James Tadd Adcox
In One Note, Gabriel Blackwell asks writers to talk about the book they are currently reading and why. One Note 022: James Tadd Adcox, Michio Kaku, Hyperspace.
In One Note, I ask writers for just that: one note, a single paragraph, on what they’re reading right now.
Today’s note comes courtesy of James Tadd Adcox:
Right now I’m reading Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension, by Michio Kaku. It’s from 1994, so it’s a bit dated — there’s some stuff about the possibilities of backwards time-travel that I’m pretty sure has been experimentally disproven by now — but Kaku does a great job of presenting the basic science, and setting it in its historical context. It’s a history book as much as a book of pop physics. Plus it contains the line “the natural home for the cheetah may be hyperspace.” Yes, I am taking that out of context, but it’s still a pretty great sentence. I found Hyperspace (along with a history of trade unions printed in the USSR) in one of the used book bins that they have on street corners in Chicago. A few nights later I went to a friend’s birthday party and spent most of the evening talking to her physicist S.O. and one of his co-workers. We played a game where I would say a concept from physics and they would fight about it. “String theory.” “Definitely.” “Definitely? String theory? Have you even been keeping up with the literature?” Etc.
The book about trade unions is pretty good too.
James Tadd Adcox’s work has appeared in TriQuarterly, The Literary Review, Lamination Colony, and PANK, among other places. He edits Artifice Magazine/Artifice Books (artificemag.com), and writes about aesthetics for the website Big Other (bigother.com). His first book, The Map of the System of Human Knowledge, is forthcoming in 2012 from Tiny Hardcore Press.
