William Egginton

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton

*The edition I "read", as usual, was the audio, which Goodreads doesn't show. I tried to import it using the URL of the audio selection on Amazon, but Goodreads digested it as the text edition.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS
-PRINT: © August 29, 2023; 9780593316306; Pantheon; 368 pages.; unabridged (Hardbound Info from Goodreads)
-DIGITAL: © August 29, 2023; 9780593316313; Pantheon; 352 pages; unabridged (Kindle info from Amazon.com)
- *Audio: © August 29, 2023; Random House Audio; 10 hours, 14 minutes; unabridged (Audio info from Amazon/Audible.)
-FILM: No

SERIES: No.

CHARACTERS: (Not comprehensive)
Jorge Luis Borges; Immanuel Kant; Werner Heisenberg; Albert Einstein; Maxwell Planck; Erwin Schrodinger; Max Born; Neils Bohr; Moe Berg; Solomon Shereshevsk; Hugh Everett; Charles Lindbergh; Sir Isaac Newton

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
-SELECTED: When my husband and I breakfasted with a pair of retired former colleagues of my husband’s, the subject of books about famous physicists came up. I got curious about whether the Libby library app would have anything on audio, and this was the result, so I put a hold on it. By the time the hold became available it took a minute to recall why I’d placed it.
-ABOUT: We get to learn, not just about the research and beliefs of these interesting geniuses, but about their relations, or influences on one another, and the influence of the times they lived in.
-OVERALL IMPRESSION: Physics and Quantum mechanics are fascinating, but even more fascinating are the people who brought them to us. I especially loved learning about the poor man with the memory that was so profoundly all consuming, that he struggled with memories he’d rather have forgotten, and tried to devise ways to keep them sorted.

AUTHOR: William Egginton (From Wikipedia) “William Egginton (born 1969)[1] is a literary critic and philosopher. He has written extensively on a broad range of subjects, including theatricality, fictionality, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and ethics, religious moderation, and theories of mediation.
William Egginton was born in Syracuse, New York in 1969. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University in 1999. His doctoral thesis, "Theatricality and Presence: a Phenomenology of Space and Spectacle in Early Modern France and Spain," was written under the direction of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. He currently resides with his wife, Bernadette Wegenstein, and their three children, in Baltimore. William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy.[2][3]”

NARRATOR: David Glass : There’s a couple of Robert Glass short bios on IMDb, but I don’t think any of them are this Robert Glass, though he may be related to the writer, the one who lived from 1939 to 1993, or the sound master.

-Mr. Glasses narration is spot-on.

GENRE: Non-fiction; Philosophy; Psychology; Science; Physics; History

LOCATIONS: Germany; United States; Prussia

TIME FRAME: 18th-20th centuries

SUBJECTS: Quantum Physics; Classic Physics; Philosophy; Religion; Nature of Reality; Cosmos; Observation; Relativity; Gravity; Nazi Regime; Fascism; WWII; Plato; David Hume; Thought Experiments; Christianity; Kabbala; Hebrew Alphabet; Metaphysics; Free Will; Determinism

DEDICATION: Not Found

SAMPLE QUOTATION: Excerpt From Introduction: “Where Did It Go?”

“Shortly before 10:00 on the evening of May 21, 1927, a plane dropped out of the clouds northwest of Paris. After flying over the city and twice circling the Eiffel Tower, it headed northeast toward the normally sleepy airfield at Le Bourget. No one could have been more surprised than the plane’s single pilot, an unknown American who looked more boyish than his twenty-five years, to see the teeming crowds awaiting him. When he landed his plane at 10:32 that night, the young man had been flying for more than thirty-three hours. By the time he fell asleep early the next morning—after fighting free from the crowds that pulled him from his plane, talking to the crush of international press that had gathered to cover his unprecedented feat, and taking a hot bath at the ambassador’s residence in Paris—he had been awake for more than sixty hours.1
By becoming the first human being to fly alone across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh went from an unassuming postal pilot to the world’s most famous person—literally overnight. His accomplishment was an example of extraordinary skill and courage, one that many others had failed to achieve in the years and months before, often perishing in the process. But the crowds at Le Bourget, and later in New York, and indeed everywhere Lindbergh would go from then on, weren’t just celebrating one man’s exploit.
For underlying Lindbergh’s undeniable skill—his flawless navigation alone at night; his constant adjustment of altitude; his nerve-racking battle with fatigue—was a magnificent edifice of science and engineering that had just propelled a single human being in little more than a day across a distance that had previously required weeks and even months. This was an extension of the stunning human capacity for knowledge that had in recent centuries navigated the glove and built the railroads and would eventually place a man on the moon. A triumph of engineering, to be sure, but also of the laws of motion that Sir Isaac Newton had put to paper more than two hundred years earlier, and that had been powering humanity’s remarkable progress ever since. For in tracing that path from Roosevelt Field in New York to Le Bourget, Charles Lindbergh had moved a greater distance in a shorter time than any human in history. Little could he know that barely a thousand kilometers from the airport where he landed that evening, the very idea of what it means for an object to move through space was being turned on its head forever.”

RATING: 4 stars.

STARTED-FINISHED
10/19/2023-11/1/2023… (mehr)

Not quite sure what the topic of this book was; maybe the state of education in the US, especially higher-ed? Or maybe more generally the state of the country itself? In any event I mostly liked the book, even though it kind of wandered around. Some parts were great in fact, but other parts I thought were weak. He quoted a lot of other writers I like, but I think he’s basically a bit to the left of where I am. I dunno. Also not sure about the stars, 3.5 I guess,but I’m rounding up because I found the book readable and blessedly short.… (mehr)

In this book William Egginton argues his point pretty well. Of course there were other works that predate Don Quixote that were fiction, but Cervantes took the genre to a new level by adding elements that would become part and parcel of fiction.

Back in my high school Spanish course I had heard some things about Cervantes, and I got to see The Man of La Mancha, but I didn't really retain as much as I should have. This covers a good deal of the life of Miguel Cervantes and talks about how his life experiences contributed to his creative genius.

It was pretty well done, but there isn't much to say that wasn't put in the blurb, so I give it 4 out of 5.… (mehr)