The Speed of Light: Constancy + Cosmos

by David A. Grandy

The puzzle at the heart of this book-light speed constancy-is a bit hard to wrap your mind around, but that is part of the fun. Light-our experience of light, our measurement of light, and the notion that light speed is constant-can be understood to mark the very interface of us with the cosmos. David Grandy's book moves from the scientific to the existential, from Einstein to Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, from light as a phenomenon to light as that...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253220866
• ISBN13: 9780253220868
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (Ips)
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.9"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Some great phenomenological reflections on relativity ... BUT!

In fact, I see that Grandy has a book coming out this fall promising to provide a similar take on the "everydayness" of ideas from quantum mechanics. Can't wait. Tbat said, on to this book. The "weirdness" of the quantum world has become more commonplace among amateur science buffs; perhaps the "weirdness," in a different sense, of relatively, namely all that light as an absolute speed limit entails, hasn't. Starting with phenomenology as his philosophical fulcrum, Grandy unpacks a trunkload of psychological and philosophical issues related to this central point. Using the writing of other philosophers (in a clearly NON-derivative way, ahem) to supplement his own thoughts, Grandy leads the reader to speculate, should said reader be ready to speculate, on just what the absoluteness of light, its transcendence of space and time to structure spacetime, means or can mean in everyday life. It's kind of a small book, but there's still plenty to savor. At the same time, there's things to question. I wrote everything above this point after being 3/4 of the way through the book rather than finishing. In some ways, I think it's still a 5-star book; it's certainly not a 1-star book (ahem) and therefore, as I've done on other reviews, I'm OK giving a "bump" to counteract that. That said, in the last chapter and a half, Grandy at least comes close to jumping off the rails. Basically, in the last part of the next-to-last chapter, he starts going metaphysical with his phenomenological take. And, goes overboard in the last chapter, getting into Christian theology, kenosis ideas, and even Egyptian cosmology/creation myths. Given that Grandy is a philosophy professor at **Brigham Young** and given the Mormon origin myth of the "Egyptian language golden plates," I kind of wonder if there's some background to that. So, just don't read the last chapter, and appreciate the mental stimulation of the rest of the book, if you're not a metaphysician, as I am not.

Fascinating and though-provoking

This is one of those books in which, every few pages, the author will crystallize complex information in such an insightful and poetic way you just want to underline it and ponder on it like koan for a while. Part of the reason this book is so engaging is because on the one hand it addresses complex scientific and philosophical information, but on the other, it continually pulls these concepts into the realm of the reader's inner life and life experience. Here's a favorite passage: "The true significance of relativity theory and quantum theory, I believe, is that there is no outside... Looking skyward, I cannot see the end of things, and this is because there is no point at which the world's physiology, so to speak, departs from my own." This is not a religious book, but at times it reads like a spiritual journey.

Light, philosophy & deep physics

I've been thinking about light. I want to write about light and I can't help notice that I am surrounded by it. It fuses within me and although it is scattered around me, I cannot see it until it strikes my eye here in the center of my universe--I am an observer, a participant with light that creates my visual field and informs my consciousness. I experience light as it combines with my mind, integrating my world at a quantum level and then bubbling up into something that can be acted upon at macro scales. Light. What is it? I owe these contemplations to this book by David Grandy, a philosophy professor at Brigham Young University where he teaches classes in the philosophy of science. Grandy begins by showing how, unlike the way we typically take the world such that light, in some sense, is moving through a fixed space and time, it is light that grounds the universe. It is the one constant, the framing structure to which space and time conform and to which they shape their warp and weave. In this book, Grandy carefully unpacks the philosophical implications of the constancy of the speed of light by examining Einstein's theory of relativity (the clearest explanation I've seen). But he does more than just catalogue light's strangeness, he explores the stunning implications of that weirdness. He looks at the physics of light, its effect on space-time; he explores the uniqueness of light and the perplexing way it interacts with observers by affecting and being affected by them; he imagines how time passes for light, or more accurately put, how it is not affected by time's passage; Grandy looks at ambient light in ways I've never thought of and explores the strange connectedness and disconnectedness of light as it moves beyond being both particle and wave; and lays out the case that light is fundamental in ways that we have just begun to discover. "Let there be light!" prior to all particular things (like suns), really is the right description of how our universe has unfolded. However, for me the best parts of the book are the latter chapters where he explores the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger on the relationship between consciousness and light. These chapters, despite drawing from rather sophisticated ideas from Continental philosophy, are accessible and well explained. Consciousness and light seem to be part of a unified reality that for readers will seem very familiar. I typically read three or four books at the same time, but this one pushed everything to the side. I literally could not put it down. Grandy writes like an angel. My advice is not to start this book on a weekend in which you have things to do--because you will not get them done. Talk someone into putting this into your stocking.