Books -- The Power Of Myth, QED

Two meaty books this week, a strange but natural pairing:

* “The Power Of Myth”:amazon by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. On the shelf forever, a great book about some of the deep issues of life and humanity. One sentence of this book has more insight into humanity than all of Kurzweil’s book. Not a light read. * “QED”:amazon by Richard P. Feynman. Simple (to the degree that anything quantum can be simple) explanation of the basics of quantum electrodynamics. When you read this, you have to wonder why we continue to stuff deterministic models of chemistry and physics down the throats of high school students, only to have to rip it out when they get to higher level sciences in college. There is no reason we can’t start with quantum science at the beginning, this stuff is very approachable.

Together these two books provide nice bookends on the nature of the universe – at one end, the squirelly but true behaviour of the universe at the quantum level; at the other, the squirrelly behaviour of humans and the deep motivations of our behaviour.