Some Remarks
Review of a collection of essays by Neal Stephenson
A little bit of everything.
I enjoyed most the essays related to his trilogy of historical novels set in the time of Newton.
“Metaphysics in the Royal Society 1715–2010” and “The Salon Interview”.
I liked least the long and dated (1994) account about the technology of trans-oceanic communications cables, “In the Kingdom of Mao Bell”.
A sampling of memorable passages:
“Matter, assumed by most to be the primary stuff of the universe, extended in space and time,is, in fact, unreal.” p. 43
“… space and time, cause and effect, are not ultimate realities, but rather constructs of mental activity.” p. 46
“… Leibniz’s most fundamental assumption, namely tht the universe makes sense and that the human has the power to make sense of it and that, consequently, pure metaphysics is no waste of time, remains perhaps the central question of all science.” pp. 56–57
“Leibniz actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic.” p. 240
“if you look at cellular automata, for example: Sure, each automaton can be explained as a unit, but that’s not what’s interesting. What’s interesting is the really complicated emergent behaviors that you can get out of a whole bunch of these things acting at one.” p. 249
