A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge

A loan from .

This was a really good read for sci-fi fans. There’s lots of fun ideas,
and it’s pretty well written.

Some concepts:

-Lupine creatures that are an entity made up of 4-8 wolf-like things.
Independantly, they’re scarce smarter than a standard wolf, but when close
enough, their minds work together (communicating through high-frequency
sound) to form a single personality.

-The Zones of Thought. The milky way is divided into several zones, from
the Unthinking Depths up to the Transcend. The closer to the galactic
core you get, the poorer technology works. So, faster than light travel
is possible at the level called the Beyond, but not in the Slowness (where
Earth is supposed to be). In the High Beyond and above that (the
Transcend) races can “evolve” into Powers… god-like things, but the
god-like things can’t exist in slower zones.

All good fun.

What I came to realize halfway through was that I had read a couple Vernor
Vinge novels back in high school: Across Realtime and Marooned
in Realtime. Both of which I had loved, and recently had tried to
locate again (I couldn’t remember the title or author). But seeing the
titles in the Other Books By page brought it all back.

The Realtime novels play with a concept called “Bobbles”, which are
basically frozen-time spheres. You can create a Bobble around yourself,
and basically time stops for you until the Bobble dissolves. To people
outside the Bobble, it just looks like an impenetrable, indestructable
mirrored sphere.

So, if you want to travel through time (forwards, at least), you Bobble
yourself for however many years, and whammo, you’re in the Future.

Also good fun.

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman

I finished this a while back, but for some reason never logged it. Better
late than never.

This is a transcription (with editing) of a 4-lecture series Mr. Feynman
did in Australia (I think) for the layman.

It’s really pretty accessible, absolutely fascinating and fairly witty.

The biggest thing that has my head spinning is the concept of
anti-matter being backwards-in-time traveling matter. At least, that’s
what the Feynman diagrams indicate; I’ve been searching around the web to
see if that’s actually what everyone believes these days and I haven’t
figured that out, yet.

But it’s still pretty cool.

Also, all along I was still thinking this wave/particle duality thing
still meant something, but turns out it’s definitely particles. No one
understands why, but it’s definitely particles. So there’s that.

Also, I have a better understanding of what holds atoms together, and what
electrical current is at the fundamental level. Though, I’d be loath to
have to explain it myself.