January 11, 2016

Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality --- by: Edward Frenkel (2013)

This is the last of three books that I'd asked my attorney, and friend, Joe, to order for me from amazon recently because I've been getting excessively bored with the T.V. in my cell lately and wanted something intellectually stimulating to read. I consider reading books like this --- that challenge me mentally --- as good entertainment. And while I was indeed entertained, as this book provides a look at what you might call the "intimate side of mathematics", I was also frustrated throughout most of it, and on occassion even outrightly insulted for my lack of ability to grasp what Frenkel was talking about as he discusses his advanced research and theories in the relationship between various "continents of science" (as Frenkel calls them) such as theoretical math and quantum physics. At one point he sums up the basic principles of differential equations (i.e. Calculus) in just a few paragraphs, as if this should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it.

But, I was entertained nonetheless by his roundabout expression of math as something that not only exists in its own right as a kind of non-material reality of pure relationships, but that it is in itself infinitely more complex and "alive" than what we commonly experience here in the material and even intellectual worlds we call reality. I suspect Frenkel is alluding to none other than my own realizations that consciousness itself is somehow the product of infinite probability, which I have attempted to write about elsewhere in this blog.

Magic and Mystery in Tibet - by: Alexandra David-Neel (1932, 2014)

This is one of those rare books that exposes another culture in a way that really opens it up an lets the reader glimpse for themselves what...