Via the Arcadian functor I’ve grabbed the full text of Gil Kalai’s book Gina Says: Adventures in the Blogsphere String War (part 1 and part 2) and read it on a lazy sunny afternoon.
Arguably the best paragraph is the final one, and, it might be sensible to start the book by reading it first as it clarifies Kalai’s point in collecting these comment-threads from a number of popular blogs (including not even wrong, the n-category cafe and asymptotia) :
This book is not about string theory. It is more about delicate boundaries
between greatness and megalomania, between humility and arrogance,
between fantasy and reality, between wisdom and bullshit, between
people of different stature and standing, between skepticism and
harassment, between sanity and its loss, and between truths and fallacies.
These are delicate boundaries that we witness in academics and in science
and even in blog discussions. This story offers a little salute to people’s
passion for understanding their logical and physical reality, as well as for
understanding themselves.
One Comment