Thursday, November 22, 2001
Yesterday evening, sometime after 6pm, the phone rang, and I noticed from the caller ID that the caller was calling from a telephone booth. Intrigued, I answered the phone. It was Erika’s father, calling from the airport. He was in town, and wanted to know if he could come over to stay. I stammered something in surprise, passed the phone over to Erika, and realizing what must happen, started cleaning things up around the house as quickly as possible. ;-) We had been expecting him to come on the Monday, and had planned things around that, including a thorough house-clean by a maid service, fresh groceries, etc. In any event, we changed plans. ;-)
We told Vanessa about the impending visit. When she asked who he was, Erika reminder her of the visit we made in the early summer to his chateau in the south of France, where she had picked oranges from his garden. That struck a chord: he was “the man who grew oranges”.
The old man arrived at the house about 40 minutes after his call. I was downstairs at the time, just having hauled the vacuum cleaner away. Vanessa and Erika greeted him at the door, and Vanessa rather excitedly showed him his room (which I had just finished tidying up – with Vanessa’s “help” just minutes before). When she came down, she excitedly showed off her new present from Josef, which was a little watch with a flower as its face. She can’t really tell time yet, but she was thrilled at getting the piece. I got a batch of various teas, and Erika got a tin of pate.
We soon set down to dinner, which thankfully Erika had made enough of for four. We opened a bottle of white wine as well as a couple of bottles of San Pellegrino mineral water, both of which seemed to go down well with Josef. He was visibly tired, having just yesterday flown from France, and just now arriving from New York City.
He talked briefly about how things have changed in NYC since September 11th. He noted that Manhattan seemed somehow muted, and the air wasn’t abuzz with activity as it had been before. He also noted that New Yorkers seemed friendlier than before, the tragedy bringing people there together as they hadn’t been before.
He also laid out his rough plans for the next few days: he was set to fly to Chicago on Tuesday, and presumably came here early in order to avoid flying immediately after the American Thanksgiving holiday. He may head up to see my sister-in-law in Hull over the weekend, and plans on returning here afterwards.
After dinner, it was time for Vanessa to go to bed. Josef offered to read her a bedtime story, and she was thrilled at the prospect. Over the audio monitor downstairs as I was cleaning up after dinner, I bemusedly listened to him reading "Horton Hatches the Egg" to her – am sure Vanessa loved it.
Soon after, Josef himself retired for the night to the guest bedroom, exhausted. I had a chance to talk with Erika for a while about the change in plans, and helped her in dealing with a now wakeful Annie. I stepped downstairs to put the polish on a bunch of articles for The Computer Paper, and then headed to bed.
Listened to Stephen Hawking’s The Universe in a Nutshell
While working yesterday at home, I had the chance to listen to the latest book by Stephen Hawking: The Universe in a Nutshell. I had been disappointed by his last book, which I thought was a rather pedestrian book on the subject of cosmology, and revealed very little I didn’t already know about the state of physics at the time (but then, as an avid science reader, the book wasn’t necessarily written for me, but for “beginners”). Was pleasantly surprised at the depth that his new work goes into, especially in the always fun-to-read-about subject of time travel, black holes and such. He is an excellent prose writer, and his mastery of his subject matter is evident throughout, while not above making the occasional joke about his life in the study of physics (while mentioning an earlier holder of his Chair at Oxford, he wryly notes that it was not mechanized at the time, as his must be due to his condition).
Hawking initially takes an interesting romp through the development of 20th century quantum physics and relativity, a subject recounted many times before by others, but given an interesting perspective of its development in the social setting of the time, and of the physics of the time. He then goes on to subject he is more directly concerned with, such as the nature of black holes and issues like the cosmological constant and the various strains of the anthropomorphic principle. The truly interesting stuff for me is when he delved into some of the most recent researches into the nature of the space-time, including the idea that our observable Universe is situated on an m-brane on a multi-braned “surface” on which electromagnetic forces operate only within the confines of the brane, but gravity operates across branes. Fascinating stuff, and easily the best overview on the subject I’ve heard on it yet.
I realize that I’m going to have to listen to this again in order to get the most out of it – it’s hard to properly concentrate on listening to a book like this while working. Thumb’s up for the book though.
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