This has been one of Sweden’s sunniest, most pleasant September months on record. I was lucky enough to spend the first third of it on Sandhamn, at the far edge the Stockholm Archipelago — Joachim and Elise have a summer house there, and I was welcome to use it while looking for an apartment in the city.

In the summer months, a ferry connects Sandhamn directly to the center of Stockholm.I tracked the course of the ferry with a GPS device and put the results up on Google Earth. More details over on my other blog, Ogle Earth. When I took up residence on the island, the vacation hordes had already left, so I had the boat practically to myself for my daily commute to work — a capacious floating living room with a bar, good food, and big windows for watching hundreds of pine-tufted islands drift by. In the evenings, on the trip home, all this was usually tinted by the colors of a spectacular nordic sunset.

Watching the archipelago ferries dock should be a spectator sport. First, the captain sets the ship on a collision course for land. He then raises the nose of the prow and a gangplank is primed to extend from the front. Just when the ship looks sure to crash into a fast-approaching dock, the captain starts playing an aquatic version of Lunar LanderLunar Lander is the first computer came I ever played — on the school’s Commodore PET computer., where he reverses the engines with a view to reaching zero velocity just as the prow kisses the lip of the dock. The gang plank is then extended, people surge off and on, and almost immediately the ship sets sail again, another island in its sights.

Not at all unhappy to be deprived of the distractions of the internet, I used the hours onboard to read. I’ve had an unusually lucky streak of good books to read this past month, so the remainder of the post is about them.

First, the fiction. Magnus Mills’ most recent novel, Explorers of the new century, is a short but engrossing read. His allegorical intrepid explorers in an arid polar region start off by sounding human, all too human in the face of adversity, but then Mills takes a turns for the bizarreDon’t go reading too many reviews if you plan to read the book. Many give away the secret. in a way that makes you want to reread the book, this time in on the cleverness of a macabre joke he’s played with our assumptions.

I had some misgivings about Robert Harris’ first historical novel about the Romans, Pompeii. Now Harris has come out with another, and it is far better. Imperium reïmagines The Life of Cicero, a real but lost biography written by his long-time secretary and inventor of shorthand, Tiro. Harris writes an interesting piece in the UK Times portraying Cicero as the first modern politician. If there is a remaining gripe about Imperium, it is that he sometimes pushes the similarities between Roman and modern politics just a little too unsubtly.Gone are the textual anachronisms and unlikely plot twists that strained Pompeii. Instead, we get a compelling narrator imparting the minutiae of Roman politics and life.Look, a blog about Roman history books!

In the Roman historical fiction genre, Vidal’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Julian-A-Novel-Vintage-International/dp/037572706X" title="Julian“>Julian and Graves’ <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Claudius" title="Claudius series“>Claudius series are the obvious standouts. What’s interesting about the most recent worthy contributions — Harris’ Imperium, for sure, but also the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/drama/rome/" title="BBC television series Rome“>BBC television series Rome — is that these newer works paint a Rome that feels far more anthropologically whole. The past decades’ rise of historical anthropology as a worthy field of study is having a clear payoff in the fiction of Rome, I think. Just compare how the <a href="http://www.historyinfilm.com/claudius/" title="BBC's I, Claudius“>BBC’s I, Claudius portrayed Romans vs. the current Rome — the former is far more revealing about the mores of the 1970s that those of the Romans.

On to the non-fiction. Two major critiques of the state of contemporary physics hit my favorite bookshopHedengren’s book buyer, whoever s/he is, has impeccable taste, and not just in the sciences. And how do they get these books so quickly? this month: Peter Woit’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465092756/ref=pd_cp_b_title/104-3152749-3935958?ie=UTF8" title="Not Even Wrong“>Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618551050/ref=pd_cp_b_title/104-3152749-3935958?ie=UTF8" title="The Trouble with Physics“>The Trouble with Physics. They both argue that string theory, which has usurped the bulk of the resources, faculty positions and mind share allocated to theoretical physics over the past 20 years, has ceased to be science, for it continues to lack a rigorous theoretical framework, any predictive power, and hence cannot be falsified (so it’s “not even wrong“). Instead, argue Woit and Smolin, it’s time to push in new and promising directions, but sociological forces and belief bordering on religiosity among string theorists is delaying such a necessary realignment, which makes for a serious crisis in this most fundamental (and I think important) scientific field.

I found the arguments made in these books to be compelling (and I’ve blogged some of them before). Not Even Wrong came out first, and I read it first, though I’d recommend a reverse reading order. Several of the reviews I’ve read so far inevitably compare these two books, and tend to find that Not Even Wrong comes out lacking. I don’t think that’s really fair. Not Even Wrong is certainly less accessible; The Trouble with Physics provides a far gentler slope for the lay reader to climb, and Smolin’s book will therefore do a better job of convincing the general public that physics is in crisis.

But Woit’s book is more of a blogger’s book, a pugnacious report from the trenches that isn’t afraid of a good dust-up, and where tendentiousness is a literary form because you’re smart enough to think for yourself — not surprising, as Woit has a blog, and it comes with the ultimate in blogger’s cred: a stuffed comments box. Not Even Wrong is also less polished — and I mean that in a good sense. Far too many physics popularizations I’ve read, including many of the best sellers, set out to simplify the science they want to illuminate but end up warping it to the point of misrepresentation. They will also present hypotheses as near certainties for the sake of clarity, but in doing so miss out on all the places where things don’t quite fit, and where the most interesting science is being done. Or as Woit puts it:

Readers who like their science always inspirational are advised to stop reading this book and to find a version of this story [of the history of string theory] told by someone with a much more positive point of view regarding it. Some suggestions of this kind are Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe or The Fabric of the Cosmos…

I smiled when I read that, because I’ve found Greene’s books to be insufferable in that regard. String theory is clearly not elegant, and yet I keep on being told that it is, most recently in Lisa Randall’s book Warped Passages, even as more and more abstruse constructions are posited to shoehorn the universe into something string theorists can model.

What Woit does is scrape a couple of layers off the veneer with which physics is often presented to a lay audience. This makes for a harder read, but I for one felt rewarded with a glimpse of the actual discourse physicists are having. Woit attempts explanations of Hilbert space, symmetry, supersymmetry and gauge theory — short of embarking on an undergraduate physics course (or a read through Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality) Or maybe it’s time for a new genre of popularization — for fast learners not afraid of a few equations. John Derbyshire’s Prime Obsession comes to mine as a model.this is about as much as an interested generalist can be expect to fathom.

As an aside, one of the footnotes in The Trouble With Physics — Chapter 16, footnote 15 — is an email dated June 8, 2006. I bought the US edition in Sweden on September 8, 2006. Wow. But maybe that also explains the typo on page 45:-)Ultimately, though, it is Smolin’s book that transcends the everyday trials and tribulations of theoretical physicists to address some of the perennial questions about the nature of science and its role in society, and this is what makes it a must-read for people who would otherwise never touch this kind of book. There are several chapters in particular that should get as wide an audience as possible: The introduction, which presents all his arguments (and easily sells the rest of the book); the first chapter, in which Smolin outlines “the five great problems in theoretical physics” (available online!), and chapter 13, “Surprises from the real world”, where he reviews some very recent evidence that may turn out to question some fundamental principles in physics (such as an unchanging fine structure constant).

So that’s September for me so far. Good books, and good weather.