Some Little Night Musings: 137 HyC Adventures
Book Details
Author(s)Hyatt Carter
PublisherAuthorHouse
ISBN / ASIN1452091366
ISBN-139781452091365
AvailabilityUsually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank7,108,253
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
This book extends the theme of Hyatt Carter's previous book, Thinking Is the Best Way to Travel, with further explorations in the adventures of ideas.
The book has many playful elements, beginning with the title, which plays on one of Mozart's most famous compositions, and the subtitle, HyC Adventures, a play on Carter's name that runs throughout the book.
The book is organized in Four Parts with a total of 137 Musings. Why 137? Because many physicists have been so enchanted and perplexed by the number 137, one of the fundamental constants in physics, that it has been called a magic number.
The Musings are of varying lengths, but most are intentionally short. As Carter says in the Introduction, "This is a collection of essays in miniature, tidbits, vignettes, nocturnes, ludibundities, and other late-night musings, musical or otherwise." For what he calls the aesthetics of variety, he also provides some longer pieces, including two substantial essays on Zen Buddhism.
These Musings range over a wide variety of topics, as a sampling of titles from each of the Four Parts will show:
Part One: Mozartian Moments, Seeing Through the I's of Jesus, Meta-Fours, Does God Have a Future?, Bacteria as Genetic Engineers, The Einstein of Religious Thought, The Psychoanalysis of Knowledge.
Part Two: Flowers of Emptiness, The Human-Insect Connection, Give Us This Day Our Daily Rhythms, Hugh Kenner Shows Me, Yes--That Mr. Spock, Gnostalgia, A Golden Trinity of Values.
Part Three: Moondrops in Dewlight, Are You a MAD Scientist?, Super-Slow Reading, Learning How to See, Playing Around with Chinese, Prometheo: The First Mystic, A Quartet of Quantum Numbers.
Part Four: It's Not Crazy Enough, My Stargate Connection, Pauli's Conversation with God, Picasso and the Stealth Bomber, The Dawn of Language, An Odyssey in Space and Time, The Magic Number 34.
Part of the magic of "34" is that this was the number on Carter's jersey when he played high-school football, and this is one of the reasons why there are exactly 34 Musings in each of the Four Parts of the book.
To bring the total to 137, Carter adds one Musing on Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate physicist who found magic and mystery in the number.
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