Sunday, September 21, 2003
Neal Stephenson's back
Neal Stephenson, the authot of the spell-binding "Snowcrash" and "Cryptonomicon" is back with a new book -- Quicksilver, the first volume of the Baroque Cycle. If the New York Times review is any indication, it promises to be a phenomenal read, as good as, or even better than the previous two.
The cards are stacked precariously in a cabin in Newtowne, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1713 where a philosopher, Daniel Waterhouse, is trying to organize all of human knowledge. Each card is also inscribed with a number. And just as each number is a unique product of prime numbers, so, in this system, is each concept a unique product of elemental concepts. For every number there's a concept, for every concept a number.
Waterhouse's project is imagined by Neal Stephenson in his gargantuan 927-page historical novel, "Quicksilver," to be published next week. But the project also derives from one imagined by the 17th-century philosopher Leibniz and that still lives on in varied incarnations. For if all the world's knowledge could be encoded in number, then the acts of creation and invention would just be forms of calculation. And the world would reveal itself as a calculating machine, an information processor.
The book -- due out tomorrow -- is already at No:9 on the Amazon bestseller list. Surprise, surprise.
The cards are stacked precariously in a cabin in Newtowne, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1713 where a philosopher, Daniel Waterhouse, is trying to organize all of human knowledge. Each card is also inscribed with a number. And just as each number is a unique product of prime numbers, so, in this system, is each concept a unique product of elemental concepts. For every number there's a concept, for every concept a number.
Waterhouse's project is imagined by Neal Stephenson in his gargantuan 927-page historical novel, "Quicksilver," to be published next week. But the project also derives from one imagined by the 17th-century philosopher Leibniz and that still lives on in varied incarnations. For if all the world's knowledge could be encoded in number, then the acts of creation and invention would just be forms of calculation. And the world would reveal itself as a calculating machine, an information processor.
The book -- due out tomorrow -- is already at No:9 on the Amazon bestseller list. Surprise, surprise.
