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Autobiography and recommended books

In his autobiography "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field", Kary writes with passion and humor about a wide range of subjects: from the scientific method to parapsychology, from poisonous spiders to the HIV virus and AIDS, from global warming to astrology, from the O.J. Simpson trial to how you can turn a light bulb on with your mind.

His book challenges us to question the authority of scientific dogma even as it reveals the workings of an uncannily original scientific mind.

"We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon on Columbia, South Carolina, during school hours. In 1957 the Russians launched the space race by putting Sputnik I into orbit around Earth. It was only twenty-three inches in diameter, but it revolutionized the American educational system. The government poured millions of dollars into science education. It was a fortuitous time to be young and in love with science."

From "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field," 1998.

Thoughts and Books

I think it's true that the majority of the people who have ever lived on earth are alive today. That would imply, ceteris paribus, that at least half of the smartest people who ever wrote are writing today. So at least half of the best books are recent. Those who take more comfort in reading than listening are quite lucky to be alive now. I am one of those people. It's easy for me to start talking about books that mean as much to me as any friendship.

I am very picky. The book must be non-fiction and it must address something that speaks to all of experience. For me that usually means biology or physics.

I make exceptions when they are warranted. Sometimes I read something that I consider to be only entertainment, but it's so good that I read it anyhow. I would put Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban, in that category. The book came to me in an odd way. One night in Berkeley in the early seventies, I ran into a psychic friend at a restaurant on Shattuck. I'd been in the lab all day and was thinking about going out for a paper. She laid the Chronicle on my table without breaking her stride, said "Your paper, doctor." Before I could be puzzled about that, she delivered another curious message before leaving, "Tonight you will meet Riddley Walker." I discovered what she meant a few hours later when I noticed a book at Moe's book store by that name. I bought it, and around two o'clock the next morning, I called to inform her that I had indeed met Riddley Walker, and was pleased with my new acquaintance.

The entire book was written phonetically. It was science fiction; set in the future about 1000 years after the "master changes" had pretty well eliminated the written word and most people. Writing was starting to come back along with gunpowder, and what people mistakenly hoped would be "the one big one." They were a bit confused about the latter. It was a haunting book. While writing, Russell Hoban was living with a family whose children were learning English grammar by the phonetic method. His other books never achieved the same level of genius.

Most of my favorite books are by physicists trying to make some communicable sense out of that quantum reality that really cannot be understood. Julian Barbour portrays a silent world completely devoid of action in The End of Time. David Bohm, now dead, in a classic from 1980, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, suggests rather convincingly that the structure of our language prevents us from being aware of the fact that nothing actually happens here, shades of Barbour, but heavy on the philosophy. Bohm is way out there, he had devotees when he passed, and you should come away from this book doubting your sanity.

The Non-Local Universe, by Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, skillfully lures you to confront the same kind of madness, or either pitch the book into the nearest body of deep water. But you must accept the disturbing fact of non-locality. This means that things can be immediately and intimately connected to each other even though they are light years apart. In other words there is nothing which corresponds to our classical cognition of geometric distance, and every particle since the so-called and now doubtfully singular Big Bang is in a way the same stinking particle, and there are recent convincing experiments by Alain Aspect and Nicolus Gisin based on theories proposed in 1964 by John Bell that close the lid of doubt on this creepy notion, which Einstein, by the way, despised. In a minor aside it might be pointed out that Feynman, in his amazing practicality, suggested that the reason every electron had the same mass, was that there was only one, buzzing around the 4-D universe, and when it was going backwards in time, relative to us, we perceived it as a positron.

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