The Outer Limits of Reason by Noson S. Yanofsky

Physics, Mathematics, Book Review

It has been a while since I wrote about a book even though there were some spectacular books that I had encountered and enjoyed very much. This list would be incomplete without mentioning the breath taking reading “When Breathe Becomes Air”, a book about a deceased neuro-surgeon depicting life, suffering, and death all seen first-hand. For the lack of better words to describe it, it felt complete. A few other recommendations are “The Telomere Effect”, “Why we sleep”,”Intelligent Asset allocator”. Some of the books definitely deserve a post for themselves, however I have really no reasons why it hasnt happened.

And speaking of things that happen beyond reason, the main book for this post “The Outer Limits of Reason” is an easily readable, suprisingly compact, and well presented book. I always enjoy popular science books. They hit me with two humbling points:

• Science can be made accessible for non-scientific public.
• Mind-boggling concepts can be sieved to extract the key idea which can be explained in simple words.

The first point is very nice, it allows for general public to be informed about advancements in science. We need more public dissemination of scientific knowledge. I would argue that it is as important to know why Flamingos stand on one leg as knowing that Melinda and Bill Gates are getting divorced. The second point is where I am fascinated by the skill of some authors. It is one thing to bring concepts to general public, and it is a whole other game to actually explain the intricacies of complex scientific theories.

This book does the second point rather well. The author takes on the task of explaining where our reasoning stops. He goes through a bunch of fields physics, computer science, logic, mathematics, and looks at the unsolvable, unattainable, and simply put “The outer limits of reason”.

In doing that, the author manages to navigate through General theory of relativity and Quantum mechanics explaining where we stand today and where we would like to go. The discussion on computer complexity gets into problems that are solvable but takes unimaginable amount of time, then he moves on to unsolvable ones like The halting problem. It has been a delight to read through these. Then the book moves on to higher logic discussions with The Godel’s incompleteness theorem discussing the limitations of axiom systems.

Overall, the book is very nice to read through and easy to sit down for hours reading through it.