Customer Reviews

The Night Is Large: Collected Essays, 1938-1995

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this, the definitive collection of Gardner's essays, and recommend it highly. My recommendation, however pales beside those that appear on the book jacket, including praise from Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Raymond Smullyan, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stefan Kanfer. Little more need be said about the value of this splendid book; but I would like to offer some observations.

The first chapter, a review of four books on symmetry is easily the most informative and insightful ten pages I have ever read on the subject. Gardner's rare talent for making things clear is shown to such advantage here that I would recommend it as a must read for anyone wanting a career in science writing. It's almost magic, the way he evaporates the fog.

The next nine chapters are on the physical sciences including chapters on relativity, quantum mechanics, time, superstrings, cosmology, etc., all good reads. The next five are on the social sciences, and it is here that I was introduced to a side of Gardner that I had not found in the other three collections of his that I have read. Chapter 11, "Why I Am Not a Smithian," is on economics and is primarily a dissection of the supply-siders who held forth during the Reagan years. It makes for lively reading even though, curiously it turns into a tribute to Norman Thomas as "the only notable American" to vigorously oppose the Japanese internment camps during WW II. In the next essay, "The Laffer Curve," Gardner continues his assault on the "voodoo economics" of the Reagan years as he presents his own satirical "neo-Laffer curve." Gardner is a sharp eyed and sharp-penned social critic, and, as he demonstrates in Chapter 21, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," a pretty good movie critic as well. (Although here I think he underrated the magic of Spielberg's movie in order to better concentrate on zapping the usual Spielberg schmaltz and pseudoscience.) Politically speaking, Gardner reveals himself as a "social democrat."

The chapter on "Newcomb's Paradox," which Gardner interprets as "related to the question of whether humans possess a genuine power to make free, unpredictable choices," has the effect of revealing Gardner's personality. You'll have to read it to see what I mean, but the choices he makes are psychological choices and reveal him as a man who is not afraid to stand by his beliefs. Herein and in the next chapter we encounter the question of whether we can have free will in the view of an omniscient God. Gardner's solution (with C. S. Lewis and others) is to put God outside time and avoid the contradictions. Incidentally, Gardner makes the very salient point that any language that allows sets to be members of themselves or evaluates the truth or falsity of its statements will run into contradictions (p. 419).

It is here in the chapters on philosophy and religion that Gardner is at his most intriguing. He is a theist and a believer in free will, although he admits that "distinguishing free will from determinism" is something we are incapable of doing (p. 427). He equates free will with self-awareness and consciousness, and declares (p. 444) "I am not a vitalist who thinks there is...a soul distinct from the brain." Yet on page 438 he writes, "I cannot conceive of myself as existing without...a brain that has free will." Although none of this is contradictory, we can see that there is something Gardner believes in that is akin to Bishop Berkeley's idealism and beyond the rock of realism that Samuel Johnson gave a kick to in an attempt to refute Berkeley. I agree with Gardner that we are not about to find an answer to the conundrum of free will, although I think it's important to add that as a practical matter the illusion of free will is, for us, as good as the "real" thing. Readers may be surprised to learn that Gardner also identifies himself as a "fideist," a word I had to look up. It refers to someone who believes in God as a matter of faith.

I would like to say (since Gardner doesn't) that consciousness as self-awareness should be made distinct from consciousness as self-identity. The former is a question of relative complexity, e.g., chimp consciousness versus flatworm consciousness. The latter is an illusion with great psychological power foisted on us by the evolutionary mechanism primarily to make us fear death. It is adaptive for long-lived creatures such as ourselves, but is otherwise empty. When the Buddhists (and the Vedas and yogic psychology) say the ego is an illusion, this is what they are talking about, this delusional self-identity that we sometimes refer to as consciousness.

There are number of funny jokes and asides herein. One of my favorites identifies Ayn Rand (philosophically speaking of course) as "the ugly offspring of Milton Friedman and Madalyn Murray O'Hare" (p. 484).

Gardner is one of the leaders of the American Skeptic movement. (Skeptics (with the capital "S") are those who seriously consider but doubt paranormal phenomenon like UFO's, ESP, and religious faith healers. They want to see if there is good evidence for the stuff and never find it.)

He makes the reader think. He considers the breath and width of human knowledge to all be worth talking and writing about. He is never unforthcoming with his opinions. Naturally, this makes for some controversal opinions coming out. But he lets you know when he blunders as well.

This collection certainly lives up to a testiment that he has had a long life writing and making folks think about the world they live in.

His greatest flaw, in my opinion, is his belief in a god. But then, nobody is ever perfect.

One reviewer suggested that Gardner is often wrong. Among those who think he is right are Dr. Stephen Gould and the late Carl Sagen. Whether or not you agree with Gardner's opinions on Freud's early theories, William James' adventures with spiritualists, the existance of God (he is a believer incidentally), you will learn new facts and expand your intellectual horizons--a great book for the intellectually curious.

This diverse collection of forty-six essays written from 1938 to 1995 is a real eye-opener. Gardner is best-known for his mathematical columns in the Scientific American. But science and mathematics are the subject of fewer than half of the essays in this progidious collection. The bulk of them are in the area of the social sciences, the arts, philosophy, and religion. In these Gardner displays a depth and authority that is surprising.

All essays are spiced up with introductory paragraphs and postscipts which reveal the author's changing (or unchanging) attitudes on the subject.

The first ten essays on the physical sciences alone are worh the price of admission, covering such subjects as symmetry, the twin paradox, quantum mechanics and superstrings. He cannot help taking a swipe at the Anthropic Principles(s) in an essay titled "WAP, SAP, PAP, and FAP. He adds a fifth in the last line of this essay which did not get listed in the title, namely, the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle.

In the section on philosophy he discusses provocative people like Allan Bloom, Isaiah Berlin, Mortimer Adler, and Robert Maynard Hutchins. Did you know that Hutchins' think tank in Santa Barbara was funded by the profits of Alex Comfort's book, "The Joy of Sex"? This questionable arrangement started out amicably enough, providing income for the Institute and a tax haven for Comfort's profits, but it eventually ended in unfriendly counter lawsuits.

Particular fun is provided by a critical review Gardner wrote under the pseudonym George Groth, debunking his own book "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener." Only in the last line does he disclose his identity.

You do not have to agree with everything Gardner says, but you cannot help but be intellectually informed and entertained by this remarkable modern intellect.

Charming, with chapters such as "The Significance of 'Nothing'" and "The Mystery of Free Will" and "Wilhelm Reich and the Orgone." On philosophical topics, the book is accessible and fascinating. On science on math, it is mind-bending. On historical personalities, Gardner either takes no prisoners and is hilarious, or is admiring and gracious. Puts new spins a lot of ideas you take for granted (such as the meaning of 2 + 2 = 4), and introduces a whole bunch of things you never thought about. Really neat.

The prolific and wide-ranging journalist Martin Gardner has published several collections of essays, but "The Night Is Large" appears to be a selection aimed at reaching people who wouldn't open his autobiography, "The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener."

The first half, roughly, is the skeptical Gardner that we have enjoyed for many decades. Here are essays on cosmology, mathematics and, unusually, politics. He has a bit of fun with Arthur Laffer and his silly curve.

Unlike those old reliables at whom Gardner has jeered so many times, like Conan Doyle and Freud, Laffer didn't have any staying power and the essay is of only historical interest, and not too much of that.

Gardner also has his enthusiasms, for Lord Dunsany (but no essays on him here), Lewis Carroll, G.K. Chesterton and Oz.

The enthusiasm for Chesterton is puzzling. No one out of his teenage years could take him for anything but a superficial logic chopper, clever but not nearly as clever as H.H. Munro; and any schoolboy can work out the jumps he makes.

Gardner does not care about the jumps. The last part of the book is an extended excursus on Gardner's own fideism and (idiosyncratic) Platonism. If faith in some sort of deity and Platonism seem incongruous with Gardner's other role as skeptic and exposer of hoaxers, he is well aware of it. He even includes a mock review of one of his own books in which he derides his own writing.

That a number of readers did not get the joke ought to have warned Gardner of something.

The Platonism is, just barely, congruous with Gardner's life as a mathematician (student of, not original thinker), although more subtle minds have understood that the occasional fact that a mathematical system dreamed up as pure intellectual endeavor later turns out to have practical use in describing the material world is not an indicator of metareality. (Non-Euclidean geometry is the commonest example.)

It does not follow that every well-reasoned abstract mathematics will eventually match some aspect of the material world, which is why the Cal Tech mathematician Eric Temple Bell called it the queen, not king, of the sciences. (Gardner knows Bell as a science fiction writer but not, apparently, as a mathematician.)

The fideism is just silly. After many, many pages of explanation, he admits that he believes in some sort of god because it makes Martin Gardner feel good. But it does not make me feel good (other than providing a brief horselaugh at Gardner's naivete) and knowing that it makes Martin Gardner feel good does not enhance my life in any way. Gardner would have done better to keep this to himself; however, getting it off his chest does appear to be the main purpose of the collection.

Gardner's many essays on philosophy are useful, if tedious, as fairly clear explications of what some modern philosophers have written about. To a materialist, most of them have a terminal flaw: In trying to concretize some abstraction, he uses thought-experiments. A large fraction of these take the form: "Assume a condition that (so far as we know) cannot exist in the material universe; what would happen then?

To a materialist, the answer is always the same: Nothing, because the initial conditions can never occur.

In the end, Gardner opines that if people are truly impressed with the universe they apprehend, they must reach for some numinous (i.e., ghostly) back story. This is not correct. A thoroughgoing materialist can be every bit as impressed by the bigness and the littleness and the complexity and the simplicity of the universe as the woolliest-brained mystic -- as Gardner tends to become when he muses.

He is too greedy. For some of us, the universe is quite enough to deal with, without worrying about what may be going on unseen behind the curtain.

In the final pages, Gardner sounds very little different from Ram Dass, demanding that we be here now.

To which a materialist (and Gardner in his harder-headed moments) would ask, What are my other choices?

Martin Gardner is a national treasure. His breadth of intellect is astounding. The only problem with reviewing a Gardner volume is deciding which of his collections of essays is the best place to start reading.

This volume may represent the best intro to Gardner. While the subtitle is, "Collected Essays, 1938-1995," none of the essay shows any signs of age. Each essay is supplemented by a postscript which updates more recent developments, or more commonly, Gardner's recent thinking on the subject. Consider the section headings: Physical Science, Social Science, Pseudoscience, Mathematics, The Arts, Philosophy, Religion. Is Gardner the last Renaissance man or what?

In short, a great introduction to an amazing thinker. By the way, if you already have one or several of Gardner's other collections, get this one as well. Gardner has lots more to say!

Gardner's scope is wide, of course. Obviously too wide for some. But for those who enjoy thinking, one finds a kaleidoscope of ideas.

This volume is just a taste of a legendary career in journalism, a career filled with insights that challenge everything--especially small closed minds.

Gardner is one of those rare polymaths who argues cogently but with imagination and humour. He expects others with claims to our time and money to do the same. This is a beautiful book that can be dipped into time after time, and is one of my 'keepers'. I also have bought it for several other people over the years.

In general, I very much enjoyed this collection of essays. Gardner is at his most compelling when he writes about science and math. When he writes about literature and philosophy (aside from some interesting reflections on his own leanings) he is at his least compelling. Still, I appreciate the fact that Gardner has eclectic interests and that he so openly and enthusiastically shares them. I dock one star (from 5) only because there is considerable repetition in TNIL. Given the many thousands of pages Gardner has penned in the course of a long a fruitful career, I'm sure such repetition could have been easily avoided. Consider this a minor criticism, however. There is much of interest in TNIL. It is a thought-provoking and entertaining book throughout. I look forward to reading more of Gardner