Happy New Year, everyone. Now back to work!

Playtime is over, kids. Or maybe it’s just beginning. The roster of authors this year will bring us a lot of great articles. I thought I’d give a sneak preview of some highlights. My apologies to anyone I’ve missed; there’s a lot on the way.

Richard Bronk is a rare combination of classicist and economist. In the midst of an economic meltdown, The Romantic Economist shows how our narrow systems can be expanded to better deal with uncertainty.

Pearl Buck biographer Peter Conn will bring insight into the The American 1930s with his new literary history.

Kevin Dettmar has assembled a stellar team of music writers, rock and roll historians, and literary critics in his Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. Some of these folks will contribute their insights here.

Look for archaeologist Pita Kelekna’s sweeping history of humans and horses, titled, oddly enough, The Horse in Human History.

…and the more I look at the catalogue, I see that there are many books on the horizon that will prove fascinating, and I don’t have time to mention them right now. I’ll do my best to announce them as the time comes.

What a great find!

We’ve had a lot of fun with the new Martin Gardner books around here, but I always find that there is more to discover about him.

David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things featured an entire piece on Gardner, from his math buddies to the sleight-of-hand circles he frequented.

Thanks to Scott, over at Grey Matter for linking it from Encyclopedia Brittanica Online. I’ve embedded it below.

Anyone who has experienced the joys of embedding video may forgive me if playback is buggy.

It’s a Windows Media file, so anyone having trouble viewing can click here for the mp4 file.

+plus Magazine warns, in its recent review of Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube, that his logic puzzles are not to be attempted on a hangover.

I’m returning to Pittsburgh for a week, and will see my family, and my wife’s.

In the new year, look for a slew of new books and some fascinating author commentary. I apologize in advance if comments languish for moderation.

Take care!

-Jonathan

Factions and Finance in China author Victor Shih has an Op-Ed (below) in the Wall Street Journal today. Shih’s research examines the push-and-pull between communist party elites and banking practices. In light of global economic slowdown, things are getting interesting.

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Around the world, the banks we see today are very different from their former selves of just a few months ago. The transformation has been most pronounced in the U.S. and Europe, where a combination of mergers and government involvement have reshaped the financial sector. But change is afoot elsewhere as well, and it isn’t always positive. In particular, Chinese banks are currently under enormous pressure to change their business practices in ways that represent a serious step backward.

A year ago, many of us were ready to be impressed with China’s banking system. To be sure, banks were still mainly state-owned, and the Chinese Communist Party continued to be omnipresent. However, the average bank managers were extremely risk conscious, and regulators from the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) swooped down on bank branches conducting surprise inspections every so often. Bankers were extremely hesitant to make uncollateralized loans to any firm except for the largest corporations.

This was an enormous change from just 10 years ago, when bankers doled out large sums at the slightest urging of the local governments and when banks were considered the “second treasury” by central policy makers. At that time, the nonperforming loan ratio was estimated to be nearly half of all loans outstanding. By January 2008, the official NPL ratio was less than 6%. This transformation wasn’t cheap or easy — it required hundreds of billions of dollars from the government to buy bad loans off bank balance sheets and recapitalize the institutions, and also the participation of Western “strategic partners” brought in to lend their expertise in best practices.

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Shahn Majid

This will be my last regular post for a while because of Christmas and teaching three courses next term at my University. These past eleven posts, see here and here, have been my personal take on many of the topics covered in On Space and Time and its now time in this twelfth post to address the larger picture of the volume itself.

In fact the volume is about opening a genuine public debate on the true nature of space and time, starting with a public panel discussion on this topic in 2006 in Cambridge, England. Where this came from was my increasing unease about the portrayal of fundamental physics — quantum gravity in particular — as already solved by string theory when, in fact, theoretical physics is in need of fresh profound ideas and contact with experiment, when these are the most exciting and turbulent of times.

I also insist in the preface to On Space and Time that this debate needs to involve not only scientists but the wider public. The reason is that scientists’ ideas have to come from somewhere, from sitting around in cafes, from contemplation of art. We don’t know where the key revolutionary idea is going to come from. Put another way, to progress, scientists need now to see what Science is, which means they have to step outside it and see it in part as a non-scientist.

In particular, and this being Christmastime, I want you to ask yourself what does someone singing a Christmas carol have to say about quantum gravity? What does that person have in common with a theoretical physicist? What I think they have in common is contemplation of the infinite. I mean a sense of something bigger than ourselves. As a confirmed atheist I won’t call it God, but its a sense of awe at the Universe and a wonder about our place in it. My approach as a theoretical physicist is to use mathematics and the scientific method to explore the issue, while a carol singer is surely using other means to ‘connect’.

In fact it is only since the 17th century Enlightenment that Science somehow replaced religion as the font of physical truth. But the Scientific Method pioneered by Hooke and others replaced religious dogma, good, yet itself is based on certain assumptions and ways of doing things, of dividing knowledge into ‘theory’ and ‘experiment’, in other words some other dogma.

As a scientist I am 1000% committed to the Scientific Method but I see it as a particular way of exploring reality. One that we might now need to understand better by seeing it from the outside.

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