Customer Reviews

Properties of Light

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I just finished my dissertation (in physics) and was looking to relax by reading some fiction. A friend suggested that Properties of Light might be a nice transition from the straight physics. Is it just that it's been so long since I've read a novel, or is this book pure bliss? I enjoyed every last bit of it, and was particularly surprised by how accurate her presentation of the physics involved was. I must admit that I have been interested in the physicist David Bohm (whom the character of Mallach is inspired by) and his mysteriously ignored interpretation of quantum mechanics since my undergraduate days, and have always thought it would make a good novel. There are so many deep questions here: why wouldn't the scientific community want to adopt a theory that seems like such a better candidate for the truth? How could it be that scientists seem so to prefer the mysterious and ineffable, to the straightforward and easily explained? Though Goldstein is careful to point out that the character Mallach is very different from Bohm in many ways and the dramatic twists and turns of her book are entirely fictional, Mallach's physics is nearly the same as Bohm's and she manages to get to the core of the real-life physics story, and deal with these deep questions, in an incredibly skillful way.

I truly enjoyed "The mind body problem" and therefore was quick to obtain and try to read the new novel. I found the first half of the novel difficult to read, not because of the physics but because of the writing was, at least in the first portion, complicated, indirect and overly intense. It is supposed to be poetic; poetry as well as quantum mechanics is a theme of the book but the faux poetic language didn't really work for me. One nice romantic poetic image, when Justin Childs sees the novel's heroine in a mirror, was relentlessly repeated. Also, most importantly, I didn't understand the viewpoint (literally) of the primary protagonist, Justin Childs. The book succeeds though in the second half where the mystery of the events unravels. The ending works well and is far from anti-climatic, which I find of common fault of many novels and even "mysteries". The writing becomes more direct as the novel proceeds; as it ends, the book easy to put down at first, becomes difficult to put down. Thus, it succeeds as entertainment and I would recommend the book as a somewhat difficult but enjoyable read.

The physicist, David Bohm, is oddly grafted onto the novel in an afterward which should not have been included. An attempt to develop a deterministic "hidden variables theory" to replace or possibly extend quantum mechanics is the scientific theme of the book. The author relates this to the work of David Bohm though makes it clear that the story itself is in no way the story of David Bohm. Excepting that she does describe the rejection of a major theoretical development in physics by protégé of Albert Einstein "for no good reason" which resulted in him being "buried alive." Her conclusion, to this effect, is overly dramatic. In my opinion it distorts the work and history of David Bohm, and its relation to the views, by implication, of Einstein's, with respect to interpreting quantum theory in deterministic terms (the hidden variables approach). In a letter to Max Born in 1952 ("The Born-Einstein Letters" Walker, NY, 1971) Einstein notes " that Bohm believes (as de Broglie did...) that he is able to interpret quantum mechanics in deterministic terms" but "That way seems too cheap to me." Born in a comment written in about 1969, writes that Bohm's and de Broglie's attempts, although in line with Einstein's own ideas, was rejected by him as too cheap and that one hardly hears about them today (written after, as I understand, Bohm did further serious work in this area).

One does hear about them today because theoretical physicists have never ceased in their desire for a deterministic substitute for the probabilistic quantum mechanics that would extend the capabilities of the theory or at least allow for a better physical picture. Bohm's work was taken seriously but rejected, not for "no good reason" but for the good reason that it really didn't seem to help -neither did it seem to harm. Physicist are eminently practical and would not have looked a "gift horse in the mouth" Bohm was not forgotten, had a successful career as a physicist in England and would object to Dr. Goldstein's characterizations were he alive to do so. He was a professor at the University of London, a member of the Royal Society, and a respected theoretical physicist. His views were sought after by giants in the development of physics, for example, Richard Feynman. He was a deep thinker concerned with philosophical aspects of quantum mechanics. I found 42 items connected with David Bohm in the Amazon.com webpages. He fled the United States not because his scientific ideas were rejected but because of politics and the McCarthy scare of the early fifties.

I thought the picture of the "Bohm" personality in the novel must have been, in part, derived by the author, rather successfully so, from the "Phantom of Fine Hall " phase of the life of mathematician and economics Nobel prize winner, John Nash, as described in the 1998 biography by Sylvia Nasar.

For all my complaints, I liked the novel and look forward to more from Rebecca Goldstein. I don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

This is the third book I have read of Rebecca Goldstein (the others were "The Mind-Body Problem, which I enjoyed immensely, and The Late Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind", which was also enjoyable, but far from the level of the former).
I did like aspects of this book as well, but overall it somewhat dissapointed me.


It is written in a much more mysterious tone than the other two books; however, it seemed rather forced... The language is also often quite complex (and not just due to the subject matter - quantum mechanics), but it has been a long time since I had to look up so many words. Not that liguistic complexity in writing is necessarily bad, but when there are perfectly useable simpler synonyms for everyday words, it seems a bit artificial to use dictionary-only words...

Overall, I found the descriptions of the physics department dynamics the most fascinating and focused part of this book, the characters and their mysterious interactions less so. And the Love Story - well, frankly it seemed too forced and too convenient for the story. Furthermore, it does not help that the language describing their love making sessions is a bit Danielle Steele-like...A great contrast to the bitter-sweet love stories of her other two books.

I did like some of the quantum mechanics descriptions - I mean, what a hard subject to tackle for a fiction novel! I remember being fascinated with the Measurement Problem when I took courses in physics years ago, and I must give Goldstein credit for incorporating highly readable extracts of such conundrums (even though I sort of doubt I would have been able to follow if I had never taken a physics class in my life).
Finally, I doubt I would recommend this book to people who has had no background in the hard sciences, and if they did - I would be worried about recommending such a cheesy love story, no matter how mysteriously the language flows... If you are reading Goldstein for the first time, pick up a copy of the delightfully clever Mind-Body Problem.

I ran out and bought this book right after reading Daniel Mendelson's effusively glowing review in New York Magazine. I figured that any book that could make that notoriously hardened critic "burst into tears" with its sheer beauty and brilliance had to be worth taking the afternoon off for. And, boy, was I right. Goldstein's prose is so luminously hypnotic, her characters so sympathetically rendered, and the story so engrossingly original that the only breaks I took from reading were a few brief moments when I simply had to put the book down and catch my breath. Though the book intimately involves some of the biggest ideas in science (specifically, the reconciliation of quantum mechanics with Einstein's Relativity Theory) Goldstein makes these go down easy by wrapping them inside a mesmerizing and multi-tiered love story. In my case at least, this resulted in the somewhat exhilerating experience of realizing that I'd just gained a whole lot of knowledge when all I thought I was doing was indulging my lust for great fiction. This is the first book of Goldstein's that I've read (though I've been meaning to read her ever since she won a Macarthur Grant in 1996), but if this book is representative of her work in general I can't wait to read the rest!

I am a physicist with a Ph.D. from the University of California. I worked with Bohm in 1971. I take issue with the statements of the reviewer who wrote:

"The science doesn't work well, either. Bohm was not the unrecognized genius everybody wanted to destroy because he argued against die Copenhagians Heisenberg and, Bohr. His papers in the early Fifties were taken seriously and discussed at length. He was able to explain the larger picture behind his ideas in a 1957 booklet, "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics," a remarkable work I got for 85 cents in 1974. His physics just didn't work. First there was von Neumann's refutation of "hidden variables," then Bell's inequalities killed them for good - or at least for now. Goldstein's assessment in her Afterward, "For various reasons, none of them good, the formulation - and David Bohm - were dismissed," is simply untrue."

Whoever wrote the above is either deliberately lying or is ignorant of what he or she is talking about. "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing."

Von Neumann's "theorem" did not destroy Bohm's theory. Indeed Bohm found an error in it. Von Neumann's theorem, at best only eliminates a very special class of "local hidden variables, and does not apply to Bohm's "causal theory". J. S. Bell discusses this explicitly in "Speakable and unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics" as do Bohm and Hiley in "The Undivided Universe". The misguided reviewer's remark "Bell's inequalities killed them for good" as applied to Bohm's theory is a complete Red Herring, ludicrously untrue.

If enough Amazon customers want details contact me at

sarfatti@well.com

This is not the place for detailed debate on the ideas, or is it?

The physics in Rebecca's book is accurate and well done. Readers of romance novels with a high IQ who are not brain-damaged with attention-deficit disorder from too many drugs should like it and also learn some important insights into how the universe works. This is not a novel for the Ersatz New Age Intelligenzia-Lite confusing skim milk for creme fraiche who get their wisdom watching Gary Zukav on "Oprah". :-)

Rebecca Goldstein's first book, "The Mind-Body Problem," is one of the funniest novels about the groves of academe, its pretenses and pettiness, but also about genius and fame. When it came out, we considered it a juicy game to trace some of the protagonists in the novel to real professors at Princeton. Goldstein won the "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation. Her new book, "Properties of Light," unfortunately, is bad, very bad. It fails as a historical novel, it fails in its verbal art. (Although it got some rave reviews.)

The plot is contrived and full of unlikely coincidences. Young brilliant physicist, Justin Childs, meets physics professor Samual Mallach, formerly an Einstein protégé. Mallach once wrote a paper, now long forgotten, that was to revolutionize quantum theory. Justin meets Mallach and schemes to get that glorious past physics out of him. The old man has - you guessed it, a lovely daughter Dana, who is smart, recites poetry, loves her father, and knows physics. One of the villainous professors, Dietrich Spencer, has an ugly scar, and he is German, and he gets the Nobel prize that Mallach should have won. Mallach's talented daughter is not only a quantum physicist, she is beautiful and she was once married to a physics professor Justin knew, and she knows Tantric love techniques - yeah, right. The figure of Professor Mallach (Hebrew for angel) is inspired by David Bohm, one of the proponents of the "hidden variables" interpretation of quantum mechanics that strives to save modern physics from giving up "reality" as we know it in favor of a probabilistic interpretation based on Schrodinger's psi-function.

The novel is loaded with gobs of perfumed language that smacks of Romance novels. Page 24 has the profound, "Do we believe in souls, Justin?" And then follows a Danielle Steel passage, "Slowly, they had come apart from each other. He had watched their bodies separating as she had lifted herself away from him ... They had bodies that were narrow and very white." On page 198, "And ravished still, to see her eyelids shiver over dreams." This phrase appears earlier on page 64 as "... with eyelids shivering over frightened dreams." And on the same page, "I watched her eyelids shiver over her dreams." On page 181: "In her eyes there was an articulation of terror so stark it seemed that of a very small child." On page 55, an overdone l-alliteration, "Lines of light and lines of longing, passing through me, un observable, a thing that longs." On page 76 a Salomon song-like passage of ecstasy: "She had a look both serious and not, ...softly parting lips ... softly opening mouth ... Dana divine and taking me in, her body arched upward like a flame above my own, fierce at one moment, tender at the next, her tenderness was the most terrible aspect of it all, I did not know if I would emerge from it at all." The words beautiful and beauty appear far too often, about 35 times in the book, as in "she was beautiful." Show me beauty, don't just say it is so. On page 40, for instance, we read that Justin "had arrived at some mathematically beautiful results, for his affinity with beauty was strong, because he came to beauty by way of his mother. - What do you study? - Beauty. - What shall I study? - The same." And on page 72: "- The solution would have to be very deep, and I know it would be very beautiful. I can't see the form it will take yet, but I know it would be very beautiful."

Then there are meaningless repetitions, as on page 63, "I am awash, I am awash, for it is Dana's room, Dana's room, Justin Childs is in Dana's room, and I am Justin Childs." Please! There's lots of names dropping: poets Blake, Proust, Yeats. Physicists: Einstein, Heisenberg, Born, Pauli, Dirac, Bohr, even God.

The science doesn't work well, either. Bohm was not the unrecognized genius everybody wanted to destroy because he argued against die Copenhagians Heisenberg and, Bohr. His papers in the early Fifties were taken seriously and discussed at length. He was able to explain the larger picture behind his ideas in a 1957 booklet, "Causality and Chance in Modern Physics," a remarkable work I got for 85 cents in 1974. His physics just didn't work. First there was von Neumann's refutation of "hidden variables," then Bell's inequalities killed them for good - or at least for now. Goldstein's assessment in her Afterward, "For various reasons, none of them good, the formulation - and David Bohm - were dismissed," is simply untrue.

I was looking forward to a novel about three people,
physicists engaged in an adventure of discovery.

What I found were dreamlike sequences, presented in random time,
beginning with the phrase "I hate her", repeated over and over again,
before you get any glimpse of characters or of a story.

Perhaps there is some unlikely plot there, somewhere at the end,
perhaps some people could find some poetry or imagine intellectual depth
in the use of physics terms in context of emotional exclamations about
unknown players. I gave up on this book and can only say

(after Thurber) - This book is not a moose;
it is a horse with attached antlers:

If you want a popular book about Quantum Mechanics, get Herbert's "Quantum Reality."
If you want story about physicists, get "Physicists", or any of the
many biographies. Goldstein's attempt to combine these elements simply does not work.

If you want to know about the Hidden Variables and David Bohm,
whose life somewhat similar to a character in Goldstein's book,
get his biography (...).

Bohm's real life is more fascinating than the artful cameo plot of this book, which
replaces real drama with the petty intrique of egos, manipulation, and jealousy.

Once again Rebecca Goldstein proves her virtuosity as a novelist of style and substance as she continues to reinvent the novel of ideas. She deftly immerses us in the most formidable problems of the mind (quantum physics), and heart (the tragic love lives of the three main characters). She hits our cosmic funny bone with one of the narrative voices, that of Justin Childs, a physicist looking for a universal truth in mathematics, who is mortified by any irrationlism, and who also happens to be a ghost.

This novel, also a serious jest, I suspect, at the zeitgeist infatuation with the turning of the man made millennium clock, is an investigation of time and timelessness. Goldstein using her powers of imagination and intellect pulls us into the world of those of genius who delve into the mystery of quantum physics, yet who are no more immune than the rest of us to irrational motivations, immediacies and obsessions of the broken heart and lost spirit. And isn't that what great novels are about? That and the understanding of goodness and cruelty and how we are all both kind and cruel. You will find all of this human-all-too-humanness in the characters of Childs and the Mallachs, father and daughter, as well as in the other significant players in the book.

Goldstein's satirical eye is also once again on display. As she did in The Mind Body Problem and The Dark Sister, her dialogue and wit skewer the hubris of professors and know-it-all windbags of all stripes.

After you've fallen under the sway of Goldstein's poetry, in this tragic comedy, with its abundant ironies and sadness, I promise, you will laugh, cry, wonder, and you, as was I, will be enlightened.

Salley Vickers' new book is called 'The Instances of Number 3'. Rebecca Goldstein seems to subscribe to the same philosophy, as tragedy comes in threes in 'Properties of Light', which features more car crashes than John Irving or J. G. Ballard can usually manage. 'Properties of Light' steers an uneasy course between literature and melodrama.

The beginning is poetic enough, with the references to Yeats and Blake that will resound throughout the novel. Unfortunately, these literary interjections, although very skilfully placed by Goldstein, are a reflection of the very American campus 'Physics for Poets' courses that make me want to smirk uncontrollably. Samuel Mallach has been reduced to teaching such a course. Once a brilliant physicist, whom Einstein regarded as his successor, Mallach regards himself as "destroyed" by the reception his work on "hidden variables" received. Thus does Rebecca Goldstein strive to fight the cause for reality, a curious thing for a novelist to do. Justin Childs is also summoned to the cause. The product of an unconventional childhood, and a brilliant mathematician, Justin comes across Mallach's seminal work and is duly inspired. There are a few coincidences that bring Justin Childs and Samuel Mallach together, mainly through Mallach's beautiful daughter, Dana. It's the Kevin Bacon game and the Six Degrees of Separation all over again. Certainly, the physicist with whom Justin also works seems to have got his name cobbled together from the film poster for 'Judgement at Nuremberg', starring Spencer Tracey and Marlene Dietrich. 'Spencer Dietrich', you come to think, may not be the best pseudonym for a ... on the run.

The language of 'Properties of Light' seems quite modern. There appears to be an essence of timelessness about the novel. We know that it's probably set in the early 70's, but no one's smoking dope or saying "Peace Man!" 'Properties of Light' is nowhere near as humourous as 'Boogie Nights'. It's also rather dark and heavy, more akin to strange matter than a solar flare. The physics is quite hard going, so it's something of a relief to discover that Mallach is somewhat of an eccentric in his ... habits. Justin is disgusted to discover that the otherwise rational Dana fully believes in the Kundalini mumbo jumbo that spouts forth from the Self-help books of her late mother. Justin is very willing to help Samuel Mallach complete his work, to produce the mathematical proof for his contentious physics, but the way that Mallach believes that the knowledge will be drawn out of Dana and Justin is most unusual.

Both Justin's parents were killed in a car crash, leaving him an orphan. Dana's eccentric mother was also killed in a car crash. Part of Mallach's work is that apparently distant particles can have an effect on each other. So it is that an announcement from Stockholm sends Mallach into a mad frenzy that threatens to undo all their work...

Rebecca Goldstein has mentioned elsewhere that only she could have written 'Properties of Light', and I would agree with that. Certainly, her husband, Sheldon Goldstein, a mathematician at Rutgers, has written a great deal about David Bohm, upon whom Samuel Mallach is based. Maybe Sheldon Goldstein has his own biases, since David Bohm certainly dated the author of 'The Feminine Mystique', Betty Goldstein (a relative perhaps?). Like Mallach, David Bohm did find complementarity with certain Eastern beliefs (along with Schrodinger). Mallach's name is taken from the Hebrew for "Angel", and maybe Goldstein's referring to Lucifer rather than Gabriel. Dana is also described as "this Pharaoh's girl". Maybe there is a tyrant hiding beneath Mallach's seemingly placid nature? Justin certainly regards him as a king of Physics. David Bohm himself seems to have been closer to Philosophy than Physics, and Goldstein has a philosophical basis herself. To a certain extent, Bohm mistrusted mathematical proofs, so it's not entirely realistic that he would have sought out a mathematician like Justin Childs to validate his work once and for all.

'Properties of Light' has been described as a Gothic novel, and I believe that this is where it falls down. The gothic melodrama is more akin to the risible antics of 'The Castle of Otranto' rather than the racy excitement of Matthew Lewis's 'The Monk'. The drama of 'Properties of Light' is simply light years away from Hamlet, and the book is only occasionally rewarding. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy's approach to life, the universe, and everything is so much more fun, and you can always stick a Babel Fish in your ear to comprehend the more difficult parts. Rebecca Goldstein tries to do too much in 'Properties of Light': you can admire her bravery, but you wouldn't want to go there yourself.

...the person who said this novel made new york mag. reviewer daniel mendelsohn burst into tears must have meant that mendelsohn burst into tears of frustration. it is preposterously overwritten, the prose so purple that it might as well be a harlequin romance. i can't really comment on the accuracy of the physics or the portrait of bohm, but it doesn't matter. literarily speaking, this is not a good book. i was a fan of "the mind-body problem" so i know for sure that ms. goldstein has it in her to write better than this--let's hope she does next time around.