Alan McKenzie (3)

This book by Alan McKenzie tells a very compelling story. I found it very seat of the pants storytelling. That might be surprising because it tells the story of two students in a physics department in university in the UK. As the story developed I found the title of the book to be very descriptive of the plot of the story. We read about Lucy and David, and their slowly developing relationship. We read about their exploration of the Gödel incompleteness theorem. The core theme of the story show more is their development of ideas around implications of the theorem. I found the pursuit of the theories to be fascinating. I had two contradictory feelings about the mathematical-physics project in the story. On one hand I find this to be a MacGuffin that is just a convenient plot device to hang the story of their relationship and search for logical meaning in the construction of the universe. On the other hand the title of the story as well as the time spent by the characters tells us how central this project is to the whole story. One way to read this book is as a detective story, where the mystery to be solved is a math problem.
I think this story could be read and appreciated by people who have no math background. I suspect I would have a hard time convincing people that they should read it, so I will outline a profile of the likely readers of this story. A likely reader will have some math background, that covers the ideas of axioms, euclidean geometry and equations. They would also be in college, recently out of college or soon to attend college. The reader should be somewhat intrigued by the idea of philosophizing about complex concepts and concerning unusual approaches to questions of reality and deity. This last part might be the deal-breaker for most readers. As an atheist, I found the later parts of the book somewhat disturbing. I suspect a Christian reader would also be uncomfortable. All in all I appreciated the writing to be entertaining and fulfilling. One spoiler to warn people. The romantic sparks between Lucy and David move more slowly than a glacier in the dead of winter. Don’t expect your hopes or expectations of their relationship to be met quickly. For a mathematical analysis of the ideas see the MathFiction site, which is how I found out about this book: http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/
There is a webpage by the author at: http://godel-universe.com/ show less