Day: January 21, 2009

Phoebe Damrosch somehow found time while serving as a backserver and waiter at Per Se to write a book about the experience. Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter is her journal of the years during the opening of the top-notch Thomas Keller restaurant. It’s highly personal, and includes her growing relationship with a co-worker André, who (from her website) is now her husband and father of their child. From the tone of the book, that’s mildly surprising. But personal insights aside, I enjoyed the light look at the intimate details behind the scenes at a restaurant that treats food, dining, and service as higher arts.

It’s also interesting after the book to read the 2004 NYTimes review which anchors the book’s restaurant threads. Reviewer Frank Bruni shares this:

I am handicapped slightly in evaluating the service, because the vigilant staff repeatedly recognized me, and kept a special watch over my table.

From Damrosch’s tale, you know that Bruni’s meals were anticipated and hashed over more times than one could imagine possible. Special watch, indeed.

Damrosch left the restaurant, and some of my interest in her anecdotes dwindled with that departure in the waning pages. Still, a gentle, amusing look at a world I rarely taste.

After an endorsement from Neal Stephenson in Anathem, I pulled Julian Barbour’s The End of Time out of the San Francisco Public Library. Subtitled “The Next Revolution in our Understanding of the Universe,” this book made me work hard. Barbour tells you what he’s going to tell you, and then he tells you. He encourages the less-scientific reader with “boxes” of asides and explanations, which I appreciated. Still, this intellectual workout left me thinking I need the equivalent of more mental hill repeats.

For Barbour, time doesn’t exist. What we perceive as time is simply a full “configuration” of the possible universe which includes in its defined space all the elements of what feel like “the past” to our conscious minds. Quantum ideas drive this thinking.

To help the reader accept his radical concept, Barbour patiently walks the reader through the history of physics and the dissemination of idea. For instance, as an introduction to why Einstein matters, The End of Time fascinated me. Connecting the dots on Schrodinger, Mach, Dirac and many others, Barbour details a history of ideas with love and appreciation, even when he no longer agrees with the interpretations. For that care and insight, I’m grateful. I might read The Discovery of Dynamics, his “historical study that covers the period from antiquity to the publication of Newtons’s Principia in 1687 together with conceptual clarification of Newtonian dynamics that occurred in the 19th century.” But not just yet.

On the larger idea, I suppose I understand enough to wonder if it’s possible… but I’m not sure it matters. How the theory will ever be proven (or disproven) remains unclear, at least to me. More importantly, I can’t imagine what would change in how we think or act or behave if Barbour’s proposal turns out to be accurate. Our biological wiring can’t interpret motion (Barbour’s “kingfisher in flight” example) any differently, so the essence of time remains even if it’s a shared fiction.

Google Book Search allows a glimpse at the book. Wikipedia displays 24 minute video which attempts to explain the ideas visually. Called Killing Time, it’s from Dutch TV, but (mercifully) is in English. I’ll leave it running while I tackle other things and see what I can learn.