Quantum Supremacy by Michio Kaku

Published by Doubleday on May 2, 2023

Quantum Supremacy is nonfiction, although it explores a topic that might interest fans of science fiction. The book’s premise is that quantum computers are the key to unlocking the mysteries of life and solving many of the world’s problems. Most of the book consists of bite-size descriptions of big problems and barriers to fixing them, barriers that might be overcome by greater computing power.

Quantum computers are in their infancy. They have the potential to dwarf the ability of digital computers to analyze vast amounts of data. They do this by dancing on top of many atoms simultaneously. Okay, that’s not what they do, but that’s my interpretation of a fascinating topic that is far too complex for my simple mind to wrap around.

Michio Kaku discusses the history of computing before he explains quantum theory. Science fiction fans know quantum theory posits that two particles can be in two different places at the same time and, no matter the distance between them, can be in instantaneous communication. That’s a pretty good trick.

No matter how many times I try to digest simple explanations of quantum mechanics, I fail. That's not a knock on Kaku. I give him credit for writing a simple, cogent explanation. I only wish I could understand how the cat in the box can be both alive and dead until someone opens the box. But as Kaku explains, a theory isn't necessarily wrong simply because it intuitively seems nonsensical.

The ability of distant particles to have the same immediate experience is known as quantum entanglement. Quantum computers, as I understand it (or, more likely, misunderstand it), compute using atoms rather than transistors, which allows them to perform computations simultaneously rather than serially. Entangled atoms interact with each other, allowing a bunch of atoms to get in on the act, processing problems more quickly than a bunch of 0s and 1s can manage.

So what does the quantum revolution promise? Chapter by chapter, Kaku discusses problems that are too complex for digital computers to solve, then speculates about the ways that quantum computing might produce breakthroughs. He suggests that quantum computer might help scientists:

•   discover how life originated;
•   understand photosynthesis;
•   develop more efficient ways to produce food;
•   develop batteries with more efficient energy storage;
•   cure cancer, dementia, and other complex health issues;
•   increase lifespans;
•   solve the problem of global warming; and
•   understand the universe.

Now, science fiction fans have read plenty of stories about artificial minds becoming so smart that they decide to control or wipe out primitive humans. Kaku doesn’t explore the potential downside of quantum computing, which I count as a significant strike against a surprisingly pollyannish book. He discusses the wonders that ever-smarter Artificial Intelligences will bring without saying much about the difficulties that AIs are currently causing, beginning with lazy students who have an AI write their term papers. As tradeoffs go, I’ll put up with sneaky students gaming their teachers in exchange for curing cancer. Still, it seems to me that there must be potential downsides to quantum computing that are worth acknowledging.

My other knock on the book is that Kaku is a physicist who, while obviously a very bright scholar, spends much of his time talking about issues of science that are outside his field: medicine, biology, agriculture, climate science, and so on. We are thus fed basic information that most of us have already seen about the health and environmental challenges our civilization faces. This seems to me to be a way to turn an essay about the physics of computation into an expansive book that often relates to physics only tangentially.

The book is informative, but less than half of it directly addresses quantum computing. I might have preferred a shorter essay without all the extraneous information about (for instance) how cancer develops and how carbon dioxide emissions are affecting climate. The book provides an overview of many familiar subjects when what I wanted was a book that would drill down on the topic of quantum computing.

We’ve all learned from the computer age that information is priceless. I can’t condemn a book for being informative, so I’m recommending Quantum Supremacy. I only wish I could connect a quantum computer to my brain so I could make sense of the fascinating world of quantum mechanics. Maybe that’s next on the horizon.

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The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Published by St. Martin's Press on March 29, 2022

Sun Tzu is so well known that he can quoted by people who have never read him. Lord knows I’ve done it. And Lord knows an endless number of authors have based their self-help books on Sun Tzu’s. Some of those might have even read The Art of War, although I doubt it.

St. Martin’s Press is publishing an “Essential Pocket Classic” edition of The Art of War. It’s in English, so I thought, why not read it? Leaders in business, football, and other occupations who liken themselves to generals fighting wars all swear to have followed Sun Tzu’s fifth century guidance. For those who have been faking it, this is their chance to actually read the book. Lionel Giles’ 1910 translation is clear and elegant, although Sun Tzu might account for some of the elegance.

Not all of Sun Tzu’s advice about war provides a useful analogy to fighting other battles. Using fire as a weapon is probably not a sound strategy in the business world. Even as applied to warfare, Sun Tzu’s advice about defending high ground versus low ground versus intersections and the six other “varieties of ground” are probably better suited to generals whose armies consist of chariots and swordsmen. Still, Putin’s generals might have wanted to read Sun Tzu’s advice about protecting supply lines and not getting bogged down. Maybe there isn’t a Russian translation.

For those who don’t want to spend an hour or two with the book, here is my Shorter Sun Tzu:

Know your enemy and know yourself. Pick your fights. Never fight without a purpose. Plan ahead but seize unexpected opportunities. Strike where the enemy is weak. Fight from a position of strength. Be sneaky. Don’t be fooled by a sneaky enemy. Use spies to gather information. Watch out for enemy spies. Keep your head. Don’t be predictable. Recognize and adapt to changed circumstances. Don’t fear retreat. Don’t go out of your way to piss off the enemy. Leaders should be firm but fair. Leaders should share goals but not strategies with the troops. Get out of bed before your enemy. Don’t fight uphill. Armies are expensive. Be generous with the spoils of your plunder. Such is the art of warfare.

Of course, Sun Tzu says all of this with more eloquence, hence: “At first, then, exhibit the coyness of a maiden, until the enemy gives you an opening; afterwards, emulate the rapidity of a running hare, and it will be too late for the enemy to oppose you.”

I’m not sure that war analogies are all that useful outside of football. Healthy competition doesn’t need to be a war. Cooperation can be more productive than conquest. Sun Tzu also notes that, in the military context, there are good reasons not to fight wars when they can be avoided. I regard that as his best advice.

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The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson

Published by Doubleday on October 15, 2019

“We are the only creatures that cry from feelings, so far as we can tell. Why we do so is another of life’s many mysteries.” My takeaway from Bill Bryson’s The Body is that medical science is perplexed by the mysteries of the human body. Almost as soon as scientists believe they have discovered something true about our physical containers, the truth turns out to be false. From balancing the body’s humors with leeches to using lobotomies as a cure for headaches, the history of medical science is a history of getting it wrong. Unfortunately, modern scientists are just as apt to be mistaken, although modern doctors are a bit less likely to base deadly treatments on ignorance.

Some of the body’s mysteries are inherent in evolution. The Body makes clear that humans are not the product of intelligent design. Our bodies are largely the product of evolutionary workarounds. Yet evolution is nothing if not mysterious. Zebra fish regrow damaged heart tissue. Humans don’t. Seems like pretty poor planning for an intelligent designer.

Bryson explores the body in enough detail to cause the reader to marvel at its workings, but not in so much detail as to create a multi-volume text. He examines skin and bones, organs (the brain and heart, liver and kidneys, lungs and guts), the neurological system, and cellular biology. He points out the many ways in which the body acts as a factory, producing chemicals that scientists don’t understand or misunderstand until they develop a working theory about their importance — a theory that will probably be subject to wholesale revision a few years later.

Bryson discusses food and how we experience taste before our bodies convert it to fuel. He considers cancer and other diseases, as well as the checkered history of medicine. He examines ever-changing opinions about exercise and conflicting experiences about the need for sleep. Naturally, he takes a look at reproduction, without which there would be no more bodies, and sex, without which there would be no reproduction.

Bryson is nothing if not informative. He explains why ATP (the chemical adenosine triphosphate) is “the most important thing in your body you have never heard of.” He provides miniaturized biographies of scientists who made crucial contributions to the human understanding of the mind and body, only to be undercut in their time or overshadowed by scientists who stole their work.

Some of Bryson’s most interesting paragraphs remind us how science is always at war with profit. When a biochemist in the 1950s reported a clear connection between the high intake of trans fats and clogged arteries, his work was disparaged by lobbyists for the food processing industry. More than 50 years passed before the American Heart Association recognized that correlation and nearly 75 years went by before the FDA stood up to food producers and declared excessive consumption of trans fats to be unsafe.

Bryson reports his findings with good humor, although perhaps with less charm than some of his earlier books. He notes that sex may be biologically unnecessary, given the number of organisms that have abandoned it as a reproductive strategy. Geckos have done away with males altogether. He considers it “a slightly unsettling thought if you are a man” that “what we bring to the reproductive party is easily dispensed with.”

On a more serious note, although this is a pre-pandemic book, Bryson talks about how much risk the human race faces from the rapid spread of disease. If Ebola were a less efficient killer, Bryson notes, it would not strike such panic into communities and would make it easier for afflicted individuals to mingle, allowing it to spread farther and endanger more people. His discussion seems prescient, given the spread of Covid-19.

Bryson’s knack is for communicating a wealth of complex information in digestible morsels that readers who don’t have an M.D. or a PhD in a biological science can comprehend. He engages in storytelling, explaining how scientists stumbled across or misunderstood facts and how their mistakes became part of the medical canon until it became impossible to ignore scientific findings that contradicted them. The information in The Body is a bit overwhelming, but the book’s true value lies in reminding the reader that medical science is constantly improving its knowledge of what makes us tick, and that our current certainties are likely to be replaced by more accurate knowledge tomorrow.

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Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free by Judge Jed S. Rakoff

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 16, 2021

Jed Rakoff covers much more than the two topics featured in the title of this brief overview of the problems that plague the judicial system. His first chapter discusses America’s ridiculous overreliance on incarceration as a solution to crime. He acknowledges a correlation between a declining crime rate and a swelling prison population while reminding the reader that correlations do not prove causation. When I was taking criminology decades ago, I remember a professor arguing that crime rates correlate with age because “crime is a young man’s game.” Crime rates may well have fallen because baby boomers got older, not because more of them were locked up. In any event, Judge Rakoff explains that mass incarceration has social costs that must be weighed against the potential benefits of a declining crime rate. Another punishment chapter explores the perils of using the death penalty in a system that is plagued by mistake and racism.

A few chapters explore the reasons that the judicial system so often imprisons the innocent. Mistaken eyewitness identifications and junk science masquerading as forensic science are two of them. Both subjects have been explored at length in other books and journal articles, but Judge Rakoff’s book is a good introduction for readers who want a quick summary. I particularly liked the judge’s advocacy of the suggestion that forensic science should be conducted by independent organizations, not by crime lab technicians who regard themselves as working for the police. Science should be neutral, but forensic scientists who see themselves as “helping” the police have a proven tendency to slant their conclusions to support an arrest.

The innocent plead guilty because they fear they will get a longer sentence if they risk a trial and lose. The risk is appreciable, given the evidentiary problems and biases that impair the system’s fairness. Judge Rakoff calls for greater judicial involvement in plea bargaining (although perhaps not involving the judge who presides in the case) to assure that the evidence actually supports guilt and that the defendant is actually guilty.

A chapter on brain science is again a useful introduction to the uneasy relationship between a judicial system that holds people accountable for intentional misconduct and a branch of science that can’t tell us what the word “intends” even means. Again, excellent books and articles have been written on the subject that explore the topic in greater detail.

Some of the middle chapters tackle problems in more depth. I particularly liked Judge Rakoff’s nuanced explanation of the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute corporate leaders for financial fraud, opting instead to “change corporate culture” by entering into deferred prosecution agreements with corporations that the companies view as a cost of doing (fraudulent) business.

Other detailed chapters bemoan the federal courts’ loss of authority to correct unfairness in the state criminal justice systems, largely through a whittling down of habeas corpus review. In that context, Judge Rakoff explores the impact of the “war on terror” on the loss of federal authority to assure that states respect the federal Constitution. Congress and conservative justices on the Supreme Court have been complicit in assuring that profoundly unfair decisions in state court, as well as unjust detentions at Guantanamo, are largely ignored by the federal judiciary.

Political observers have long documented the rise of executive branch power at the expense of congressional oversight. Judge Rakoff suggests that judicial oversight of the executive branch in our system of checks and balances has been nearly abandoned by the Supreme Court (particularly, I would add, when the president is a Republican). The judge offers a history lesson that stretches from the Supreme Court’s first Chief Justice to explain how the Court’s view of its institutional power is rooted in a politically expedient deference to a branch that holds greater power (lacking command of a military, the judiciary depends on the executive to enforce its decisions). That deference is particularly strong when the executive branch claims authority to trample rights in the interest of national security.

Along the same lines, Judge Rakoff examines judicial doctrines, including narrow interpretations of standing (the rules that determine who has suffered an injury that entitles a litigant to sue) and the political question doctrine (the notion that some issues, like gerrymandering, are better decided by legislatures than courts), that shield governmental misconduct from review. Another chapter discusses the difficulty of obtaining access to the civil judicial system for a variety of reasons (such as the prevalence of arbitration agreements and the cost of hiring a lawyer — a cost that banks foreclosing a mortgage can bear more easily than homeowners facing foreclosure). He returns the discussion to the criminal justice system by emphasizing an earlier point about the ways in which defendants and their lawyers have grown increasingly powerless, as sentencing guidelines and other procedures divert decision-making authority from judges to prosecutors, who often decide (regardless of the defense lawyr's skill) not just the crime of conviction but the sentence that will be imposed. That regime has resulted in ever-increasing sentences.

All of this will be familiar to people who follow law and the judiciary. The system really is broken. It has been for years. For those who aren't familiar with the problems that Judge Rakoff spotlights, the book serves as an excellent introduction to a variety of problems that need to be addressed. Judge Rakoff suggests possible improvements at various places in the text, but meaningful improvement will only come if America insists upon Supreme Court justices who value justice more than their interest in maintaining a system that is largely designed to keep power in the hands of the powerful.

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Lessons from Lucy by Dave Barry

Published by Simon & Schuster on April 2, 2019

Dogs are effortlessly happy. Joy is a default state. Humans too often ignore daily or even hourly opportunities to be happy, if only for a few moments. Humans should be more like dogs. And there you have one of the lessons Dave Barry offers, but with a lot more humor, in Lessons from Lucy.

Barry is 70; Lucy is 10; both are entering their senior years. Barry wrote the book, he says, to try to identify how his dog Lucy manages to be so happy and whether he can apply those techniques to his own life.

Barry meanders a bit, as is his style, before he gets around to imparting each lesson, some of which are only tangentially related to dogs, not that it matters. The funniest chapter (to me) explains why aging sucks, and the funniest line is that AARP is the last sound people make before they die. Barry also pokes fun at mindfulness, motivational events, scallops, the folly of outsourcing customer service to distant countries, people who don’t think about what they might want to order until they reach the front of a fast food line, and many other targets. For a bit of time in each of the seven chapters, he talks about Lucy, who sounds like a wonderful dog, much like all other dogs except possibly the little ones who need to be carried all the time (one of the many prejudices I have in common with Barry, whose books I like because he seems to be a lot like me, only funnier).

Lucy’s lessons are things like Make Friends Easily, Never Stop Having Fun, Be a Good Companion to the People You Love, Let Go of Your Anger, and You Do Not Need More Stuff to Be Happy. All of those lessons (and more) are illustrated with amusing examples of the ways in which Barry could make his life better, as well as amusing examples of how Lucy lives those lessons effortlessly. So this is sort of a self-help book (although Barry makes fun of self-help authors in an epilog), but it is really a light examination of how someone who is getting older might not be too old to think about how to live a better life. And who can teach better lessons about living a good life than an aging dog?

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