What book are you reading now?

I decided that I needed a new book to read and managed to find one on my bookshelf that I’d only half read so thought I’d finish it off: Tower, An epic History of the Tower of London by Nigel Jones. I just wondered what everyone else is reading at the moment? What does everyone else like to read?

Parents
  • Currently in various stages of progress:

    * The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric by Sister Miriam Joseph.

    * Understanding Numbers in Elementary School Mathematics by Hung-Hsi Wu.

    * Teaching Students How To Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate in Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills and Motivation by  Saundra Yancy McGuire, Stephanie McGuire.

    * Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Stephen Mumford.

    * The course texts for the OU course I'm registered on that starts properly at the beginning of February.

  • That all sounds very philosophical. I hope that you enjoy reading them and doing your course. I need to get back into studying again at some point, maybe once the youngest starts school. What course are you going to be studying?

Reply
  • That all sounds very philosophical. I hope that you enjoy reading them and doing your course. I need to get back into studying again at some point, maybe once the youngest starts school. What course are you going to be studying?

Children
  • What do you think of Roger Penrose's approach that consciousness and, therefore, ideas originate from the quantum world via microtubules? This would link in with Gödel's assertion that one can never prove a system of logic (including maths) from within the rules of the system, even though they are true insofar as they work, but that one has to step outside of the rules of the system to see that a proof is possible? Now where would that come from? Not from a computability model, surely? In other words, a system of rules can never prove itself without an attending consciousness?

  • It's quite small, so handy for your situation, plus it's an interesting book.  I have the Cambridge University Press version 978-0-521-42706-7 which has quite an extensive forward by C. P. Snow.

  • Thank you for the book tip

  • I'm interested in Physics to a degree, but I don't really have the urge/time to get massively current on it, but I like to keep a vague eye on the goings-on.

    There's a bit in:

    A Mathematican's Apology by G. H. Hardy:

    where he talks about the fact that mathematical theorems are however known to be true and for all time.

  • Thank you for explaining further. I think it’s the case with all science from physics through to philosophy. We can have good evidence in support of a model/theory but not proof per se and we can also see that the current model/theory is perhaps not the best if you start getting results that you wouldn’t get if it were ‘correct’. I did a bit of physics several years ago as part of a science module with the Open university. Is Physics an interest of yours then? 

  • I don't know much about psychology, so I shouldn't say anything about that.  Also if you put aside social sciences and things like economics for the moment as well.  But if you think about a "hard" science, like Physics then you're 100% correct - there's very little, if anything, that we know for sure.  But we have some mathematical models which have incredibly good predictive capabilities for events in "real life".  Based on accumulated evidence, they look like good models, or at least we don't yet have anything better.

    In physics however, we actually know that either there is something wrong with our current best models - either there's been problems with our experimental measurements or interpretation thereof, or a combination of both.  That was something that they were hoping to be able to make progress on at the large hadron collider (LHC) at CERN but the latest word on the street is that they don't seem to be getting the results they were hoping for in terms of new physics, they just seem to getting additional confirmation for the "Standard Model" of particle physics and they were hoping that would start to break down.

    Or think of it this way, the Earth has orbited the Sun for God knows how long, and as far as we are aware it's going to carry on doing that.  But we don't know that there isn't some physical effect that we've not yet come across that could send it hurtling out of the solar system tomorrow.  We don't think that's likely to happen, but we can't say for sure it never will.

  • Glad that you finished the book and thank you for explaining it. Metaphysics sounds like it has much in common with psychology, or pretty much any science in as much as firstly, there are lots of different ‘camps’, the disciplines within a discipline that you only discover once you start studying the subject and secondly, that there are no agreed answers. In Science, nothing can ever be proved, a certain answer/theory may be supported/suggested/hypothesised but never proved. We could literally read every book in the world on a given scientific question and we still wouldn’t know the blooming answer, just what it probably is or what it might be. Any thoughts on this?

  • Replaced that one with "Logic - A very short introduction."

  • Finished the metaphysics book.  Quite interesting - philosophy not been too much my thing in the past.  Rather than trying to explain what metaphysics is, he has a question a chapter and then looks at what you can say about that question from a metaphysical perspective.  Seems like there are lots of different "camps" in metaphysics!  But just because there are no agreed answers doesn't mean the questions aren't worth asking.

  • I'm more inclined to some of the more pure stuff, but I'm pondering how much applied I should do.  Luckily at this point it's not too much of an issue since level 1 and level 2 you don't really get much choice.  So that's probably a question for about 4 years away!

    I think I'm so far most looking forward to the calculus/analysis parts.

  • A Mathematics degree sounds very interesting! I like bits of maths, statistics and the maths/physics crossover of using algebra to calculate distances between stars etc. Are there any bits that you prefer over others? Good luck with the degree!

  • The Trivium book is very interesting but quite a hard read for me - a lot of it not my area.  But I'm learning interesting things from it so it's good.  The metaphysics book was because the trivium books so far has talked a lot about metaphysics, which I didn't really know anything about so I thought it would be helpful to get a bit more of an idea of what it involved.

    I'm enrolled on a BSc. Mathematics degree, this course is the first level 1 course "Discovering Mathematics".  It's quite basic but I'm aware I have quite a few gaps in my knowledge so I thought I'd use this to find out what I didn't know and it should be a reasonably stress-less way back into studying.