Books
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The Endless Passion for Books
‘I am haunted by an inexhaustible passion that up to now I have not managed or wanted to quench. I feel that I have never enough books. Books delight one in depth, run through our veins, advise us and bind us in a kind of active and keen familiarity; and an individual book does not…
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The Enchantment of a Great Book
‘It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in paradise again.‘― Ralph Waldo Emerson
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The Great Beyond: Higher dimensions, parallel universes and the extraordinary search for a theory of everything, Paul Halpern (ISBN 9780471741497, Trade Paper Press)
I got a tip about this book from somewhere I cannot remember. But it was a lucky tip. The book is basically a short history of what has lead us to string theory. It starts of with the mathematical extension of Euclidian geometry to more dimensions by Riemann and Gauss. Then the link is made…
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The lap of eternity
‘I no sooner come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance, and Melancholy herself, and in the very lap of eternity, amongst so many divine souls, I take my seat, with so lofty a spirit and…
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The Magic of Old Libraries
‘What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labors to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon…
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The marvellous existence of bookstores
‘The marvel is, indeed, that the bookseller ever survives at all. It is as if a haberdasher, in addition to meeting all the hazards of the current fashion, had to keep in stock a specimen of every kind of shirt, collar, sock, necktie and undershirt in favour since 1750‘― H. L. Mencken
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Book Review : De ontdekkers van de hemel, David Baneke (ISBN 9789035136885, Prometheus)
Bought this book after reading about it in the magazine of the Nederlandse Natuurkunde Vereniging. It is written by a Dutch historian specialised in the history of science. The title of the book refers to the famous book of Harry Mulish, de ontdekking van de hemel. It describes astronomy in The Netherlands in the nineteenth…
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In search of Schrodinger’s cat, John Gribbin (ISBN 978-0-552-12555-0, Transworld Books)
I had this book lying around for a long time (it first came out in 1984 but I read the edition from 2012) and finally decided to give it a go. Mainly because of John Gribbin’s and the book having a bit of a reputation as a classic. I have already read many popular books…
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