March 19, 2004
The Night is Large: Collected Essays, 1938-1995 by Martin Gardner
Martin Gardner, of course, is famous for his mathematical recreation columns in Scientific American. He is also famous for the Annotated Alice books.
This is a collection of 47 essays spanning almost 70 years. The essays have some recurring themes which is either good or bad depending on whether you agree with Gardner's treatment of these themes.
For instance, he defends Platonic mathematical realism in many of his essays ("Mathematics and the Folkways", "How not to talk about Mathematics", "Computers near the Threshold ?", among others), defending it from the view that mathematics or any science as a purely solipsist human construct without any reality outside human brains. It is hard not to sympathize with this view for any person remotely connected with scientific activity. However, the controversy was still alive and well in the late 1990s, see The Sokal Hoax for more on this debate. But in none of his essays that deal with this issue does Gardner address any of the arguments that are put forth by other kinds of mathematicians like intuitionists or formalists. In fact, in defending the Lucas-Penrose arguments he also defends a narrow Platonist view that a mathematician can see, without proof, that certain statements of mathematics are true, which can then be used to see that certain artifacts like thinking machines are impossible. For more on this issue from another point of view read the essay by Edward Nelson called "Mathematics and the Mind" (available from Edward Nelson's web page).
Another common theme is the debunking of the fringe pseudosciences or other untenable positions. Since none of these were particularly controversial, these essays were not so interesting to me. Many of arguments used I had seen before. However, there were some essays in this theme which were novel and which I enjoyed, for instance, "The Laffer Curve" which talks about various half-truths that lie behind supply-side economics and the role of tax-cuts to rejuvenate the economy, which is a topic that seems to be one of the central dividing lines between left and right in politics.
In "WAP, SAP, PAP and FAP" Gardner takes on the proponents of the anthropic principle, and also "The Curious Mind of Allan Bloom" and "The Strange Case of Robert Maynard Hutchins" where the motivations behind a couple of tirades against the neglect of the `Great Books' of the western world in modern universities are explored with great dispatch.
Other enjoyable essays about literature and language were "The Irrelevance of Conan Doyle", "Lewis Carroll and his Alice books" , "H.G. Wells in Russia", "Coleridge and The Ancient Mariner", "Puzzles in Ulysses" (about James Joyce's penchant for wordplay) and "The Royal Historian of Oz" (Gardner wrote one of the first biographical essays about L. Frank Baum). These essays were very informative, although Gardner lacks Borges' flair for talking about literature. Also it is interesting that Gardner treats Lewis Carroll with the same cultural relativism that he argues against elsewhere (in "Beyond Cultural Relativism").
One common theme which I found particularly annoying was Gardner's belief which he is not shy to state as a fact, that there are some mysteries such as the nature of time ("Can Time Stop? The Past Change?"), or the nature of consciousness and `free will' ("The Mystery of Free Will", and "Computers near the Threshold?") which according to Gardner can never be discovered by puny human brains. Note that Gardner supports Penrose, even though what Penrose is saying is not that a theory of consciousness can never be discovered but that all will be explained when Penrose will discover how quantum mechanics relates to this issue. The Mysterians can only stand up, nay-say for a while, and then sit down and let the people working on these `unsolvable' problems continue with their work.
The back of this book has quotes from Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Raymond Smullyan, Douglas Hofstader and Arthur C. Clarke praising Martin Gardner and this book. High praise indeed.
%T The Night is Large %T :Collected Essays, 1938-1995 %A Martin Gardner %I St. Martins Press %D 1996 %G ISBN: 031214380X %P 586 %K science, philosophy
Review written: 1999/08/01