any 'popular' book by Thorne, Penrose, Whittaker, Ghirardi, Chaitin, Feynmann, Gell-Mann, Davies (except the last, "Goldilocks"), Gribbin, Rees, Kauffmann, Pagels, Rees, Tipler, Lindley, Greene, Kaku, Deutsch, Smolin, Prigogine, Guth, Linde, Gross, even Susskind, etc. etc. etc.) will give you a better, sounder idea of the topics this one rushes throug so breezily and incorrectly (not by ignorance but by distorted and contradictory dumbing down to a level where brane attraction through the fifth dimension -of a Calaby-Yau manifold, presumably?- is as easy and familiar as fish 'n chips). Of course, every book treats some themes in preference to others, so youll' nowhere find a balance similar to the one chosen by Chown; to achieve that, you'd have to read five or six of the above-mentioned authors. But you'd have a much sounder knowledge of topics that the book mangles (for example, the explanation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle in page 178 of the PB edition: "The HUP actually states that for any microscopic event, there is a minimum value of particular quantity - the duration of the event multiplied by the energy of the event. An oscillation has a characteristic time associated with it -the duration of a single oscillation- so the HUP dictates it must also have a certain minimum energy associated with it" [everything sic, except for the acronims]. If I hadn't known what decoherence is and supposedly manages to accomplish I wouldn't have understood a word of Chown's explanation his in Chapter 4 "Keeping it Real". The strange thing is, Chown in the Glossary at the end of the book (page 273) gives a clearer and far more conventional definition of the HUP. That reinforces my impression that the book is acollective, badly harmonized effort.
4) Closely linked to the preceding point is the question of the book's quality, which I frankly found wanting.
Besides careless writing (or editing; as one of many examples consider a possible message left by the Creator in the CMB, page 210 on the PBE: "This is how up I built the Universe"), Chown apparently can't bring himself to think coherently. For example he repeatedly presents the Big Bang as the moment everything started, and was concentrated in a singularity, once he even cautions us against likening it to an explosion that happened in space and time; at other times he states that it happened all at once in all of (I suppose infinite) space; most of the time he refers to it as caused by inflation's leftover energy that had nowhere to go except to power the creation of mass-energy and so cause the BB. Since for all we wnow almost anything might be true, one couldn't fault him for presenting ONE idea as true, but this is nowhere done: he writes as if he weren't even aware of his inconsistent statements. (Well, perhaps the book WAS after all put together by helpers and he hurriedly stitched the parts together: have you noticed how often he publishes - and presumably this mustn't be his main occupation-? And the huge number of footnotes and sentences of the type "as we already saw in Chapter ... ", or "for a more thorough treatment refert to Chapter ... ")?.
He also jumps from one argument to another without rhyme or reason: rather in the middle of the book, he defines several times for the presumably least-lower-bound-average reader what are frecuency, amplitude, etc. Yet before that, in pages 57 ff., he presents the brane collision scenario, in a chapter where he "discusses" incredibly advanced conceps (without saying that some of them are more akin to hard science fiction than to science), and even employs exponential notation!
He fails even to mention how physicists categorize leptons, gluons, hadrons, bosons, etc., which he mentions freely but without once explaining how they fit into the general picture, and what the terms mean.
5) The only, for me, good point of the book: his discussion on the origin of mass, in a language more sober and reflective than usual for him, and his thinly veiled but, one feels, rather heartfelt opposition to the Higgs mechanism (let's hope that CERN'S LHC doesn't find the boson too soon!).
So, abstain if you're a complete layman.
In general, avoid unless you're the type that can't resist the chance of finding about a new glamorous field that you hadn't heard about and interests you. In that case, skim through cursorily in one/two days maximum and buy and read toughtfully the bibliography, or surf the articles.
As for me, this is the last (it was the first) book I buy from this author.
 Great September 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Very well written with some brillant ideas. Excellant read it you like this sort of stuff!
 Never ending chapters of speculation August 26, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
If you enjoy reading the more far-fetched New Scientist cosmology articles then I am sure you will find this book entertaining. However, if you like your science at all Popperian you will probably, like me, find it increasingly irritating as you progress. There is very little criticism of the ideas presented in the book, some of which are at best controversial and at worst probably nonsense. Furthermore it would also be very easy to go away with a distorted view about the relative importance of various thinkers; for example, Chaitin is virtually put on a par with Godel and Wolfram with Turing. Having said that there was something addictive about this book and I suspect I'll end up buying more of Chown's work.
 So what? June 27, 2008
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
Is the complexity of the universe the result of a four line computer program?
Will we be resurrected within a computer simulation contrived by an advanced civilisation utilising the energy made available to them as the universe approaches it's ultimate demise?
Are we already living within such a simulation?
Has a message been left for us by the creator in the background radiation of the universe?
These and other completely unverifiable musings are addressed in this book and that, for me, is one of the problems with it - all of the ideas are so out there that after a while I found myself thinking "Here's another off the wall idea that can't be verified one way or another, so what?".
Having said that, it's well written and the author is very capable when it comes to explaining some pretty complex ideas.
If you want to keep up too speed with the current ideas doing the rounds in cosmology then this book will probably interest you. If, on the other hand, you're one of these people who think cosmologists have far too much time on their hands and should get out more, then this book will probably confirm those suspicions!
Thanks for inspiring me again June 10, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am a part-time physics student and last week finished doing my exams. So, you can imagine, I was sick to death of physics. But a friend urged me to read this book and, against my better judgment, I did. And I'm so glad I did. I couldn't put it down. It's all the fun stuff that wasn't in my course. It's reminded me of why I did physics in the first place. Thanks Mr. Chown for inspiring me again!
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