This is a review of the following paper.

I think one of the central questions of the book is: what gives money it’s value? The book leans towards saying it’s:
1) because people think it has value
2) it’s useful as a yardstick for comparing distinct object types.

More notes to myself than a review:

Great book! The book is wonderfully detailed and complicated (in a good way). Given the intricate subject matter, I found it wonderfully clear, like a good detective story. After all, any science is at it’s heart, a detective story!

I recently discovered Joscha Bach ( a sample interview). He is a cognitive scientist with, in my opinion, a very insightful philosophy about the mind, ai and even society as a whole. I would highly encourage you to watch the linked video (or any of the others you can find on youtube), he is very good at expressing his thoughts and manages to be quite funny at the same time.

I recently read three very interesting sci-fi books (A door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski, Ventus and Lady of Mazes by Karl Schroeder) and while the books are very different, they have a few common themes. I highly recommend all three books – especially Karl Schroeder who has many, many good ideas in my opinion. There will be a few minor spoilers for all the books.

As far as I could gather, the book was saying something like… “our model of physics is an approximation of the real world anyway. The laws we normally write down are good approximations when N is small, but not when N is large in which regime the continuous density solutions are a better model.”

This is analogous to how Newton’s gravity is a good approximation for low energy scales but not for higher energy scales when you have to replace it with something else totally different. In the case of thermodynamics, you don’t have to replace it with something totally different, just quite different.”

The guy did win a nobel prize so I am sure he’s on to something but the book had so few details mathematically that I couldn’t get much more than that summary out of it. Makes me want to read something more technical by him though, for sure.

I think (hope!) this book will live in my head for some time to come. There is so much to say about this book – the language, style, characters, emotions, life in a bourgeois town in mid 19th century France…!