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A review by bab
The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe by Stephon Alexander
1.0
Serious contender to "WORST BOOK I'VE EVER READ" award.
A few things I've learnt from it, though:
– don't trust the praise section in a book, even if there's praise from Brian Eno himself
– check out a few goodreads comments before you buy a book
– if a published piece of allegedly scientific work bears the words "THE SECRET [...]" in capital letters on the cover: distrust/disregard/kill it with fire
And now for some brief comments:
– This is not a science book, this is a biography. And a lousy one at that. All that the writer cares about is telling us how very clever and talented he is and how very cool all of his top-of-the-line mentors/friends are. The science and the music are just excuses to blabber about himself.
– Also, it's not a book but a huge ongoing lie. In the introduction the writer tells us that analogies, symmetry, harmony, resonance, and improvisation are the key factors to build this whole picture of the universe, from quantum up to pangalactic dimensions. Short of a complete quantum+relativity grand unification theory, music will be the key to our understanding, via intuition, of the deep workings of the universe at all scales, through this "secret link" he will show us.
Well... Why write an introduction and say you'll be doing something if then you ain't gonna be doing it at all? Just to sell some books, I'm guessing. The only "secret link" we're told about is that resonance rules the physical world at all scales – impressive, what a surprise, nobody ever figured that out before... And then another game-changing "secret": that first and foremost learning the rules, then breaking loose and forgetting about them a little bit and improvising, are the keys to finding new ideas that might lead to new discoveries – wow, such a brand new insight again, thank you, Professor, you're truly killing it today.
What about telling the reader something about the structure of music and jazz instead, other than the basic, elementary, trite to the bore 12-bar blues structure? What about at least TRYING to explain why you think the Coltrane tempered scale notes' mandala is related to subatomic particles? What about at least TRYING to do any of the things you tell the reader you'll be doing?
This wasn't a book but a fraud.
– Then, specifically about the science. I should say that, usually, books about cosmology or quantum physics for the layman tend to spend some time doing a basic overview of the history of math/physics so that the least informed reader will know what we're talking about. They'll take you through ancient Greece, then Galileo, then Newton, the usual stops, and then they'll get to Einstein/Planck/Schrödinger et al. and fly over and do a terrible job at barely explaining those "new" physics. The issue or the excuse tends to be that relativity and quantum stuff are very difficult, even counter-intuitive at times, they entail a lot of hard math, and formulae are scary.
In this case, however, it's even worse: the writer manages to explain even basic concepts such as F=ma in such a way that they get distorted and sound confusing even for an engineer such as myself. Awesome job. I never thought it could be possible.
And then he gabbles and babbles about quantum relativistic stuff just dropping down concepts without linking them properly, sometimes without linking them at all. It's poor and mystic at best, generally dismal.
– Specifically about linking concepts, and "THE SECRET LINK" – let me stress it just once again – no such links whatsoever in the whole damn book.
– Personal note: never buy anything ever again from this swindling publisher.
– Also quite pissed off today by goodreads' rating system. There's no way to rate a book without giving it at least one star. I wish I could give this one an absolute zero, but I'm forced to rate it infinitely much higher and with a positive net contribution to its final mean rating. This is, in a different sense, truly mean.
– Finally, for this is already growing too long: dear Brian Eno, why? Why did you do this to us?
We trusted you. You're a respected musician and a respected intellectual, a master of many skills. Why did you willingly lead us into this shithole? How much was your friend Stephon going to pay you? Did you really need the money that bad? We could have helped! If you only had told us! There was no need for this!
Now it seems we can't trust you either anymore :(
So, recap in short:
if I may borrow the words from Bill Hicks' classic capsule review,
PIECE OF SHIT.
A few things I've learnt from it, though:
– don't trust the praise section in a book, even if there's praise from Brian Eno himself
– check out a few goodreads comments before you buy a book
– if a published piece of allegedly scientific work bears the words "THE SECRET [...]" in capital letters on the cover: distrust/disregard/kill it with fire
And now for some brief comments:
– This is not a science book, this is a biography. And a lousy one at that. All that the writer cares about is telling us how very clever and talented he is and how very cool all of his top-of-the-line mentors/friends are. The science and the music are just excuses to blabber about himself.
– Also, it's not a book but a huge ongoing lie. In the introduction the writer tells us that analogies, symmetry, harmony, resonance, and improvisation are the key factors to build this whole picture of the universe, from quantum up to pangalactic dimensions. Short of a complete quantum+relativity grand unification theory, music will be the key to our understanding, via intuition, of the deep workings of the universe at all scales, through this "secret link" he will show us.
Well... Why write an introduction and say you'll be doing something if then you ain't gonna be doing it at all? Just to sell some books, I'm guessing. The only "secret link" we're told about is that resonance rules the physical world at all scales – impressive, what a surprise, nobody ever figured that out before... And then another game-changing "secret": that first and foremost learning the rules, then breaking loose and forgetting about them a little bit and improvising, are the keys to finding new ideas that might lead to new discoveries – wow, such a brand new insight again, thank you, Professor, you're truly killing it today.
What about telling the reader something about the structure of music and jazz instead, other than the basic, elementary, trite to the bore 12-bar blues structure? What about at least TRYING to explain why you think the Coltrane tempered scale notes' mandala is related to subatomic particles? What about at least TRYING to do any of the things you tell the reader you'll be doing?
This wasn't a book but a fraud.
– Then, specifically about the science. I should say that, usually, books about cosmology or quantum physics for the layman tend to spend some time doing a basic overview of the history of math/physics so that the least informed reader will know what we're talking about. They'll take you through ancient Greece, then Galileo, then Newton, the usual stops, and then they'll get to Einstein/Planck/Schrödinger et al. and fly over and do a terrible job at barely explaining those "new" physics. The issue or the excuse tends to be that relativity and quantum stuff are very difficult, even counter-intuitive at times, they entail a lot of hard math, and formulae are scary.
In this case, however, it's even worse: the writer manages to explain even basic concepts such as F=ma in such a way that they get distorted and sound confusing even for an engineer such as myself. Awesome job. I never thought it could be possible.
And then he gabbles and babbles about quantum relativistic stuff just dropping down concepts without linking them properly, sometimes without linking them at all. It's poor and mystic at best, generally dismal.
– Specifically about linking concepts, and "THE SECRET LINK" – let me stress it just once again – no such links whatsoever in the whole damn book.
– Personal note: never buy anything ever again from this swindling publisher.
– Also quite pissed off today by goodreads' rating system. There's no way to rate a book without giving it at least one star. I wish I could give this one an absolute zero, but I'm forced to rate it infinitely much higher and with a positive net contribution to its final mean rating. This is, in a different sense, truly mean.
– Finally, for this is already growing too long: dear Brian Eno, why? Why did you do this to us?
We trusted you. You're a respected musician and a respected intellectual, a master of many skills. Why did you willingly lead us into this shithole? How much was your friend Stephon going to pay you? Did you really need the money that bad? We could have helped! If you only had told us! There was no need for this!
Now it seems we can't trust you either anymore :(
So, recap in short:
if I may borrow the words from Bill Hicks' classic capsule review,
PIECE OF SHIT.