Black Hole

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The teenage protagonists of this book live in a small town in the American northwest of the mid-1970s (you can date it only by a fleeting reference to Bowie's new album Diamond Dogs). Here, the usual confusion of peer groups, social cliques and sexual frustration is exacerbated and exemplified by ‘The Bug’, a sexually-transmitted condition that causes bodily mutations, some of them extreme – forcing their sufferers to live feral in the woods – and some more benign, allowing kids to ‘pass’ as normal. Is this really the case? I don’t know for sure. I think it might well be. The alternatives seem less plausible to me. But I could be wrong. Trying to figure it out, still, is such a joy.

NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center: A Brief History of High-Energy Astronomy I like that the story is told using shifting viewpoints and told in small morsels. Keith was the character I latched onto, although Chris and Rob had their moments. There's no happy ending, though. Nobody magically comes up with a cure for the sex plague. People just deal with it as best they can.This is the ultimate vindication of research for research’s sake: two of the biggest problems in science and technology have turned out to be intimately related. The challenge of building a quantum computer is very similar to the challenge of writing down the correct theory of quantum gravity. This is one reason why it is vital that we continue to support the most esoteric scientific endeavours. Nobody could have predicted such a link. Hawking lets us into his thoughts a bit, like a tiny window, not too much. But he talks about this special connection he feels with Sir Isaac Newton. Also, he seems to see himself standing on the shoulders of Albert Einstein and building off of the legacy that Einstein’s life work left behind.

Galison’s film also follows a separate group of theoretical physicists – Sasha Haco, Malcolm Perry, Andrew Strominger and Hawking – working on a problem known as “the information paradox”. Strominger describes how he thinks about the paradox 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when he’s brushing his teeth and when he’s dreaming.

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I was a teenager from 1974 - 1981. I wore ugly clothes and listened to some great music. And yes, I still have my mood ring. Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.) Right. So, terrifying, then. Especially when Galison adds with cosmic understatement: “In the long term that’s not a good survival event.” I started and stopped this book several times when it first arrive on my doorstep over a week ago — Oh my GOD... it’s soooo much over the top in experience- of GRAPHIC- visually AND in the storytelling than I was comfortable with.

The writing is superb. Charles Burns clearly remembers what it's like to be a lovelorn, sex-crazed teenager. The angst, drug-addled tales are all too familiar if you toss out the ever-present threat of the sex plague. Such a textual reading may provide quite insightful for understanding Nabin Chandra Sen as well as nationalists who also reproduced this rhetoric, but does it apply to Muslim intellectuals of the same time period? Or, for that matter, to intellectuals grappling with these ideas in other regions of India? Since Muslims were the majority of Bengali speaking people at this time, readers have no way of assessing the manner in which these constructions actually represented anything beyond the Hindu intelligentsia. Or if there were discursive and intellectual encounters that transcended the boundaries that Nabin Chandra Sen, Akshaykumar Maitreya, and Girishchandra Ghosh represented. this is wonderful as an introduction to hawking's work, or as a reminder for people who read a brief history of time a while ago and would like to be reminded of the basic concepts. wouldn't recommend it for students of physics (just go straight for brief history) but excellent for the layperson. Second, the question of possible imperial ambitions held by the nationalist political leadership of the new Indian state needs more careful analysis than was possible within the space of my book. I would suggest that the key lies in my distinction between empire as technique and empire as ideology. In ideological terms, the Indian political leadership was, for obvious historical reasons, overtly, loudly and, one need not doubt, sincerely anti-imperial. In terms of its technical uses of power, however, as I have suggested on p. 196, it used many of the same imperial techniques used by the British, such as, for instance, in the integration of the princely states into India, including the use of armed force in Hyderabad and Kashmir. There are many instances where one will find undisturbed continuities in the technologies of power employed by the erstwhile imperial rulers and the present state leadership in India.All of this disregards entirely that I am already sort of tied up with a pseudo-career in a different scientific discipline and do not relish the thought of attending university again. Nor am I particularly skilled at focussing on multiple things, fond of starting over, or withholding anything of value from the theoretical physicists that they haven't already got covered. I had great difficulty telling the different characters apart. Too many looked alike, with long light hair. Individual characteristics were few and maybe this was intentional. Many of the characters I was only able to recognize once their particular deformity was revealed or focused upon but this did pose a problem with two of the main characters, who never really showed outward signs.