Diamine! è stato come scalare una montagna, leggere questo libro. sicuramente ci sono cose interessanti, c'è il viaggio come riscoperta interiore, ma un viaggio senza sosta, senza guardare i posti dove si passa, senza soffermarsi su nulla, senza capire il perchè si fa questo viaggio col proprio figlio; quasi una tortura per un ragazzo che neanche lui capisce il perchè di questo viaggio. di motociclette si parla poco o niente, forse è una scusa, forse è secondo me, una specie di cura interiore per rimettere a posto il proprio io, dopo elucubrazioni filososfiche che hanno fatto sdoppiare il protagonista, e facendolo finire in manicomio.
...ContinuaInteresting. Sometimes a bit difficult to follow.
I've been reading lots of reviews of this book, before, while and after reading it myself. And whereas most of them seem to have read a boring and dense nonsensical stuff, I have another story to tell.
Recommended by a friend of mine who likes to read stuff that's not precisely light, I found the book and started reading with no expectations (or at least no further than 'it's damned good'), as I'm sure it's the intention of the title.
I can only say that I couldn't put it down. And that it is, indeed, no light stuff. It IS dense. Sometimes slow and sometimes too descriptive for my taste. But it had been a while since I read something that successfully combined actual facts and a lot of rambling and ranting (chautauquas, according to Pirsig) with a story that is as enthralling as completely unexpected.
It's not quite about zen. It's not quite about motorcycle maintenance. It has quite a bit of both, though.
Go read it. Seriously, read it. Especially read it when you have time to think about what you're reading.
...ContinuaI read it because it is a famous book and I was curious. In parts it's boring in others it flows very well. A mixed balance I guess, overall not bad but I wouldn't read it again
This is also one of my all time favorites.
All the other axioms seemed so obvious as to be unquestionable, but this one did not. Yet you couldn't get rid of it without destroying huge portions of the mathematics, and no one seemed able to reduce it to anything more elementary. What vast effort had been wasted in that chimeric hope was truly unimaginable, Poincaré said.
Finally, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, and almost at the same time, a Hungarian and a Russian...Bolyai and Lobachevski...established irrefutably that a proof of Euclid's fifth postulate is impossible. They did this by reasoning that if there were any way to reduce Euclid's postulate to other, surer axioms, another effect would also be noticeable: a reversal of Euclid's postulate would create logical contradictions in the geometry. So they reversed Euclid's postulate.
Lobachevski assumes at the start that through a given point can be drawn two parallels to a given straight. And he retains besides all Euclid's other
axioms. From these hypotheses he deduces a series of theorems among which it's impossible to find any contradiction, and he constructs a geometry
whose faultless logic is inferior in nothing to that of the Euclidian geometry.
Thus by his failure to find any contradictions he proves that the fifth postulate is irreducible to simpler axioms. It wasn't the proof that was alarming. It was its rational byproduct that soon
overshadowed it and almost everything else in the field of mathematics.
Mathematics, the cornerstone of scientific certainty, was suddenly uncertain. We now had two contradictory visions of unshakable scientific truth, true for all men of all ages, regardless of their individual preferences.
This was the basis of the profound crisis that shattered the scientific complacency of the Gilded Age. How do we know which one of these geometries is right? If there is no basis for distinguishing between them, then you have a total mathematics which admits logical contradictions. But a mathematics that admits internal logical contradictions is no mathematics at all. The ultimate effect of the non-Euclidian geometries becomes nothing more than a magician's mumbo jumbo in which belief is sustained purely by faith!
And of course once that door was opened one could hardly expect the number of contradictory systems of unshakable scientific truth to be limited
to two. A German named Riemann appeared with another unshakable system of geometry which throws overboard not only Euclid's postulate, but
also the first axiom, which states that only one straight line can pass through two points. Again there is no internal contradiction, only an inconsistency with both Lobachevskian and Euclidian geometries.
According to the Theory of Relativity, Riemann geometry best describes the world we live in.
...Continua
