{"id":2220,"date":"2009-02-25T17:52:20","date_gmt":"2009-02-25T23:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2009\/02\/25\/why-isnt-this-a-movie-yet\/"},"modified":"2009-02-25T17:52:20","modified_gmt":"2009-02-25T23:52:20","slug":"why-isnt-this-a-movie-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/25\/why-isnt-this-a-movie-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Isn&#8217;t This a Movie Yet?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following <a href=\"http:\/\/scottaaronson.com\/blog\/?p=384\">Scott Aaronson&#8217;s advice<\/a>, I instructed the good folks at Amazon to send me a copy of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Princeton-Companion-Mathematics-Timothy-Gowers\/dp\/0691118809\/\"><em>The Princeton Companion to Mathematics<\/em><\/a>.  (In exchange for money, of course.)  It&#8217;s sprinkled with gems like this, in the article on &#8220;Differential Topology&#8221; by my former professor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.math.harvard.edu\/~chtaubes\/\">Clifford Taubes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If you are with me so far, suppose now that an advanced alien en route from Arcturus to the galactic center kidnaps you and drops you into some unknown, 2<em>n<\/em>-dimensional manifold.  You suspect that it is <em>S<sup>n<\/sup><\/em> x <em>S<sup>n<\/sup><\/em>, but you are not sure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Come on, the screenplay practically writes itself!  I&#8217;m seeing Ewan McGregor, maybe Natalie Portman.  Russell Crowe as the alien.  <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2008\/11\/18\/seex\/\">SEEx<\/a> could help with some of the mathy stuff.  If any studio executives are reading this, call me, I&#8217;d be happy to bang out a treatment.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, the book is great fun, and as Scott says it&#8217;s surprisingly readable.  Not really a popularization; neither equations nor high-level abstractions are shied away from.  (After months of jousting with the &#8220;grammar checker&#8221; in Microsoft Word, I now deploy sentence fragments and the passive voice out of sheer spite.)  But put into the hands of the right ambitious high-school student, it could be life-changing.<\/p>\n<p>p.s.  You haven&#8217;t really lived until you&#8217;ve seen Cliff Taubes do his little dance to illustrate the concept of &#8220;quantum fluctuations.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following Scott Aaronson&#8217;s advice, I instructed the good folks at Amazon to send me a copy of The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. (In exchange for money, of course.) It&#8217;s sprinkled with gems like this, in the article on &#8220;Differential Topology&#8221; by my former professor Clifford Taubes: If you are with me so far, suppose now [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}